That announcement was made as a Note on the Substack app. This issue is a brief catch-up for readers who prefer newsletter format.

What we did

Since May, In the Pipeline has been capturing fuel stock data from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), and trending it. Most of the risks affecting Australian fuel supply are external, and some are changing. The International Energy Authority’s global fuel stock draw-down expired in July-August, commercial fuel reserves are getting depleted, there is the risk of consumption rising gradually over time as markets adapt to increased pricing, and alternative fuel routing around the Strait of Hormuz is coming on only slowly. Trending helps us spot whether we have a growing supply issue.

But weekly data capture was slow and error prone. It required screenshots and we didn’t have the complete data. In July, ITP approached DCCEEW for back-data and was initially rebuffed, but this month DCCEEW began to publish weekly fuel stocks since the fuel crisis began. (ITP acknowledges and thanks the stats team at DCCEEW for this work.)

That now gives us full context to trend and interpret, and something new to report by newsletter.

The Fuel Resilience Chart

In late February, in response to the global fuel crisis, DCCEEW moved from quarterly fuel reporting to weekly. The chart above presents Australian fuel stock levels week-on-week for petrol, diesel and jet fuel. These are represented in days of available consumption, based on average daily consumption for 2025.

The data labels on the right list the total stocks held for the latest week: 42 total days for petrol, 36 each for jet fuel and diesel. Here are the calculated Minimum Stockholding Obligation (MSO) levels in days for each fuel.

Back to the chart, and the vertical axis on the left shows days of resilience above the MSO. Here’s why that’s important.

The MSO is Australia’s emergency fuel reserve and reports against all stocks held in terminals, plus any fuels in Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, scheduled for delivery. It exists to help smooth out any disruption to supply — and issues around the Strait of Hormuz may not be the only disruption.

So we’re looking for a healthy buffer above the MSO level to cover constricted times. The limit of that buffer is whatever the terminals can hold plus whatever boats are about to deliver. This chart shows how diesel dipped into the MSO by 31-Mar-26 and explains why the government needed to declare a 20% temporary MSO reduction to help cover the initial panic-buying.

The chart also shows how all fuel stocks were built up through April and May to their current levels. That didn’t happen accidentally: it was the Energy Security Taskforce working to secure new and additional supplies.

So with the Iran War dragging on, how do we presently stand?

At the moment, petrol is healthy with 18 days of resilience above the MSO floor and 42 days total; jet fuel has ten days of resilience and 36 days total, but ITP has an eye on diesel, which has 36 days of total stocks, but only six days of resilience.

Diesel is concerning because it’s the fuel we consume the most in Australia (92 megalitres per day, compared to 45 megalitres for petrol), and our supplying Southeast Asian refineries find it hardest to produce without good access to Middle Eastern feedstocks. A single bad delivery week could put diesel into the MSO, and two bad delivery weeks could raise questions about prioritising diesel use.

So the strategic question this chart helps us answer is whether the prolonged issues with Hormuz and the expiry of the IEA drawdown are squeezing our fuel resilience, and especially that of diesel.

The answer so far then is: no, but it’s not as healthy as it was for the last two months, so watch this space.

Supply and Price

It’s also fair to ask whether fuel resilience affects price and the answer is: not unless resilience suddenly gets tight.

The price for fuel is controlled by the price at the refinery, plus wholesaler margins, government taxes and retailer margins. The ACCC tracks this weekly, but the big price-jumps at the bowser in early July and August were from the government excise reduction coming off in two halves.

Supplied by the ACCC’s weekly fuel report, the dotted vertical lines in the Sydney petrol and diesel price charts below show when the excise reduction first took effect in April, and when it stepped back in July and then August. The charts show the bowser price tracking the refinery price, which has come down since its peak on 22-March, but is gradually crawling back. ACCC’s weekly trending for all capitals can be found here.

