Canada’s Wildfires Have Been Disrupting Lives. Now, Oil and Gas Take a Hit.

its meaning: Crude oil prices are soaring due to the fire.

Rystad’s vice president of upstream research, Thomas Lyles, said in a memo that the damage to oil and gas production would likely be significantly higher than the current tally. Most of Alberta’s shale gas producing regions remained under “extreme” or “very high” wildfire warnings. Oil sands production of 2.7 million barrels per day was also at risk.

Disruption from fires in Canada, a major oil and gas producer, has led to higher oil prices. Chevron announced that it has halted all production at its Kaybob-Duvernay oil and gas fields in central Alberta. Paramount said in its latest update on Sunday that it has temporarily closed its natural gas processing plants along with production at several fields. Both companies said the safety of their employees is a priority.

Background: Oil and gas are also susceptible to climate change.

It’s not the first time Canada’s oil and gas fields have been hit by fire, and the current shutdown has affected a tiny fraction of the country’s total oil and gas production. Yet they highlight how the production of oil and gas, a major contributor to climate change, is vulnerable to the increasingly disastrous consequences of global warming.

The risk of devastating wildfires around the world will soar as climate change intensifies, the United Nations warned last year in a landmark report. Researchers have found that in areas with a long history of wildfires, such as the western United States and Canada, wildfires have become larger and more intense over the past decade.

The fires come amid years of drought and much higher than normal temperatures in western Canada, which climatologists blame on climate change. And in recent years, Alberta has seen the effects of climate-related disasters, including severe flooding in 2013, devastating wildfires in 2016, and thunderstorms that caused billions of dollars in damage in 2018, almost everywhere else in the country. than in other regions.

Ryan Ness, director of adaptation research at the nonprofit Canadian Climate Institute, said it’s hard to say how much a climate disaster will affect Canada’s oil and gas industry, but more shutdowns are expected in Canada. said it could be expected.

“Canada is in a difficult situation because the oil and gas industry has been a very important part of our economy for a long time,” Ness said. “But the reality is that the world must move away from fossil fuels and meet greenhouse gas emissions targets. will be gone.”