a massive wildfire that is still raging
has forced almost 90,000 people to flee
the West Canadian town of Fort McMurray
in what is shaping up to be the
country's costliest natural disaster
fortunately there are no known
casualties from the blaze at the moment
but thousands of structures have been
burned to the ground now there's also an
economic impact Fort McMurray is the hub
of Canada's oil sands industry these
fields produce around 2.3 million
barrels a day of oil more than half of
Canada's entire output Canada produces
about four-and-a-half million barrels a
day of crude of which about 3.4 million
barrels is exported to the US for a
network of pipelines
well the actual damage to the old sounds
facilities at the moment is minimal
companies have been making sure their
staff and families are safe and
inevitably that means there will be
supply disruptions so what sort of
numbers are we looking at well it's
important to stay at the moment that we
don't have any verifiable figures but
analysts wrecking anything between
500,000 and 800,000 barrels a day of
crude oil production could be forced
offline because of the blaze now this is
based on comments that we've heard from
all companies operating in the region
when wildfires at last spread across
this part of Canada about a year ago
around 300,000 barrels a day of
production was knocked out most of which
returned by the middle of June but this
blaze is much worse
well one notable feature this year has
been a string of unexpected supply
disruptions of which the Canadian
wildfires could be just the latest these
disruptions have helped crude rally by
more than sixty percent from its January
lows at one point in April more than 2.8
million barrels a day of global oil
production was offline this helped
tighten the market that was awash with
supply