Without creating shortages at this stage, fuel shipments were still blocked this Thursday morning at the exit of the TotalEnergies group refineries, in order to protest against the government’s pension reform project, said CGT-Chimie. “The strike was renewed at all TotalEnergies sites this morning,” said Eric Sellini, elected national representative of CGT-Chimie, a union that called for a renewable strike.
However, the vast majority of the 10,000 French stations were supplied on Thursday. In fact, only 6.7% of them were short of fuel. However, there are disparities between departments, with the west of the country being more affected than the national average, with around a quarter of the stations in Sarthe, Indre-et-Loire and Calvados running out of petrol or diesel, according to the lifts of the station available on the prix-carburants.gouv.fr website.
“Almost no problem”
Although no fuel comes out of the refineries on strike, there are 200 tanks in France that continue to supply the stations and the refineries themselves continue to produce fuel: gasoline and diesel that will have to be ordered to be stored on site, in the absence of being able to leave. Therefore, it will take several days of blocking, or even weeks, before the reservations on the site are full and require the effective closure of production for security reasons. A hardening of the strike through a stoppage of production was certainly mentioned in the Feyzin Refinery but for the moment, “the situation has not changed”, affirmed Eric Sellini, specifying that “the management seeks to avoid a total stoppage”.
At this stage, “there is almost no problem” and there is no rush at the pump, Olivier Gantois, president of the French Union of Petroleum Industries (UFIP), told France info: “We were (on Wednesday) slightly above the level normal out of stock of fuel at the station.(…) There are, unfortunately, all the time gas stations that run out of fuel, regardless of strikes”, he added.
Invited on RMC and BFMTV, the head of Intermarché, Thierry Cotillard, also reassured: “The concern is for gasoline. There will be no problem with diesel. But since today there are refineries that are beginning to stop sending, there is a risk. But the good news The news is that in this case, there are the emergency stocks of the State in which we have not been removed, so if the refineries did not deliver to us, or we would have the solution of the State, of their stocks, and it would last us a few days.
Source: BFM TV
