As global temperatures climb, the impact of wildfires on oilsands
operations will climb as well
This article appears in the August issue of Oilweek; photo from Calgary Herald
As fire roared through the boreal forest toward Cenovus’s
Foster Creek last May, the company took the precaution of evacuating 1,800
employees from the site, according to company spokesman Reg Curren.
“The big challenge was that it was threatening to cut off
the road in and out of the facility,” he said. “We couldn’t take the chance of
having people stranded, and provincial forest fire officials asked us to get
ready for a potential evacuation.” The company decided to evacuate. Most people
left in the large buses already on-site to transport workers, while those with
personal vehicles drove to safety.
“We thought we might be able to continue to operate, with
reduced staff, so about 140 people stayed behind to continue operating the
plant,” he said. “When it became clear that we couldn’t do that, we brought
helicopters into play. Over a period of a few hours, we were able to get the
last people off-site.” The facility was down 11 full days, and “we returned to
full operations on June 11.” Operations quickly returned to normal.
Wildfires
The company was lucky. So was Canadian Natural Resources,
which needed to close down its Foster Creek and Kirby South operations at the
same time. The reality, however, is that the number and extent of the forest
fires Alberta’s boreal forest are increasing. As far as oil sands operations
are concerned, the risk of forest fire disruptions is on the rise.
That is the view of Mike Flannigan, who is director of the
University of Alberta’s Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science. Global
warming and climate change are real, he says, and they are affecting the way
the oil sands business operates.
Warming up to the topic of climate change, he says it is no
coincidence that Earth’s hottest ten years have all taken place this century.
Indeed, the most recent meteorological winter – from the beginning of last
December to February 28th – was the warmest Earth has seen since record keeping
began, more than 135 years ago. Another piece of evidence: Alberta’s official
fire season now starts March 1 – a full month earlier than only five or 10
years ago.
This spring the province’s fires were less destructive than
in some years past, and they had a curiously positive impact on the bottom line
of oil sands producers as a whole. By closing access to oil sands facilities,
they reduced supplies to the booming downstream sector, accelerating increases
in Western Canada Select oil prices after nearly a year of declines. From April
to the middle of June, the price differential between WCS and West Texas
Intermediate stood at about $7.50 per barrel despite high oil inventories in
the US. That was the narrowest differential in more than five years.
These bottom-line impacts reflected reduced production
representing represented more than 8 per cent of the province’s total oil
output. There were 917 fires, compared to the average over the last five years
of 690. At this writing, some 90,000 hectares have burned this year, compared
to the average 30,000 hectares per full year between 2009 and 2014.
Northern Alberta’s boreal forest surrounds most oil sands
projects, which are designed to resist the ravages of fire. Careful planning
notwithstanding, fire does disrupt operations. As events this year demonstrate,
they can lead to evacuations from field camps – sometimes by helicopter, when
fire makes rural roads impassable. Smoke can close airports, complicating
helicopter rescue. In addition, of course, people with respiratory ailments can
suffer from the smoke itself.
In the past, according to Flannigan, “we often talked about
the wildland/urban interface. People enjoy living in the country, and that is
fraught with risk if you have a wildfire.”
For rural communities and those who want to live on properties
in the woods, big fires can lead to the destruction of property. In 2011, for
example, a bush fire torched the Town of Slave Lake, with 40% of its structures
going up in smoke. During that time there was “a huge fire, 600,000 hectares—it
was a huge fire –” near Fort McMurray, several hundred kilometres away.
Those
fires were so severe that they had a measurable impact on Canada’s GDP.
According to a StatsCan report, oil and gas production decreased 3.6% in the
second quarter of that year – the biggest single contributor to a quarterly
decline in the country’s output. “Wildfires in Northern Alberta as well as
maintenance shutdowns reduced petroleum production,” wrote the federal agency.
“Extraction of natural gas also decreased.”
Because of industrial development in norther forests, he
says, “we have started using a new expression: wildland/industrial interface.
Today there is so much industrial activity in the boreal forest that fires lead
to all sorts of impacts and consequences.”
What Fire Needs
Unlike rural communities, the boreal forest “survives and
thrives with regular fires,” Flannigan says. While he acknowledges year-to-year
variability in forest burns across Canada, “roughly speaking, that area has
doubled since the 1970s.”
For lift-off, forest fires need fuel, ignition and weather.