The refineries, meanwhile, take their price signals from the price of Brent crude. The chart beneath shows how that is tracking — again, the price is crawling back up from its recent low at end June. Significant also is that the ‘crack spread’ — the difference between the refinery fuel price and the oil feedstock price — is higher for diesel than it is for petrol. This may partly be due to demand, but part of it may be that Southeast Asian refineries struggle to produce diesel when Middle Eastern feedstocks are tight.

What’s Next

As wearying as it is to call the Iran conflict The New Normal, no party shows a viable pathway toward a sustainable Strait reopening. Meanwhile, alternative supply-lines to bypass the Strait of Hormuz are developing, but will only come on-stream slowly. The pressures on Australian fuel resilience are therefore demand-driven, and demand is a global concern.

In the Pipeline will continue tracking fuel resilience trending weekly, and that can be viewed on demand at this page.

ITP will continue to monitor Australia’s policy response and any significant changes to the policy environment, and will report any updates in newsletter form.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

The fuel story has gone quiet at home but remains frantic abroad.

Quiet at the bowser: petrol came down weeks ago and has stayed down. The headlines have moved on. And the cliff the last issue warned about — the morning of Wednesday, 1 July, when the whole excise/GST discount was meant to snap back on at once — won’t arrive the way we said it might. The prop we told you to watch for went back in. The government stepped down the relief instead of letting it lapse.

Abroad, if anything, it’s more frantic — new headlines every couple of days, changing nothing here.

Each side has reasons to keep the noise up. In the US, mid-term elections in November will read as a half-way verdict on a President whose fuel prices are high and whose approval is falling — so there’s a home crowd to perform for. Iran, its former leadership killed and its income choked off by sanctions and a US blockade, holds the Strait as a card: closing it is something it can bargain into sanctions relief or revenue, so the sabre-rattling gets answered — in words and in ships.

The speculative markets twitch at every move, and the media — which watches oil prices and the cost of living closely — amplifies the lot. A headline a day, for weeks. And almost none of it moves the number on the sign.

If you’ve lost track of which headline matters, that’s not a lapse of attention. Most of the theatre doesn’t change the price we pay. We can put most of it down.

Underneath, what’s solid is smaller, but steady. The shooting has paused — mostly — under a signed framework. Petrol is back. The government’s liquid fuel reserve rebuild has continued. The 30 June price cliff has been softened into a gentler ramp. None of that is a victory lap — the framework is fragile and the relief is still being withdrawn, just slowly. But it’s enough to stand on while we sort the noise from the few dials that actually move.

This issue is about those dials. Two of them are on the government’s clock — the excise step, and the inflation number behind it. The third runs on a clock of its own, underneath the supply, where the politics can’t reach it. For that one, this issue hands you a gauge to keep.

The step that came, and the one being held

Let’s start with the bowser, because it’s the easiest to see. As will surprise no one, petrol has still been gradually coming down in the cities. Shown beneath by continued custom is ACCC pricing for Sydney. Key to note is that the price fall follows Mogas 95 — the Singapore refinery price, and that the wholesale price falls are flowing through. Each other capital has its own supply cycles, but shows similar.

In the last issue we said the single date to mark was 30 June: that on 1 July the full relief — about 32 cents a litre, once the excise cut and the GST relief tied to it were counted — would come back on mechanically, onto a price already near its floor. That was the read on the Budget’s own settings. The Budget said the cut wasn’t funded past 30 June, so back it would come.

Late this month, the government changed course. On 20–21 June it extended the cut rather than letting it lapse — but tapered, not in full. From 1 July the relief is about 16 cents, roughly half what was there in June. So 1 July is still a step up at the pump, but a half-step, not the full cliff. That’s the bad news.

The nearly-good news is that it lands on a cheaper barrel than we had in May. Brent crude has fallen from around 95 US dollars in early June to about 77 by late June — roughly 17 dollars off in three weeks, and about 37 dollars below the April peak. For petrol, the 16-cent step puts us back toward late-May pricing, sliding us back around four to six weeks, with further falls possible if Brent continues to slide.

