For several weeks, diesel has been cheaper than gasoline at the pump, but the gap is only growing. Explanations.
It’s a price difference that we had almost forgotten. Since the beginning of February, the price of diesel has fallen below that of gasoline at the pump, ending nearly a year of an abnormal period in which the curves were reversed.
A growing gap
And from an initially insignificant price difference in 2023, this is becoming increasingly significant: 16 cents less for a liter of diesel at the last weekly pump price survey.
A historically high difference. It is indeed necessary to go back to October 2016 to find such a difference, of 16 euro cents, in price at the pump between diesel and gasoline in France.
Except precisely during this period, in the wake of the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine… where diesel ended up with a price per liter up to 27 cents more expensive (in October 2022) than gasoline.
An atypical situation, already with a difference in taxation against gasoline in France:
“There are 10 cents more tax on gasoline compared to diesel if we combine the difference in TICPE and VAT”, recalls Olivier Gantois, president of Ufip (French Union of Petroleum Industries).
The limited impact of the embargo on Russian diesel
Diesel more expensive than gasoline was still the case at the start of the year. And at the time, we feared above all the start of the total embargo on Russian diesel, decided in 2022 but which only applied from February 4, 2023, which would further increase the gap between the two fuels.
On paper, the fears were justified:
“Russia exported 3.5 million barrels of diesel per day and this Russian diesel represented 50% of imports in Europe, 30% in France”, underlines Olivier Gantois.
Except that in fact, it is precisely since February that the price of diesel has fallen below that of gasoline, with a growing gap since then.
“First of all, the markets saw that diesel could be imported from suppliers other than Russia. It also seems that the Russians export their diesel to other countries, which do not apply the embargo and can therefore then re-export them to European countries Finally, it is the start of the “Driving season” in the United States, with a demand for gasoline which increases in this period from April-May until the beginning of July “, explains Olivier Gantois.
To this range of reasons, we can add the “structural tendency to shift part of diesel consumption to gasoline”, which modifies the balance of demand between the two fuels. Diesel still represents three quarters of fuel consumption in France.
“A slow but inevitable ‘dedieselization’, notes Olivier Gantois, between 2021 and 2022, gasoline consumption increased by 11% and that of diesel decreased by 1%.”
