The French release of its emergency oil product stocks under the International Energy Agency initiative announced a week ago will be from companies' stocks alone, an official at the French strategic stock agency, the CPSSP, said Thursday.
A percentage of the country's strategic stocks is held by operators -- refiners and importers -- and a percentage is held by the CPSSP.
On this occasion, the stocks will be released solely from the operators.
"The CPSSP is not concerned," Jean-Marc Tenneson, general delegate at the CPSSP, said.
"The release is of operators' obligations, and they have the possibility of reducing their own obligations by 3.2 million barrels," Tenneson said.
France has given the most detailed breakdown of its stock release. Of the total 3.24 million barrels, 2.375 million barrels are diesel, 476,000 barrels gasoline, 327,000 barrels jet fuel and 64,000 barrels fuel oil.
Tenneson said the mechanism would be market driven, in that stockholders can sell to the market if there is the demand.
"No parties are obliged to buy the stocks," Tenneson said.
He said this was the solution decided by the French energy minister Eric Besson.
"We offered a number of options [for implementing the release], but Besson considered that the stocks owned by the operators are more linked to the market," Tenneson said.
The release is being implemented in the same way as it was in 2005 when the IEA announced an emergency stock release after Hurricane Katrina disrupted operations in the US Gulf of Mexico.
Tenneson said he was not sure of the volumes of French stocks sold during that release, saying only stocks were made available to the market in France and some made their way to the US.
Tenneson also said the CPSSP was in daily contact with the IEA, and said he hoped a further release once this one is completed would not take place.
"We don't wish that the situation will come again soon," he said.
The CPSSP holds stocks at around 100 sites throughout the country. They were last used during the French refining strike in October 2010, which saw all of the country's refineries closed leading to service stations running dry and fuel depots being blocked.
The CPSSP released around 1 million mt (7.35 million barrels) of oil during that time, Tenneson said.
