There is yellow caution tape up around the gasoline pumps at the Oliver Street Petro Canada station because it has run out of gasoline.
The shortage, said Suncor spokesperson Sneh Seetal Monday, is due to the Fort McMurray fires and an outage at the Suncor refinery in Edmonton.
“The cumulative impact of the fires in the Fort McMurray region and an unplanned outage at our Edmonton refinery had an unavoidable impact on our ability to produce the regular volumes of gasoline and diesel we’d normally produce,” Seetal told the Tribune. “Both fuels were impacted, but diesel was impacted by a lesser degree because the units that had the outage primarily produce gasoline.”
The “temporary shortage” has shut down Petro Canada sites in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and in parts of B.C.
When the Fort McMurray fires broke out they hampered the ability to bring crude oil out of the oil sands that is usually refined into gasoline and diesel at the refinery in Edmonton, Seetal explained.
While repairs of the units at the refinery are underway, Suncor is restarting some of its oil sands operations, she said.
The company is also moving gasoline from its own supplies and from third parties by truck and rail to sites that have been deemed critical, typically where there are limited or no other options for fuelling, Seetal added.
When the Tribune checked in with several other gas stations in Williams Lake Monday afternoon, staff said they did not anticipate they would experience a similar gas shortage.
