One in 10 French petrol stations runs out of fuel

One in 10 French petrol stations runs dry

The fuel shortage in France is now a measurable fact, not a dinner-table hunch: one in 10 of the country's service stations is not serving. Emmanuel Macron has warned of an unprecedented energy situation and asked citizens to prepare for a scenario that, according to his own message, no one imagined would become real. And all this in September, with October still to begin and the heating off.

It is worth qualifying the headline before anyone fills the boot with jerrycans: there is no general supply collapse in France. What there is, is a perfect storm between a shock to international crude and demand concentrated at the same pumps.

Why have French petrol stations run out of fuel?

Because two different problems overlap. The first is global supply: the temporary closure of the East-West pipeline, operated by Aramco, leaves an infrastructure capable of moving 7 million barrels a day out of action. Saudi Arabia has announced it will not supply crude to European refineries next month and the facility would be out of service for between three and five weeks. With that scenario, a price rebound was only a matter of time.

The second problem is demand. A chain of stations froze its prices and, according to the account that circulated during the alert, half the country rushed to refuel there. The result is a strange picture: dry petrol stations a few kilometres from others that have more petrol than usual. The shortage, at least in part, would be one of management and nerves, not molecules underground.

The frozen price that emptied the cheapest pumps

When one brand holds its price and the rest raise theirs, the market does what it knows: send everyone to the same place. The fine calculation — how many stations in that chain, in which regions, with what per-customer litre limit — has not been disclosed, and without that small print any conclusion falls short.

Add to that the stockpiling reflex we already saw with toilet paper. It is enough for the warning to be repeated on television for part of the population to understand that it must fill jerrycans. The fuel missing at the pump is often surplus in a garage.

Spain as Europe's petrol station

The price gap pushes people to cross the border. French and Portuguese trucks come to refuel in Spain because filling up works out cheaper than the detour. It is the segarro consequence of a single market where a litre is not worth the same on either side of the Pyrenees. At the same time, Spain's agricultural sector has announced protests over the price of diesel, which it calls a “critical situation”.

France has spent six decades running on reserve

France's fragility is not new. A review of previous episodes:

• May 1968: general strike with 9 million workers and total paralysis of transport, with critical shortages in Paris.
• 1973: first oil shock and OPEC embargo, with stations closing due to lack of crude.
• 1992, 1996 and 1997: truckers' strikes over wages and the professional licence that again drained the pumps.

The pattern repeats: when road transport squeezes, the country grinds to a halt within days. The difference is that now the blow comes through two channels at once, crude and logistics.

What could happen in the coming weeks

If the pipeline returns within the estimated timeframe and the buying hysteria cools, it will remain an expensive scare. If the Saudi cutoff extends beyond those five weeks, the strategic reserve comes into play and there the accounts are no longer controlled by anyone in Paris. What is certain is that the price of diesel in Europe will not fall while the episode lasts, and that Spain, with its comparatively low taxes, will remain the convenience filling station for half the border.