You can buy a lot for 30 loonies in Alberta. A case of Molson beer. A bottle of Alberta Premium whisky. And now a barrel of heavy crude.

Western Canadian Select, the benchmark for the country’s heavy crude, fell below C$30 ($23.11) a barrel Wednesday for the first time since 2008. Prices have been rocked by the global oil rout, a recovery in production following spring wildfires, and shutdowns of key refineries and pipelines in the U.S. Midwest.

“There was a big production ramp-up, severe outages and we had a big crash in global prices,” Martin King, an analyst at FirstEnergy Capital Corp. in Calgary, said by phone. “It always seems to hunt down the heavy oil for some reason and put it in the penalty box.”

WCS dropped to as low as $22.70 a barrel Wednesday, or C$29.46. It’s the lowest level since December 2008. The crude is $20 a barrel cheaper than the U.S. benchmark, the largest discount in a year.

Producers coping with low prices for the heavy grade that make some of their wells too costly to run have already shut in output. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., the nation’s largest producer of heavy oil, said in May it had taken offline 4,000 barrels of high-cost heavy output. That followed curtailments by Baytex Energy Corp. and Crew Energy Inc. over low prices.

Canadian heavy crude output will probably be curbed again as producers shut in more conventional wells, said Tim Pickering, chief investment officer and founder of Auspice Capital Advisors Ltd., a Calgary-based hedge fund that runs an exchange-traded fund tied to Western Canadian Select prices.

The reduced supply would support higher prices and more investment in the heavy oil gives investors who believe in a market rebound more upside, because of the already wide discount relative to the U.S. benchmark, Pickering said.

“We believe we’re closer to a theoretical low for Canadian crude than WTI,” Pickering said. “The downside is much more limited for Canadian crude than WTI.”