The renewable strike demanded by all the unions affects more and more sectors. This Monday, three of the four LNG terminals that import liquefied natural gas (LNG) into France were shut down for “seven days” to protest against the government’s pension reform plan, said Monday. evening the CGT Elengy (subsidiary of GRT Gaz).
The shutdown of these three terminals located in Fos-sur-Mer (Bouches-du-Rhône) for two of them, and in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique) for the third, blocks the gas supply to the network GRT Gaz distribution system, unloading LNG carriers and filling LNG tanks.
“Elengy’s three LNG terminals are shut down”, confirmed the management of Elengy, a subsidiary of Engie, which indicates that this shutdown was carried out “under conventional safety conditions” and has, at this stage, “no impact” for the general public. The judgment was “voted by the general meeting of staff organized by the CGT” (majority), according to Mathieu Michel, elected to the CHSCT of Elengy.
The fourth LNG terminal in France, operated in Dunkirk by the Belgian group Fluxys, will also go on strike for 48 hours from Tuesday morning.
“Request the pure and simple withdrawal of the project”
With the war in Ukraine, LNG gradually replaced Russian gas, which arrived by pipeline, for France: in 2022, LNG terminals “represented 50% of French gas supplies”, according to Elengy. And the share is expected to increase significantly in 2023.
The other source of supply for the GRTgaz network, the storages, “are extremely in demand to fill the gap” and will be the subject of filter dams from Tuesday, according to the CGT. “We are going to lower the flow a little bit on storage and ask for the outright withdrawal of the government’s reform project”, indicated Frédéric Ben, head of the gas sector at FNME-CGT.
Initially, gas-fired electricity generation plants could be affected, as could industrial customers, “erasable” customers, that is to say able to obtain energy supplies in other ways.