Motorists queue for gas on Friday in front of a station on the highway between Saida and Sur. (Credit: Mountasser Abdallah/L'Orient-Le Jour)
BEIRUT — Cars queued two and three abreast in lines that extended for kilometers outside gas stations on Friday morning, as motorists hoped to fill up before fuel stocks run out completely.
Here’s what we know:
• Amid industry-wide fuel shortages, Georges Brax, a spokesperson for the gas station owners’ syndicate, said most stations will likely close their pumps next week as gasoline runs out.
• Some stations have already closed. Coral, which operates gas pumps across the country, announced Thursday that it would close all its stations due to lack of fuel stocks. The company blamed its shortage on the state’s failure to process a payment for a gasoline shipment, stranding the fuel it needs aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Lebanon.
• Total, however, said its stations would open on Friday after it received a shipment of fuel earlier this week.
• The severe shortages come in the wake of Banque du Liban’s decision to end fuel subsidies — a move that would increase fuel prices by in excess of 300 percent — as it could no longer finance them without dipping into the central bank’s mandatory foreign currency reserves. BDL’s governor, Riad Salameh, said in an interview last weekend that only Parliament could roll back the decision to remove subsidies on fuel. Parliament is set to meet at 2 p.m. on Friday to discuss the issue.