Canada Fire Disrupts, But Doesn’t Destroy, Oil Production

A raging Canadian wildfire grew explosively on Saturday as hot, dry winds pushed the blaze across the energy heartland of Alberta and threatened to burn close to an oil sands project.

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The fire that has already prompted the evacuation of all 88,000 people who lived in the city of Fort McMurray was set to double in size on Saturday, the seventh day of what is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada's history.

Fort McMurray is the center of Canada's oil sands region. The city ballooned in the past few decades as an entry point to the region’s rich tar sands, exploited through fracking. The cause of the fire is still unclear, but it spread quickly partly due to an unusually dry winter and spring this year.

About half of the nation's crude output from the sands, or one million barrels per day (bpd), had been taken offline as of Friday, according to a Reuters estimate.

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Officials said they expected the fire would burn up to the edge of a project operated by Suncor Energy Inc, but noted the site and others like it were resilient to fire damage.

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At least 10 oil sand operators have cut production due to evacuations and other emergency measures.

Syncrude oil sands project said it would shut down its northern Alberta operation and remove all personnel from the site due to smoke. There was no imminent threat from the fire.

Firefighting officials said the inferno, propelled northeast towards neighboring Saskatchewan by high winds and fueled by tinder-dry forests, was set to double in size to 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) — almost twice the size of Houston — by the end of Saturday.

Cooler weather forecast for Sunday could then help keep the blaze under control, but without substantial rain the fire might easily last for months.

Quite how quickly Fort McMurray can recover is unclear. Earlier in the day Alberta premier Rachel Notley said the city's gas had been turned off, its power grid was damaged and the water undrinkable.