On one of the worst days of the shortage, on October 17, the government declared that 28.1% of service stations in France were short of either petrol, diesel or both.

But the real proportion that day was around 40.6% according to an estimate by AFP based on data from the prix-carburants.gouv.fr site covering around 9,800 stations, and 40.8% , according to another estimate published Friday by Le Figaro.

Franceinfo concludes for its part that 50% of the stations were in difficulty that day.

These are national averages.

The closed stations were indeed concentrated in the north, center and south-west, where the proportions were much higher, while the Great West was less affected.

At the peak of the strike, 49% of stations in Hauts-de-France and 47% of those in Ile-de-France were de facto closed on October 11 and 10, respectively, according to AFP, i.e. say that they said they sold neither petrol nor diesel.

Proportions in phase with the testimonies collected from motorists in search of full.

On those days, the government claimed that around 44% of the stations in these two regions were totally or partially out of service.

Worse: in Haute-Garonne, 72% of stations experienced fuel shortages on October 11, according to AFP.

At the peak of the strike, therefore, just under half of the stations in France ran out of fuel, of which a third were completely dry, according to several media estimates.

Interchangeable fuels

Le Figaro evokes figures "much more alarming than announced".

Franceinfo, "by applying the same methodology as that of the executive, from the same source of data", estimates the real figures of the stations in difficulty "higher by 8 to 20 percentage points than those of the government".

The refinery strike began on September 27 at TotalEnergies.

A strike started a few days earlier in the two Esso refineries in France also contributed to drying up the country, since at the worst of the crisis there remained only one refinery in service, operated by another group (Petroineos).

Fuel: the impact of strikes on service stations AFP

France has around 9,900 active service stations, which provide their prices every day on a portal of the Ministry of the Economy, an obligation more or less well respected and which concerns those which sell more than 500 cubic meters per year.

These data can be downloaded from prix-carburants.gouv.fr.

For its calculations, AFP considered, like the government, Le Figaro and Franceinfo, the three types of gasoline SP98, SP95 and SP95-E10 as interchangeable.

The ministry, questioned by AFP, explained that it only counted the stations declaring a "break", but not the stations ticking another box saying that a fuel is "not distributed" for other reasons, a category that is not distinguished in public data.

He declined to provide his full data including this category.

Slow return to normal

The times of the lifts can also have a marginal influence on the rupture rate observed;

and these figures depend on the assiduity of the stations for the information of the data, whereas certain prices in the file go back to several days.

Discrepancies appear in particular between the file updated in real time several times a day, the daily data published once a day and the annual aggregate.

However, the trend remains improving this week, thanks to the requisitioning of striking employees and the suspension of strikes at Esso-ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies, with only two sites of the French oil group still on strike on Friday.

Another way to visualize the shortage is to count the stations that said they sold both gasoline and diesel: 92% did so before the strike, and only 53% on Monday.

A rate returned to 75% on Friday for the first departures on vacation.

© 2022 AFP