CALGARY – It could take up to a week for one of Canada’s largest oil producers to get its Pelican Lake crude flowing at full speed once a key northern Alberta pipeline returns to service after being shut down due to forest fires in the region.
"You can’t bring the plant up too quickly, because it can cause issues. You bring everything back in a slow manner to essentially protect the equipment," Reg Curren, a spokesman for Calgary-based Cenovus Inc., said on Tuesday
Cenovus (TSX:CVE) normally produces about 22,000 barrels of oil per day at Pelican Lake but shut down production Thursday due to a prolonged closure of the southern leg of the Rainbow pipeline, owned by Plains Midstream Canada.
The pipeline, from Nipisi, Alta., to Edmonton, was expected to restart as early as Tuesday after being idled for more than a week because of wild fires in the area.
The northern section of the Rainbow pipeline has been shut for nearly a month because of a 28,000-barrel spill.
Curren said it will take Cenovus a day or two to restart Pelican Lake operations once the Rainbow pipeline restarts, and another four or five days to get back up to full production.
Cenovus is taking advantage of the production downtime to complete maintenance work at Pelican Lake, about 90 kilometres northeast of the devastated town of Slave Lake, Alta. The blazes haven’t posed any danger to the oilfield operations themselves.
Cenovus is not disclosing what kind of financial impact the outage may cause.
Forest fires were hampering cleanup efforts, but authorities have since lifted an evacuation order, Plains Midstream said in a statement.
It expects to resume full-scale cleanup operations on Wednesday, provided conditions don’t change. On Tuesday, a small crew was removing fallen trees and other debris at the spill site.
Meanwhile, a province-wide fire ban remains in effect in Alberta, but only seven of the 43 forest fires burning across the province are out of control.
The fire that devastated Slave Lake last week is now under control.
Another 250 evacuees will be taken to see what’s left of the town today.
Firefighters are still extinguishing hot spots, so people aren’t being allowed off the bus to retrieve belongings from their homes.
All seven-thousand residents were forced to flee just over a week ago when flames blazed through the town — gutting about a third of its buildings.
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