Fifty-eight billion euros. That is what France paid in 2024 to import oil and gas that it barely produces [1]. By comparison, the National Education budget is around sixty billion. The bill dropped by a fifth compared to 2023 thanks to easing gas prices: but this pullback is cyclical [2]. The underlying structure has not changed: France remains exposed to resources it does not control, and whose price can triple in eighteen months, as happened between 2021 and 2022 [3].
This is not a recent anomaly. In 2000, France’s energy bill stood at 24 billion euros. In 2013, 56 billion. In 2019 (an ordinary year, before any crisis) 46 billion [4].
France has never found a way out of this structural trap. And the world has not helped: as Daniel Yergin documents in The Troubled Energy Transition (2025), what is called a “transition” is actually an “addition”: renewables accumulate on top of fossil fuel consumption that is not declining globally. At the worldwide level in 2024, more oil and more coal were consumed than ever before [5]. France finds itself in this paradox: electricity among the most decarbonized in Europe, and an economy still powered by fossil fuels at nearly sixty percent [6].
Sixty Percent of an Economy Plugged into Foreign Energy
The 2024 figure from the Statistical Data and Studies Service (SDES) is unambiguous: fossils still represent 59.6% of final energy consumption in France [7]. That is less than the 72% in 1990, but the reduction has taken thirty-four years. And the geography of this dependence reveals the essence of geopolitical exposure: France imports 99% of its oil and all of its gas [8]. This oil arrives from the United States, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Algeria: a dispersed supply map, with no margin for national production.
The transport sector concentrates the bulk of the problem. It alone accounts for roughly one-third of France’s final energy consumption, and almost all of this consumption is powered by petroleum products [9]. In 2024, electric vehicles reached 17% of new vehicle sales: but only 2.3% of the total fleet of more than thirty million vehicles on the road [10]. The electrification of freight transport, which accounts for nearly half of the sector’s consumption, has barely begun [11]. Building heating remains the second major issue: natural gas heats millions of homes, and heat pumps are progressing but slowly.
What the data reveals is not obvious: France pays its fossil bill twice. A first time on imports: 57.8 billion in 2024, of which 43.8 billion for oil alone [12]. A second time in volatility: in 2022, when the war in Ukraine sent prices soaring, the bill jumped to 126 billion euros [3], two and a half times the 2021 level. This shock forced the State to mobilize 72 billion euros in price shields between 2021 and 2023. Fossil dependence is not merely an ordinary cost: it is a major budgetary risk, triggered whenever geopolitics tightens.
The Rupture That Yergin Names and That the PPE Does Not Address
Daniel Yergin poses an uncomfortable diagnosis in his Foreign Affairs essay (2025): the official objective of the transition (replacing fossils) has never been achieved by any historical energy transition [13]. Coal, oil, gas never disappeared after a new energy arrived; they simply moved elsewhere. What France must therefore avoid is believing that the deployment of renewables or a nuclear rebound is enough to mechanically lighten the bill, if uses—cars, boilers, industrial processes—remain plugged into oil and gas.
The Shift Project, in its Robust Plan for the French Economy report published in April 2026, draws the same conclusion with national figures [14]. The total energy exposure of the French economy is assessed at 3,005 TWh per year, of which 71% comes from imported fossil resources. Domestic energy production covers only 681 TWh of actual needs.
Jean-Marc Jancovici frames it in terms of sovereignty: “France imports 99% of its oil and 100% of its gas. These two commodities are finite” [15]. As long as oil remains in cars and gas in boilers, the decarbonized kilowatt-hours produced by EDF do not serve to reduce the external bill.
The PPE3, published on February 13, 2026, sets an ambitious course: moving from 58% to 40% fossil fuels in final consumption by 2030, and dropping below 30% by 2035 [16]. The objective is real. But the PPE is a programming of energy supply: it organizes the production of decarbonized electricity. It does not change the architecture by which households and businesses buy their boilers, choose their cars, and finance access to alternatives. This gap is precisely what Yergin points to: without an intervention that changes demand behavior and existing equipment, the fossil addition continues [5].
An Import Toll That Could Finance Its Own Exit
The rupture to propose for 2027 does not consist of “accelerating” electrification or “refocusing” aid. It consists of changing who bears the fossil risk, and making it finance the exit.
France has a lever that does not currently exist: a contribution on hydrocarbon imports, based on physical volumes imported (barrels and cubic meters) and not on final household consumption. This levy, collected at the border, would be earmarked by law to a dedicated fund for electrifying end uses: heat pumps, affordable electric vehicles, thermal renovation. The principle changes the architecture on three fronts simultaneously.
