Shortage of fuel, the return. After a weekend of November 11 marked by images of long queues in front of service stations, part of France woke up on Monday November 14 with its pumps running dry. In total, 30% of service stations in France were declared out of diesel, gasoline or both fuels at the same time during the day on Monday. This is at least what the analysis of official data carried out by franceinfo shows. (read our methodology at the end of the article).
The geographical distribution of outages shows that Ile-de-France and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region are the most affected, with rates of outage stations reaching 50% in Paris, 62% in Yvelines, 61% in Ain or 57% in Loire. Border territories in the Grand Est region were also very affected, particularly in the Meuse (50% of ruptures) and the Haut-Rhin (48%).
This sudden increase in the number of dry pumps is mainly attributed to the rush of many motorists to service stations in anticipation of the reduction in rebates granted by the State and TotalEnergies, which is due to come into force on Wednesday November 16 (from 30 to 10 cents for state aid and 20 to 10 cents for the discount at Total stations). “This runaway is only due to the end of the discounts, with motorists who rushed to the pump, but also to the three-day weekend, with one day less supply last week”, explained to AFP Francis Pousse, president of Mobilians, a union which represents 5,800 service stations.
But this runaway phenomenon also added to a situation which had still not returned to normal before the weekend of November 11, following the recent strike movement in depots and refineries. Nearly 15% of service stations were still out of petrol or diesel during the day of November 10, as shown in the graph below.
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 essentially TotalEnergies stations, victims of the success of the reduction of 20 cents applied by the French oil giant since September 1st.
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 is declared to have run out of diesel, unleaded or both fuels at the end of a day or has been a moment of that 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.