“Such a mess is all the easier to provoke as refining capacities in Europe have been in constant decline for almost twenty years”

IThey were at least two groups to want to block, this weekend, the refineries of TotalEnergies. But for opposite reasons. In Belgium, activists from Code Rouge, an environmental and anti-capitalist association, symbolically camped in front of the country’s two factories to demand that the oil giant finally get out of fossil fuels. On the other side of the border, CGT employees are on strike, on the contrary, so that the activity develops and that they receive a fair share of the exceptional profits that the company will still reap in 2022.

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The queues in front of gas pumps have demonstrated the sensitivity of the subject: 80% of French people have a car and one in two lives in a detached house, often far from public transport. The uprising of “yellow vests”, which started at the end of 2018 from a rise in gasoline prices, shows the flammability of the subject. The exit from oil from TotalEnergies is therefore not likely to happen overnight, even if we may regret its lack of enthusiasm to do so.

Especially since we do not take the path of detoxification. The rebate on fuel prices, added to that of TotalEnergies, even had the opposite effect: the rush on gasoline. Even the Belgians have crossed the border to stock up at Leclerc or at Intermarché, in Tourcoing (North). In terms of encouraging sobriety, we have known more effective.

Diesel power ramp-up

Such a mess is all the easier to provoke as refining capacities in Europe have been in constant decline for nearly twenty years and have become extremely dependent on imports, particularly from Russia. In question, the decline in the consumption of petroleum products, due, in particular in France, to the nuclear fleet, which converted the country to electric heating, and to the rise in power of diesel, which imposed itself during the 1990s. , until it becomes the majority in the car fleet.

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Since refineries always produce the same amount of gasoline and diesel per liter of oil, they ended up with a surplus of one and a deficit of the other. In recent years, France has therefore imported 50% of its diesel and exported 40% of its gasoline, in a context of the rise of refining in Russia, the Arabo-Persian Gulf or India.

Result, mass closures – more than fifteen in forty years – and a chronic loss of activity, except in 2021. The planned rise of the electric car is not likely to reverse the trend. The balance between supply and demand will therefore be increasingly fragile… and political.

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