For more than a week now, truckers like Dan Dickey of Chilliwack, British Columbia, have been scrambling around to find fuel.

That’s because supplies to some of the “cardlocks,” aka unmanned fuel stations, in the province of Alberta, Canada, are being rationed and have run out of diesel because of scheduled maintenance and unexpected production problems at Western Canadian refineries.

Since Monday, Oct. 6, Dickey said he has been tracking the fuel situation in Western Canada after trying to fuel up in Edmonton. Every cardlock but one was out. That’s when he said he became aware of the fuel shortage problem there.

“I started inquiring about why this was happening here and could find nothing, so I started posting the information on the locations that I had been to that I couldn’t get fuel from. Then people started sending me information about where they had been and couldn’t get fuel,” Dickey told Land Line on Monday, Oct. 13. “That’s one of the benefits of being on the ground – in the trenches – and seeing what’s going on.”

Last week, Dickey said he personally witnessed lines of trucks that were “three deep” at pumps in Northern Alberta waiting on a fuel truck to arrive with more diesel.

He said some areas of Western Canada that typically have the lowest fuel prices in the country –such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba – are facing severe shortages, while areas typically that have the most expensive fuel prices – such as British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec – are not experiencing nearly as many supply issues.

Up until a week and a half ago, Dickey said the company he is leased to only had one fuel card, but added a second fuel card right before he noticed the shortages in diesel fuel supplies.

“Trucking companies may have had some prior knowledge there was going to be a fuel problem, but on the driver level we never had any indication there was going to be a fuel shortage or fuel problems,” he said.

Mayne Root, executive director for the Alberta Motor Transport Association, told Land Line on Thursday, Oct. 9, that the fuel rationing situation may last another few weeks.

Root said that because of the ongoing problems surrounding the fuel shortages there, the transportation industry is encouraging producers to develop a contingency plan for the future to “help alleviate this type of volatility in diesel availability.”

On Monday, Husky Energy Inc. was reporting that cardlocks and fueling stations in Edmonton, Edson, Red Deer and Lethbridge were out of fuel, while supplies at 13 other cardlocks in Western Canada remained critically low.

Petro-Canada was reporting that 16 of its Petro-Pass sites were out of diesel on Friday, Oct. 10.

– By Clarissa Kell-Holland, staff writer
clarissa_kell-holland@landlinemag.com