Summerland’s Shell station ran out of gas during the Action Festival weekend.
On Friday evening, the station ran out of regular unleaded gas. The station then dropped the price of premium fuel to the price of regular gasoline.
Around noon on Saturday, the pumps ran dry.
“It was really frustrating, especially during the Action Festival weekend,” said Tony Colgur, manager of the Shell station.
The pumps were still empty on Monday and Tuesday, and Colgur did not know when the next shipment of fuel would arrive.
The gas shortage began on Friday evening, when some Petro-Canada stations in Western Canada were out of fuel. Several stations in the Okanagan Valley were affected. These were not limited to Petro-Canada stations.
Sneh Seetal, spokesperson for Suncor, Petro-Canada’s parent company, said the shortages were the result of the Fort McMurray wildfire in the Alberta oil sands. In addition, the company had an unplanned outage at its Edmonton refinery on May 27.
Crude oil from the Fort McMurray area is processed at the Edmonton refinery.
The outage at the refinery affected Suncor’s ability to produce gasoline.
“We are doing everything we can to bring things back,” Seetal said.
Suncor has a team working to bring the refinery back to capacity.
In addition, the oil company is working to bring in additional gasoline as quickly as possible, in order to meet the demand for fuel.
“We know this is a huge inconvenience for our customers and we apologize,” Seetal said.