Diesel pricing continues to sit higher, and will continue to depend on the feedstocks available to Singapore and the region. There’s a ‘fall-plateau’ pattern in wholesale diesel prices, with a period of around five weeks. This may reflect selling off bulk stocks acquired at previous prices. The retail price fall is smoothed out due to distribution, but the trend suggests that the 16c diesel step might be offset within two to three weeks in July.

Then there’s the second, later step. The remaining relief is scheduled to come off on 2 August. But that date is worth reading as an indicator, not a fixture — because the government has just shown it will move these dates. It turned a 30 June cliff into a 1 July half-step inside a single news cycle. The Prime Minister explicitly did not rule out another extension past 2 August.

So we need to watch the conditions behind the date, not the date itself. Three things are likely keeping the lever in the government’s hand. First, politics: the government didn’t want “Hormuz reopens” and “excise fully back” landing in the news on consecutive days. Second, economics: stepping the relief down gradually manages the rush at the service station as the discount ends, and gives business time to adapt to changing costs. And third, plain uncertainty: nobody knows what Brent will be doing into August, because nobody knows how well the Hormuz opening will go — and a government manages that kind of uncertainty by keeping the option open rather than committing.

So we don’t know whether the 2 August step will land, soften, or move — and neither can the government. The same volatility that stops us making a confident call is the volatility they’re managing by holding the lever. We have to watch what they’re reacting to, because that tells us what they’ll do.

The dial the pump isn’t showing

The pump price is one number. But the cost of living is another, and this fortnight they pulled apart.

The Reserve Bank watches inflation, which drives interest rates, which in turn drive mortgages and business costs. The Reserve Bank meets every six weeks, and fuel — diesel especially — is part of what they notice.

The May inflation figures, out on 24 June, had the headline rate easing to 4.0 per cent, down from 4.2. That sounds like mildly good news, but what matters is why. What pulled it down was fuel: automotive fuel fell nearly 12 per cent in the month, as the excise cut and the cheaper barrel both showed up at once. That’s the relief, in the data.

But the number the Reserve Bank actually watches is called the “trimmed mean“. It sets aside the wildest price swings — the biggest 15 per cent of jumps and falls — and looks at the middle. Fuel is among the big movers, so out it comes. What’s left is the inflation tide, not the waves. And the trimmed mean actually rose, to 3.6 per cent from 3.4. Strip out the bowser relief, and underlying inflation firmed — diesel being part of the reason.

So the fall in headline inflation is real, and it’s mostly the fuel discount doing the work. The cost of living you feel in the rest of the shop isn’t tracking the friendlier number on the petrol sign. That just confirms what we can already see: petrol is down, but food prices aren’t. And we won’t know until August where diesel might fall — and those costs still need to pass through.

The turn — recovery has started, on a slower clock

Now the part underneath, which is where we’d like this issue to earn its keep.

By any reasonable measure, the reopening has begun. The framework signed in mid-June lifts the naval blockade and provides for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen; ships are meant to move again — and some already are; the risk premium has come out of the oil price. That’s the real turn, and it’s why the barrel is cheaper. Despite the continuous breaches and threats, there are ongoing political and economic incentives for both the US and Iran to settle; the Gulf States have so far largely stayed out of it, except to ramp up production; and Israel’s continued fighting in Lebanon is troubling but might not change the outcome.

Still, reopening isn’t arrival, and we’ve made this case before. A waterway has to be demined. Insurers have to gain enough confidence in the peace to write cover again. Trapped ships have to clear. Refineries have to restock and resume. And every nation that drew down its reserves through the shock has to rebuild them at once — which puts Australia, a long voyage away and a small buyer, near the back of the queue. That sequence doesn’t run on weeks. It runs into next year.

What’s new this issue is the state of the global cushion that’s been absorbing the shock while all that plays out. It’s finite, and it’s drawing down. The coordinated release that steadied the market back in March — about 400 million barrels, the largest the International Energy Agency has ever organised — is spent. Government-held stocks across the developed economies are now at their lowest since 1990. The emergency releases still feeding the market, on the order of two and a half to three million barrels a day, are, in the agency’s own words, no substitute for the strait actually staying open.

