Canada’s oil heartland has some evacuation orders lifted
Evacuation orders have been lifted on two oil sites in Canada's wildfire-ravaged energy heartland, as a spell of cold weather and rain helped to tame the flames.
Authorities in the oil town of Fort McMurray in Alberta lifted the lifted the mandatory evacuation orders on Suncor Energy's base plant and Syncrude's Mildred Lake facility, as well as nearby camps that house oil workers late last night.
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Fort McMurray is still largely empty, after nearly its entire population was evacuated as a wildfire has torn through more than 1.2m acres since it began this month.
Producers have since signalled a gradual increase in operations.
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The wildfire forced precautionary production cuts or shutdowns at a number of facilities, swallowing up well over a third of the country's typical daily production.
This provided some support to oil prices which had fallen to a multi-year lows at the beginning of this year. Coupled with other production outages across the world, it helped Brent hover around $50 per barrel this week.