Petro-Canada gas stations could be refuelling by the end of next week, the parent company said Wednesday.
A problem at Suncor Energy’s Edmonton refinery that reduced gasoline production should be fixed by then and its Fort McMurray operations — halted because of the wildfires that threatened the oilsands city in northern Alberta — should be up-and-running again by the end of the month, spokeswoman Sneh Seetal said.
The two setbacks drastically cut supplies of gas at Petro-Canada and some Shell stations in the Okanagan, Thompson, Kootenays, the north, and throughout the Prairies.
“We’ve been working to minimize the impact on our customers as much as possible,” Seetal said. “We continue to bring in additional gasoline from outside the region by truck and rail, and we are ramping up production in a staged manner.”
It can’t be soon enough for some Petro-Canada and Shell gas-station operators, who saw their holding tanks drained dry late last week, with no gas deliveries to fill them again on the immediate horizon.
“We ran out on Friday,” an employee at a Petro-Canada station in Kelowna said. “We’ve been told absolutely nothing. We’re operating like a convenience store. It’s very frustrating.”
Some gas has leaked its way to a handful of Petro-Canada stations in the Okanagan, stations considered critical locations by Suncor, but not much.
“We have gas, we got a delivery on Saturday morning,” an employee at a Petro-Canada station in Penticton said. “We’re fully supplied right now, but we were out for two days.”
At many of the Okanagan Petro-Canadas Postmedia tried to contact, no one answered the phone.
Motorists in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island aren’t affected because their gas is supplied by Chevron and three refineries south of the border in Washington state, an industry expert said.
And, Dan McTeague, senior analyst for GasBuddy, added he’s skeptical Suncor will be refining at full speed again by the end of next week.
“If what’s been given to me is anywhere accurate, there will be rolling shortages (beyond next week),” he said. “I don’t mean they’ll run out, there’s no need to panic, but I tend to think that it’s doubtful. I may be completely wrong, but I expect this not to be resolved at the end of next week.”
A bigger concern than temporary Suncor-related shortages, McTeague said, is a projected price rise this summer, not because of Alberta forest fires or problems at Suncor’s Edmonton refinery, but because a pair of refineries in the U.S. Midwest are out of commission, while there is record demand for gas in the U.S. South.
“If you’re lucky, the price rise will be four cents a litre,” the Toronto-based analyst said. “I think it’s more likely it will be eight to 10 cents a litre.”
