In practice, no more drop of fuel leaves French refineries, blocked at the call of the unions, hostile to the pension reform. “The strike was renewed at all TotalEnergies sites this morning”, said Thursday, March 9 to Agence France-Presse (AFP) Eric Sellini, national elected representative of the CGT-Chemistry, a union which called for a renewable strike. Fuel shipments are still blocked in the establishments of TotalEnergies in La Mède, Donges, the refinery in Normandy, Feyzin and Flanders, but not production (except in Donges, stopped for technical reasons).
If production continues, the fuel must now be stored on site, for lack of being able to leave. In the immediate future, there is therefore no shortage at the pump, the impact being limited on the 10,000 service stations in France which continue to obtain supplies from the 200 fuel depots spread over the territory. It will take several days of blockage, if not weeks, before on-site reserves are full and require the actual shutdown of production for safety reasons. In the meantime, the vast majority of the 10,000 French stations are now full.
At the Feyzin refinery, a hardening of the strike by stopping production had been mentioned, but, for the moment, “the situation is unchanged”affirmed Eric Sellini, who specified that “management is trying to avoid a complete shutdown”. On the Esso-ExxonMobil side, the “strike is also renewed at the Esso refinery in Fos-sur-mer”with 70% of strikers, said the union official.
“Everything will depend on whether or not the strike continues”
About 6% of service stations ran out of gasoline or diesel on Wednesday, according to public data analyzed by AFP. The oil sector calls into question the concern of motorists who would multiply their precautionary fill-ups because of the strikes. “As of today, there is plenty of fuel on national territory” And “service stations continue to be delivered normally”, assured Wednesday Francis Pousse, president of the professional union Mobilians, which represents 5,800 stations. If a deposit is blocked, “we have enough agility to get fuel elsewhere, even if it takes longer”. But for the next few days, “everything will depend on whether the strike continues or not, whether it intensifies or not”he observed elsewhere.
According to public data analyzed by AFP, the west of France is more affected than the national average, with around a quarter of the stations of Sarthe, Indre-et-Loire and Calvados lacking petrol or diesel. . This analysis is based on station feedback available on the prix-carburants.gouv.fr website. Stock-outs remain, in any case, far from the more than 40% of stations running out of fuel observed during the peak of the refinery strike at TotalEnergies and Esso-ExxonMobil in October, with shortages which had been even more serious in some regions.