Who pays: the importer, an actor upstream in the supply chain, and no longer the consumer at the end of the line. On what basis to levy: the fossil volume imported, not income or final energy consumption. Which institution controls the allocation: a multi-year fund designated by law, removed from annual budget trade-offs.
The idea fits within the Shift Project’s Robust Plan framework, which calls for “energy policy focused on results, with clear targets for reducing emissions and fossil dependence” and for “effective coordination of public instruments” [14]. It is consistent with Yergin’s diagnosis: if the transition is structurally an addition, only a mechanism that makes fossil use progressively more costly upstream can trigger substitution downstream [13].
With a contribution of 5 to 7 euros per ton of oil equivalent imported (an order of magnitude to calibrate and whose precise figures remain to be established by the Treasury Department) the fund would generate several billion per year, without touching domestic fuel taxation, which makes its political acceptability different from pump taxes. After adoption, financing the exit from fossils would no longer depend on the State budget’s annual allocation, but on a levy automatically proportional to the dependence it is meant to reduce: the more we import, the more we finance the alternative. The system reduces itself as it succeeds.
Sources
[1] SDES, Chiffres clés de l’énergie : Édition 2025, October 2025, https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/chiffres-cles-de-lenergie-edition-2025 (accessed 30/09/2026).
[2] Notre-Environnement.gouv.fr, “Why Has France’s Energy Bill Decreased in 2024?”, 2025, https://www.notre-environnement.gouv.fr/actualites/breves/article/pourquoi-la-facture-energetique-de-la-france-a-t-elle-diminue-en-2024 (accessed 30/09/2026).
[3] SDES, Energy Balance Sheet for France for 2022, May 2024, https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/sites/connaissancedesenergies.org/files/pdf-actualites/bilan-energetique-de-la-france-pour-2022.pdf (accessed 30/09/2026).
[4] Knowledge of Energies, “What Is the Amount of France’s Energy Bill?”, https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/questions-et-reponses-energies/quel-est-le-montant-de-la-facture-energetique-francaise (accessed 30/09/2026).
[5] Daniel Yergin, Peter Orszag, Atul Arya, “The Troubled Energy Transition: How to Find a Pragmatic Path Forward”, Foreign Affairs, February 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com (accessed 30/09/2026).
[6] RTE, 2024 Electricity Balance Sheet: Electrification of Uses, March 2025, https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2024/electrification (accessed 30/09/2026).
[7] SDES, Final Energy Consumption by Sector and by Energy Source, in Key Energy Figures 2025, https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/edition-numerique/chiffres-cles-energie/fr/7-consommation-finale-denergiepar-secteur-et (accessed 30/09/2026).
[8] Ministry of Ecological Transition, “Hydrocarbon Resources in France”, https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/politiques-publiques/ressources-hydrocarbures-france (accessed 30/09/2026).
[9] RTE, 2024 Electricity Balance Sheet: Electrification Fact Sheet, March 2025, https://assets.rte-france.com/analyse-et-donnees/2025-03/BE2024%20-%20Fiche%20%C3%89lectrification.pdf (accessed 30/09/2026).
[10] RTE, 2024 Electricity Balance Sheet: Electrification Chapter, March 2025, https://assets.rte-france.com/analyse-et-donnees/2025-03/BE2024%20-%20Chapitre%20%C3%89lectrification.pdf (accessed 30/09/2026).
[11] Ibid.
[12] SDES, Energy Expenditure, in Key Energy Figures 2025, https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/edition-numerique/chiffres-cles-energie/fr/4-depenses-en-energie (accessed 30/09/2026).
[13] S&P Global, “The Energy Transition Needs a Reality Check”, Press Release, February 25, 2025, https://press.spglobal.com/2025-02-25-The-Energy-Transition-Needs-a-Reality-Check (accessed 30/09/2026).
[14] The Shift Project, Succeeding in Transition amid Uncertainty: Robust Plan for the French Economy, April 2026, https://theshiftproject.org/publications/reussir-la-transition-dans-lincertitude/ (accessed 30/09/2026).
[15] Jean-Marc Jancovici, interview France Info, 2025, https://www.franceinfo.fr/replay-radio/8h30-fauvelle-dely/carburants-electrification-backlash-ecologique-l-interview-de-jean-marc-jancovici_7881404.html (accessed 30/09/2026).
[16] French Government, Pluriannual Energy Programming: PPE3 (2026-2035), Decree of February 13, 2026, https://www.economie.gouv.fr/ppe-3-programmation-pluriannuelle-de-lenergie (accessed 30/09/2026).
