The movement against pension reform continues at refineries and affects both production and shipments. the government claims to carry out “ultra-targeted” requisitions.
Four employees of the TotalEnergies refinery in Gonfreville-L’Orcher, near Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) were requisitioned on Friday March 24. Three others were in Donges (Loire-Atlantique), while the mobilization against the pension reform continues and the effects on fuel supplies are beginning to be felt. Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister for Energy Transition, assures us that this is “ultra-targeted requisitions”: “We are talking about three or four employees who must take their service”, she explained. With these requisitions, the government is trying to plug two different types of problems.
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Kerosene: a critical situation for Orly and Roissy airports
For the Normandy refinery, Gonfreville-L’Orcher, it is mainly to send kerosene to airports. It is a CGT representative of TotalEnergies, Adrien Cornet, who best sums up the issue around aviation fuel: “If a drop of ‘kero’ comes out of Normandy, we’re dead, comrades”he said during a rally on Thursday, in front of the refinery.
Gonfreville indeed produces part of the kerosene which is sent to the reserves of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle and Orly airports. However, for the past few days, the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) has been waving red flags concerning the level of stocks at Paris airports. There are between ten and fifteen days of consumption in reserve and with strikes and slowdowns in the sending of kerosene since the start of the pension dispute, this capacity is beginning to be tested, and the situation is becoming “critical”.
The problem arises for foreign companies which make long-haul flights and which have to refuel before leaving, but also, for the same reasons, for French companies. It is less sensitive on medium-haul flights which can refuel at other nearby airports.
It is for this reason that the government, at the request of the employer TotalEnergies, requisitioned four employees to take over from the team that had been inside the plant for 24 hours. She could no longer work since operators are not allowed to work more than 12 hours in a row for safety reasons. And the relief teams, on strike, refused to enter. Around 4 a.m. on Friday, the gendarmes therefore unblocked the entrances to allow the requisitioned employees to go and take up their posts.
Gasoline: shortages in stations in Loire-Atlantique and Brittany
In Donges (Loire-Atlantique), as in Fos-sur-Mer (Bouches-du-Rhône), it is a question of resuming the supply of fuel to petrol stations. Three employees were requisitioned there. The decision was taken at the end of the morning by the prefecture of Loire-Atlantique. The employees will have to release fuel which will take the direction of the oil depot of Vern-sur-Seiche (Ille-et-Vilaine), released Wednesday morning by the police. We are therefore no longer talking about planes, but about automobiles. The Donges site supplies part of the Great West and Loire-Atlantique and Brittany are particularly affected by fuel shortages. This is not yet the case in Île-de-France, where depots make it possible to supply stations correctly and where motorists have obviously been less greedy than in October-November.
These requisitions will relieve the airports a little because they allow a minimum of fuel to be sent to their tanks. The Gronfreville refinery itself does not produce all the kerosene consumed at Roissy and Orly. And besides, it is not production that is restarted since the refinery has been shut down since Tuesday and cannot be restarted in a few hours. These are the expeditions that have resumed. This is the sector most affected by strikes.
In any case, this will not allow a normal situation to be restored, because the kerosene sent to Paris airports is dependent on crude oil imported to the oil port of Le Havre, by the same pipeline. And there, the CGT which controls the port, sends nothing more in the pipes. For the moment, no requisition concerns this union stronghold. Once the stocks at the Gonfreville refinery have been consumed, there will therefore be nothing more to send.