The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: “Heatwave Amoco” Damages Canadian Oil and Gas Production
Dear Diary. In an ironic twist of events, western Canadian oil and gas production is being curtailed by wildfires induced by a system I’ve dubbed as Heatwave Amoco. Perhaps Mother Nature is trying to tell us go leave fossil fuels in the ground, otherwise heatwaves like Amoco or worse with more smoke choking wildfires will be an end result.
Here are more details from the New York Times about this fossil fuel curtailment:
Canada’s Wildfires Have Been Disrupting Lives. Now, Oil and Gas Take a Hit.
May 17, 2023
The News
Wildfires sweeping across western Canada that have driven thousands of people from their homes are also striking the heart of Canadian oil and gas country, forcing companies to curb production.
As flames bore down on wells and pipelines, major drillers like Chevron and Paramount Resources together shut down the equivalent of at least 240,000 barrels of oil a day, according to the energy consulting firm Rystad Energy.
Firefighters near Fort St. John, British Columbia, on Sunday.Credit…Kamloops Fire Rescue, via Reuters
What It Means: Fires are sending oil prices higher.
The damage to oil and gas production was likely to significantly surpass current tallies, Thomas Liles, vice president of Rystad’s upstream research, said in a note. A large part of Alberta’s shale gas producing regions remained under “extreme” or “very high” wildfire warnings. Another 2.7 million barrels a day of oil sands production was also at risk.
The disruptions from the fires in Canada, a major oil- and gas-producing nation, have helped push oil prices higher. Chevron said it had shut down all production at its Kaybob Duvernay oil and gas fields in central Alberta. Paramount temporarily shuttered a natural gas processing plant along with production in several gas fields, the company said in its latest update on Sunday. Both companies said they were prioritizing the safety of their workers.
Background: Oil and gas are also vulnerable to climate change.
It isn’t the first time Canada’s oil and gas fields have been hit by fires, and the shutdowns, for now, affect a small proportion of the country’s total oil and gas output. Still, they underscore how the production of oil and gas, the main driver of climate change, is also vulnerable to the increasingly dire consequences of a warming planet.
As climate change intensifies, the risk of devastating wildfires around the world will surge, the United Nations warned in a landmark report last year. Researchers found that in regions with long histories of wildfires, like the western United States and Canada, the burning has become larger and more intense over the last decade.
The fires come amid a multiyear drought and much warmer temperatures than are normal in western Canada, which climate scientists attribute to climate change. And in recent years, Alberta has been more affected by climate-related disasters than almost any other part of the country, including severe floods in 2013, a previous round of devastating wildfires in 2016 and thunderstorms that brought billions of dollars in damage in 2018.
While it’s hard to say how much climate disasters will affect Canada’s oil and gas industry, the country can expect more shutdowns, said Ryan Ness, director of adaptation research at the nonprofit Canadian Climate Institute.
“Canada is in a difficult situation in that the oil and gas industry has been a very important part of our economy for a long time,” Mr. Ness said. “But the reality is that the world has to shift away from fossil fuels and meet our greenhouse emissions targets, or else the types of extreme weather and wildfires and the like we’re seeing will just become unsurvivable.”
Hiroko Tabuchi is an investigative reporter on the Climate desk, reporting widely on money, influence and misinformation in climate policy. @HirokoTabuchi • Facebook
Learn More About Climate Change
- If you struggle to understand the science behind climate change, let us walk you through the basics.
- What’s causing global warming? How can we fix it? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small.
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- Is carbon capture really an effective counterweight to the overheating planet? Here’s how these technologies work.
- Half the world could soon face dangerous heat. We measured the daily toll it is already taking.
- New data reveals stark disparities in how different U.S. households contribute to climate change. See your neighborhood’s climate impact.
- Wildlife is disappearing around the world as humans take over too much of the planet. Meet some of the animals that are running out of places to live.
Here are some more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Some More April Climatology
(Climatology is presented daily on this blog.):
Here is more climate and weather news from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)