The agency’s term for the danger window is the “red zone,” and it falls in July and August — but it’s explicitly conditional on Hormuz not fully reopening. That ties the risk to the framework’s fragility, not to a date on the calendar. If the reopening holds, the window passes quietly. If it slips, the cushion is thin.

That’s the shape of it. The relief you can see runs on a political timer — the excise steps, set and moved in Canberra. The supply underneath runs on a slower clock, set by demining and insurance and the queue for cargoes, and the step-down doesn’t touch it.

The instrument — days above the resilience floor

So here is the gauge for the part that isn’t on a political timer.

In the last issue we recut the government’s weekly MSO fuel chart by hand, because the official version didn’t show what we needed and we finally had the data to do better. This issue we’re turning that into a standing instrument — something you can read every week, and run yourself if you want to.

The problem with the official MSO chart is built into it, and we covered that last issue. It’s a single-week snapshot and each week replaces the last, so you can’t read a trend. And it reports headroom as a percentage above a reduced floor — the minimum stockholding line the government drew down in March to absorb the early panic-buying. That operational job was done long ago, but the lowered line has been kept on as the weekly benchmark, and a percentage is misleading in any case. Measuring comfort in percentage against a floor you quietly lowered makes every week look roomier than it is.

Picking through the trend, it’s not that the government has hidden anything alarming. It’s just that the current reporting hides the movement toward or away from national resilience, and that’s what we care most about. The official framing implies something close to twice the real headroom we have — every week, built into the method.

So here’s the gauge instead.

What it contains. We measure in whole days of resilience above the long-term MSO floor, which is marked in yellow. Any encroachment into the MSO is treated as an emergency exception and we’d reasonably want to know why. Above the MSO are whole days of additional fuel resilience for petrol, jet fuel and diesel, reported week on week. Rising levels represents growing resilience and perhaps better supply. Total days of fuel stored are labelled above each trend-line.

How we calculated it. Weekly fuel stocks are reported by DCCEEW, typically on a Saturday. The average consumption rate can also be calculated from DCCEEW quarterly, and we are rounding to whole megalitres per day:

To calculate whole days of stock, just take the megalitres of stock reported and divide by daily consumption, rounding down. (This is likely to be conservative due to pricing driving reduced consumption.)

To calculate days of resilience above long-term MSO, subtract the long-term MSO from the stock first, and then divide by daily consumption, rounding down. The latest DCCEEW data can be found here.

Differences from government reporting. This is a rule-of-thumb chart meant for easy domestic use. We use whole numbers for consumption rates, whole days for stocks, and we calculate resilience above the long-term MSO rather than the MSO which was reduced in March to cover the initial panic. The numbers will be different at times (perhaps by a day), but the trends will remain accurate. (There may be minor discrepancies with last issue also, due to how we calculated.)

What makes this a gauge and not a scare. This is not a countdown to the last drop of fuel; it’s a trend toward or away from greater fuel resilience for the period of concern. However, when stocks are about a week of resilience from the MSO (as with Jet fuel on 16-Jun), it’s useful to know that historically, the boat arrival rate can vary by 5-7 days even in years of steady supply.

How to read it. From start of our trending, the government has maintained resilience above the MSO, but resilience for jet fuel is thin, is vulnerable to late or missing boat arrivals and diesel is not far behind it. A clear week of stock above the MSO represents healthy resilience. Above that range what’s interesting is the trending across multiple weeks: is resilience holding? Rising? Falling? (Across the current month of report it seems to be gently oscillating.) If stocks fall into MSO encroachment then that begins a countdown to see whether the government can either dig the stock-levels back out again or has a story to tell about what it will do instead. Within the trend period, that has not yet occurred.

What we expect as the Strait reopens is a lumpy picture. If the reopening is slow, the IEA cushion could come under strain and resilience may fall. This gauge helps you see past the weekly lumps to whether we’re straining or not.

