Wildfire Season Begins in Alberta With First Evacuation

Wildfires erupted in the northern part of Alberta over the weekend, with some igniting near oil wells operated by Canadian Natural Resources. The wildfires have already prompted a mandatory evacuation order for the town of Swan Hills, Canadian media reported.

Per the Alberta authorities, 48% of the wildfires are under control, with another 44% out of control. One of the latter was about half a kilometer from a Canadian Natural Resources well and some 20 kilometers from other oil sites, according to Bloomberg.

Spring is wildfire season in Canada’s oil country and the blazes sometimes interfere with oil sands production. Back in 2016, a total of 90,000 people in Fort McMurray were evacuated because of a wildfire, which also shut in about 1 million bpd in oil production in the area.

Last year’s wildfire season caused some curbs to oil production as the fires spread to oil wells and prompted personnel evacuation. The curbs, however, were relatively modest, although Suncor had to shut down an oil sands site with a capacity to produce over 200,000 barrels of crude daily.

This wildfire season, on the other hand, is just starting and the oil province is bracing for more fires in the coming days amid strong winds expected later this week. “A north-south oriented trough combined with a cold front that will move from west to east across Alberta will initiate showers and thunderstorms,” Environment Canada reported this week. More dangerously, “These high-based thunderstorms will move quickly, making strong wind gusts, up to 100 km/h, the primary threat.”

Wildfire season comes amid a certain sense of depression in Alberta’s oil industry due to the latest price route caused by the tariff war that President Trump started to mend the United States’ trade deficits and by a faster than expected unwinding of the OPEC+ production cuts agreed in 2022.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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