“It’s dead bro, it’s shit in here. Nothing. It sucks.” Tuesday October 11, 2022, in the car park of the Esso gas station on Place du Colonel-Fabien, sandwiched between Boulevard de la Villette and Rue Louis-Blanc, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, the anger of the first days of fuel The shortage gave way to an amused fatalism. That of mutual help and half-wise advice: one advises going “to Avia, over there, further down” when another replies that there is “no diesel” and that in any case you have to wait “at least two hours” .
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On Saturday, three days earlier, a hundred cars were parked in front of the deserted train station, a consequence of the strike movement renewed on Tuesday for a ten-day pay rise at TotalEnergies and Esso-ExxonMobil. As of Wednesday morning, more than 30% of French channels were in trouble. “I’m waiting for the truck, it seems to be coming today,” complains a young man sitting on his scooter, philosophically but hardly convinced.
He may have to wait a long time, because the core of the shortage problem is the transport: It is a long way from the oil well to the car driver’s tank. It starts somewhere underground, sometimes under the sea. In fact, France does not produce large quantities of hydrocarbons: in 2017, it released from its basement only about 0.8 million tons of crude oil, or barely 1% of the national consumption located mainly in the Paris Basin and the Aquitaine Basin. We are therefore totally dependent on our crude oil imports: 31% comes from the African continent (particularly Algeria (11.6%), Nigeria (11.4%) and Libya (9.9%)), ex-USSR (22.7% , including 8.8% from Russia). before the war in Ukraine) and 14.7% from the Middle East and 10.3% from the North Sea. After negotiations, the crude oil is then transported to 17 ports on the French mainland. Three alone account for 84% of national traffic: Marseille, Le Havre and Nantes-Saint-Nazaire.
The oil is transported to them on board tankers, special ships with a capacity of no more than 300 thousand tons. Before the 1973 oil crisis, gigantic supertankers with a capacity of 500,000 tons and sometimes more than 400 meters in length were preferred. Today, most of them have been rebuilt or dismantled.
Once at the destination, the crude oil is then sent to refineries. In 2022, France has eight refineries: one in Martinique, which ensures production for the West Indies and Guyana, and seven in mainland France, the latter accounting for more than 98% of the national refining capacity, distributed as follows: in Gonfreville-L’Orcher (Total) and Gravenchon (Esso) in Seine-Maritime, in Lavera (Petroineos) and Fos-sur-Mer (Esso) in Bouches-du-Rhône, in Donges (Total) in Loire-Atlantique, in Feyzin (Total) in the Rhône and at Grandpuits (Total) in Seine-et-Marne. The latter, like the eighth French refinery, that of La Mède (Bouches-du-Rhône), is in the process of converting to the production of agrofuels. Oil major TotalEnergie, which operates four of these seven active refineries, holds the majority of France’s refining capacity (~54%), followed by Esso (~29%), Petroineos (~16%) and SARA (1%).
Donges Refinery (Loire-Atlantique), July 22, 2021. (BAPTISTE ROMAN / HANS LUCAS / AFP)
Crude oil is brought there by pipeline: the Southern European Pipeline (PSE) supplies the refineries of Feyzin and Cressier (Switzerland) from the large seaport of Marseille, while the Antifer-Le Havre pipeline transports crude oil from the port of Marseille Antifer to the CIM Depot (Compagnie Industrielle Maritime) in Le Havre, from where it is then delivered to the refineries in Basse-Seine.
There it will be a matter of converting the black gold into diesel, unleaded Super 95 and 98, which feed the engines of the cars, by means of atmospheric distillation. So, crude oil is heated in a furnace to a certain temperature to get a finished product that can be used as a household fuel: 200°C for gasoline, 350°C for diesel. Products that have already been processed are imported directly to coastal depots. In 2017, these refineries processed almost 57 million tons of crude oil.
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After finishing, the finished product is then shipped to one of 200 storage depots spread across the city, each with a capacity ranging from 400 m³ to more than a million m³. Since 1974, these deposits must constitute strategic stocks (three-month reserve) that can be released at the request of the state. 60% of the fuel is brought there via a network of more than 6,000 kilometers of underground pipelines.
For example, the Le Havre-Paris pipeline serves the Île-de-France region and Paris airports, and also serves the Caen and Orléans-Tours areas. The Méditerranée-Rhône pipeline supplies the Lyon region, the Côte-d’Azur and Switzerland (Geneva) from Fos-sur-Mer. The Donges-Melun-Metz pipeline supplies the Le Mans region and eastern France. The common defense pipeline, created within the framework of NATO to meet military needs, provides mainland France with about half the stocks of petroleum products required by the French armed forces and extends over 2260 kilometers on French soil. The rest is transported on the river in barges or by rail, and the rest is transported by tanker trucks.
There we arrive on the “last straight”. Because from these depots, the fuel goes to one of the 10,500 filling stations in France, 443 of which are on motorways and expressways. 5,104 of these are managed by supermarkets. In concrete terms: a tanker picks up the fuel at the depot and is supposed to take it to the gas stations according to a precise timetable, but has been disrupted by strikes at TotalEnergie and Esso in recent weeks.
The trucks therefore sometimes wait for hours at the depots before they can start delivering, blocking the entire machine. Suppliers, on the other hand, try to distribute deliveries more or less fairly between the various points of sale. Some are served on time, some are not… which, as we have seen over the past few days, has led to endless queues outside the service stations.