Is there or isn’t there going to be enough fuel for Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport to keep functioning after Monday?
A near-national strike was set to grip France for another day on Monday. Truck drivers, refinery operators and rail staff have all now joined forces in protesting against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to raise the retirement age by two years.
According to Bloomberg, unions have called for a fourth day of national strikes to begin on October 19.
But it’s ongoing strikes at France’s main refineries — now heading into their third week — which are really threatening to grind the country’s infrastructure to a halt.
Protests which began at France’s main oil hub of Fos-Lavera, accounting for 43 per cent of the country’s total refining capacity, spread nationwide over the weekend, with workers now blocking a total of 61 ships from unloading cargoes into France.
According to Reuters, a spokesman for the French oil company Total warned that more of the company’s petrol stations were experiencing shortages as of Saturday.
As JBC Energy explained earlier last week in a note to clients the Fos and Lavera terminals are key to European oil infrastructure as crude is unloaded from there into the SPSE pipeline. The pipeline transports some 460,000 barrels of crude per day to French, Swiss and German refineries.
They explained:
Taken altogether, the strike could potentially affect up to 1.2 million b/d of refining capacity. Furthermore, even if the strike is ended today it will still take around a week for the backlog of vessels to be cleared.
Unsurprisingly, benchmark European gasoline prices are already trading at five and a half month highs as a result, despite high oil stocks across the continent:
There have been further calls for the government to release strategic stocks to curb further fuel shortages.
In terms of airport disruptions, France’s Transport Ministry insisted that Charles de Gaulle airport would have enough fuel to last through to at least October 19, after a strategic pipeline to the airport reopened.
Despite that, though, short-haul flights were still being asked to fly into the airport with double the normal amount of fuel in tow, according to Bloomberg.
Related links:
French strikes put fuel supplies at risk – FT
French pension protests intensify – Reuters