The strike by TotalEnergies employees has been going on for a month and, with it, the fuel shortage. The Gonfreville refinery (Seine-Maritime) and the Feyzin depot (Rhône) were, Thursday, October 27, the last two sites where the strikers continued the movement started by the CGT on September 27. In the middle of the All Saints holidays, motorists are still struggling to find gasoline and queues continue to lengthen at the entrance to certain service stations. Franceinfo sought to find out, by analyzing official data (read the methodology at the end of the article), what was the percentage of outlets that still encountered supply difficulties; where they were in France; and whether the situation was likely to improve quickly.
Nearly 20% of service stations still out of stock in the middle of the week
More and more petrol stations are now being replenished with fuel, but the situation has still not returned to its pre-crisis state. This is what the analysis of the information reported by the managers of service stations, published by the government on the price-carburants.gouv.fr site, reveals.
These figures show that 18.8% of service stations in mainland France were still out of diesel, gasoline or both fuels at the same time, Wednesday, October 26. These difficulties are now mainly concentrated on gasoline since 80% of these service stations in difficulty were out of unleaded (SP98, SP95 and E10).
Before the start of the first strikes in the refineries of Esso-ExxonMobil, on September 20, there were between 5 and 10% of the points of sale in shortage of at least one fuel, depending on the day. It was then mainly TotalEnergies stations, victims of the success of the reduction of 20 cents applied by the French oil giant since September 1st.
Nearly seven out of ten service stations out of stock in the Greater Paris metropolis
The analysis of the geographical distribution of fuel shortages shows that it is in Ile-de-France and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes that the situation remains the most tense. In the metropolis of Greater Paris, 68.6% of service stations were out of at least one fuel, Wednesday, October 26. Among the other territories most in difficulty, outside Ile-de-France, include the departments of Puy-de-Dôme (47.5% rupture) and Ain (45.5%).
Improvements promised by oil companies “by this weekend”
“We did not see the tensions of this week coming”acknowledges to franceinfo Olivier Gantois, president of the French Union of Petroleum Industries (Ufip). “They are very localized and almost exclusively linked to unleadedhe points out. There are no, or very few, gasoline imports, unlike diesel. Everything we consume is produced by our refineries.”
However, the president of Ufip assures that the supply disruptions which still persisted this week should soon be resolved. “The particular tensions will disappear within a few days. The improvement should be seen by this weekend”, promises Olivier Gantois. Between the blockages that persist at the Gonfreville refinery and the Feyzin depot, and the time needed to restart the refineries where the strikes were lifted, the president of Ufip considers that it will take “still more than a week to return to a normal situation”.
Methodology
Fuel shortage rates are calculated by franceinfo based on information provided by service station managers to the government and published on the prix-carburants.gouv.fr website. The declaration of prices at the pump is in theory compulsory for any manager of a point of sale that distributes more than 500 cubic meters of fuel. But, in fact, the information in this database is not always up to date. Also, franceinfo only retained the declarations of stock shortages of service stations whose last tariff updates dated back to September 1 at the latest.
This sorting work made it possible to isolate a sample of 9,564 stations which were then grouped by agglomeration communities (communities of municipalities, metropolises). Outage percentages were then calculated, considering a station out of order as soon as it declares itself running out of diesel, unleaded or both fuels on the same day. When an agglomeration community has less than three stations from our sample, then a rupture rate calculated at the departmental level replaces the displayed value.