Fuels, reform still delayed: why Italy's 22,000 plants need a reorganisation

For the reform of the sector, which the government would have liked to have approved by the last Council of Ministers and which, instead, has astill slipped due to the resistance of the petrol station trade unions, we will have to wait. But the Italian fuel distribution system, which is based on a little more than 22,000 sales outlets on the ordinary road network and 450 on the motorway network, has long been in need of a reorganisation to bring order to inefficiencies and the excessive fragmentation of plants.

On the other hand, the numbers provided by Unem (the Union of Energies for Mobility) take a very good picture of the gap between the Italian network and those of neighbouring countries and show how the atomisation of service stations is a fact. According to Unem's check, in 2022 (the latest available comparison) Italy had 22,187 service stations with an average delivery of 1,370 cubic metres and a number of cars per point of sale of 1,812, compared to 14,069 stations in Germany (delivery of 3,641 cubic metres and a ratio of cars to points of sale of 3,764). France (10,609 stations, one of the highest average deliveries in Europe, at 3,990 cubic metres, behind only the United Kingdom, and a car/installation ratio of 3,509) and Spain with 11,734 stations, 2,275 cubic metres of average delivery and 2,160 as the ratio of cars to sales outlets.

In short, the Italian network is particularly redundant and, as Unem president Gianni Murano also recalled during the association's last annual assembly last July, 'has an excessive number of low-delivery outlets'. Here, too, the numbers are pitiless, as Murano pointed out: "Today, about 20% of the outlets dispense less than 400,000 litres/year with gross revenues for the manager estimated at between 15,000 and 30,000 euro/year, and only 5% have dispensed more than 3.5 million litres, which is the average value distributed by countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom with less than half of our plants.

Unem's number one rightly pointed out how the economic unsustainability of some sales outlets and their excessive atomisation 'also favours illegal phenomena, generating unfair competition with other operators, as can be seen in the recent conclusions of the cognitive investigation into VAT and excise duty evasion in the fuel distribution sector conducted by the Chamber's Finance Commission'.

Not to mention that there are also profound differences at regional level. On average, the regions of the North-East have higher deliveries than the national average compared to those of the Centre-South, which instead have lower ones, also in relation to the number of cars served. According to a survey also signed by Unema, the national average dispensed value is 1,370 cubic metres, while Turin is on that same value, Milan is higher (2,080 cubic metres), Rome has an average dispensed value of 1,512 cubic metres, and Naples is below the national average, with 1,183 cubic metres. And, like the capital of Campania, the entire South.