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-Chimie, union which called for a renewable strike. . Fuel shipments are still blocked in the TotalEnergies establishments in La Mède, Donges, the Normandy refinery, Feyzin and Flanders, but not production (except in Donges, which is 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 specifies that “management seeks to avoid a full stop”. 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.
“It will all depend on whether or not the strike continues”
About 6% of gas 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 precautionary fill-ups due to strikes. “As of today, there is plenty of fuel on the national territory” and “the service stations continue to be delivered normally”, assured Wednesday Francis Pousse, president of the professional union Mobilians, which represents 5,800 resorts. If a depot 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 or not the strike continues, whether or not it intensifies,” he observed.
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 that had been even more serious in some regions.