Fuel is “the stuff that burns, like pine needles and decomposing organic
matter,” Flannigan says. “How much do you have, how dry is it? What type of
fuel is it?” Rivers and wetlands can block fires, so “what’s the continuity” of
the fuel? The second factor is ignition – mostly lightning, but also such human
activity as campfires. Weather is the third. “You need all three for a wildfire
to burn,” he says. “You need fuel, you need ignition and you need hot, dry, windy
weather.”
Besides an earlier start to the fire season, Flannigan’s
explanation of the impact of global warming includes two other main factors.
One is that warmer weather leads to more combustion from lightning. Also,
rather counterintuitively, “the warmer it gets the more moisture you have in
the air. That’s because the increased heat leads to more evaporation and
therefore drier fuels.
Fire management philosophy is simple: “You hit it hard and
you hit it fast. Once a fire gets the size of a football field (about one
hectare) you have a real problem.” Yet despite modern, efficient fire
management organizations across Canada and larger areas covered by
fire-fighting personnel and equipment, annual burn areas are growing, with most
of the impact coming from 3% of the forest fires.
For natural fire control, he says, “for every degree of
atmospheric warming, we need a 10-15% increase in precipitation to compensate.”
Yet projections created by atmospheric scientists “which you have to take with
a great deal of salt” suggest that, in the future, fuels will be much drier.
“This will make it easier for fires to spread. So what we now have is a longer
fire season, more fires and drier fuel.”
What Geoscience Says
Of course, to get a contrary opinion the person to talk to
is a geoscientist, and Colin Yeo does not entirely disappoint.
“Geologists have always noted that climate is subject to
change, like the mini-ice ages before the Industrial Revolution” he says. Solar
activity has caused warming and cooling trends, and so have astrophysical
cycles. “Earth tilts and goes through long periods of climate change over long
periods of time.” The best known are the Milankovitch cycles. These three
cosmic progressions give Earth a dramatically eccentric orbit, although over
tens of thousands of years.
“Earth was getting warmer and colder even when there was
little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Yeo says, then gets to the heart of
the matter. The geological community does agree – “because it’s measurable” –
that there is an increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere, he says.
“We also note that there has been an increase in global temperatures over
recent years, although there was a pause for about ten years until about 1998.”
While the geological community recognizes that many factors
influence climate, “we do not know which driver is dominant, and many
geoscientists are ill-equipped to render a meaningful opinion because
atmosphere science is so complex,” he says. “You need geophysics to truly
understand this.”
Then he begins talking about a recent survey of Canadian
earth scientists.
How is the profession responding to a changing climate? For
one, geology departments are shifting their primary focus from the science of
exploration and extraction of resources to environmental science and
environmental remediation. Most geoscientists believe climate change, over the
last few decades, has been driven by a combination of natural and anthropogenic
processes. Furthermore, public understanding and media representations of
climate change are not based on good scientific knowledge, and politicians
worry more about public opinion than science.
By now, he is more willing to talk about climate change as a
problem that could, indeed, contribute to more and larger wildfires in
Alberta’s North. He begins talking about methane hydrate –a crystalline solid
that consists of a methane molecule surrounded by a cage of interlocking water
molecules. Stable on the seafloor at water depths below 500 metre, this
substance also exists in large quantities in the permafrost of Northern Canada.
It is the largest natural gas resource on Earth.
While he acknowledges its potential as a source of energy,
Yeo says gas hydrates themselves are potentially a serious problem. “If the
planet’s temperature goes up enough and subsea hydrates are released as methane
into the atmosphere that is going to cause a lot of grief.” The reason is that
methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Back to the Future
So, is the outlook bleak, with nothing
but worry ahead? “There will be a lot of spatial and temporal variability in
terms of climate change, Flannigan says. “Just because the climate is getting
warmer does not mean there won’t continue to be extreme events. In some places
there will continue to be outbreaks of extreme cold and strange weather” – like
last winter’s mountains of snow in the Maritimes.
However, he says, “You have to look at climate over larger
areas and over the longer term. There will be winners and losers.” The losers
will be, in particular, those parts of the world where global warming is
turning farmland into desert and creating droughts. The resulting poverty and
other social issues often complicated by war. According to the United Nations,
the number of people living as refugees from war or persecution now stands at
51.2 million – the highest level since World War Two.
By contrast, says Flannigan, Canada will be a winner.
“Farming in more northerly areas is now possible, since our growing seasons are
getting longer” and Canada has the world’s largest fresh water resources, for
irrigation.
As an afterthought, almost, Flannigan says “our fuel bills
are going down.” Those with central air conditioning, of course, will find
their utility bills going up.
