Fuel shortages

Over the last few weeks there has been a shortage of diesel in N'Djamena. Like many oil producing countries in Africa Chad still lacks the investment and the infrastructure of a totally robust supply chain so such shortages are not unexpected (although they are thankfully relatively unusual).

A bit of a grapevine developed whereby word of which petrol stations had diesel would start to spread, which of course meant that very soon they too would run out. One day a colleague managed to fill up his car but when I went to the same petrol station a few hours later they were already out of stock again.

The biggest challenge was buying diesel for our generators, both at the hangar and at the compound. Power cuts are a daily occurrence so we rely on the generators for our electricity supply, particularly in the hot season when the city power can be out for several days at a time and the need to run fridges, fans and air-conditioning is at its greatest. Typically we will buy several 200 litre barrels of diesel at a time in order to give us a good reserve. However, despite our forward planning we soon found ourselves down to our last couple of hundred litres. This may sound a lot but it is quickly used up if we are without city power for a few days. For about a week I was sending one of our staff members out every day to tour the petrol stations to see if he could find one that not only had fuel but was also willing to sell us at least 200 litres. We limited the use of the generator for a while and managed to get by with fuel to spare and now it seems that the supply of diesel is back to normal again.

But this is Africa so just as you come through one challenge another one presents itself! On Tuesday we went to get fuel for one of the aircraft in preparation for a flight the next day only to be told that our usual supplier of Jet A1 (the type of fuel used for most aircraft) was out of stock and would not have any more for a week. Well, aircraft burn a lot of fuel, and despite having some reserves we would not have had enough for all the flights we had planned for the coming week so we made contact with the other supplier of Jet A1 at the airport to see if they could help us. It took a visit to their offices and several phone calls but eventually they said we could buy what we needed.

So we took the plane back to the place where the fueling is done at the airport and filled it up with Jet A1 using the same equipment and the same staff as if we had been buying from our usual supplier. The only difference seemed to be the company name on the invoice and who we wrote the cheque out to. All of which left us wondering if there really is a shortage of Jet A1 at all...