But please note: this is not for hedging fuel costs or planning industrial supply. It’s a kitchen-table gauge, just so you can see how we’re doing and where we’re generally headed.

Also interesting — how much easier it has been for the government to replenish petrol than diesel or jet fuel. Partly this may be because our diesel consumption is higher, but regional refineries also depend on a heavy, sour crude that has been harder to acquire.

For this reason, diesel and jet fuel resilience are both worth watching if the coming months get lumpy. For petrol, additional resilience against lumpiness is now up to nearly three weeks.

What we’re tracking

Here’s what we’re still watching.

The pump, as we sit between the first half of the excise returning and the second. Will it read as a noticeable jump or softening hiccup for petrol? Will diesel behave better or worse? Will the next step come in early August — and will it land or soften?

The resilience, week on week, against the real floor — the gauge above. You can run it yourself from the weekly stock figures. Watch the slope, not the single read.

Inflation, on two prints that fall close together. Absent other external economic factors, softening fuel prices should help with June inflation reports. The July print, due in August, tells us whether the fuel relief gives some back as the discount tapers. They may land in the same August window as any second pump step, so they may be worth reading together, as we did in this issue.

And the Strait, as a clock rather than a settlement — the frictions around the framework are what decide whether the IEA cushion’s red-zone window passes quietly.

What we don’t know

This issue makes two forward calls, worth checking. Here’s what would break each one.

The 1 July offset. It looks like the cheaper crude already in the pipe may largely cancel the 16-cent excise step for petrol, so July may read as mild, flat, or down in places. This breaks if petrol jumps a clear 16 cents on 1 July. That would mean the crude fall didn’t pass through, the dollar moved against us, or retailers front-ran the change. It will be interesting to see whether that Diesel price-lag helps with the excise pain.

Recovery runs slow and lumpy. We’ve said the Strait reopening puts strain on availability even as price and tension ease, so any single-digit MSO buffers stay worth watching. This breaks — happily — if the buffers climb steadily across all three fuels over several weeks. That would show the recovery is smooth and we may not need the gauge. We’d take that result gladly; it’s the good-news case, not a defeat.

Two things sit behind those calls and are worth stating. The pressure on Iranian storage that drove part of the early crisis is being eased by diplomacy and resumed exports rather than forced to a head — which holds, and strengthens. And the relief-erosion we tracked last issue has reversed on both legs at once: the world price is down, and the domestic relief was tapered rather than withdrawn.

One boundary. We’re carrying the mid-June framework as a 60-day clock with live frictions around it — Lebanon, the toll dispute, the disputed strait-closure claim, the invasion threat — not as a settled reopening. Whether the whole situation has moved into a genuinely new “fragile reopening” phase is a larger judgment we’re not making in this piece. The reading here — recovery, slow and lumpy — doesn’t need it either way.

What to do about it

Even less than usual. There’s no new reason to fill jerry cans. Keen pump-watchers will top up before the July half-step anyway, and the government surely expects that.

The suggestion for this issue is: let the geopolitical headlines look after themselves, and just keep the MSO gauge. The daily announcements and counter-announcements are real and tiring and mostly don’t reach the price we pay. You can stop tracking them without missing anything that matters to your budget.

The resilience in days, against the real floor, read for its slope and not its single number, is the one thing we think is worth a glance — and you can run it yourself. If a fuel ever crosses below its MSO floor, that’s the read that counts on its own, and we’ll say so plainly.

That’s the whole of it. The relief is real, and it’s coming off a step at a time, on a clock the government controls. The supply underneath runs on a slower clock that the steps don’t touch — and that’s the part we’ll keep watching for you.

The Fuel Resilience chart was updated to include 23-Jun-26 data on 27-Jun-26.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

Whatever is happening in the Strait of Hormuz, the fuel-vibe at the pump has gradually been getting better.

Petrol is home. Across the five largest cities the average is about 173 cents a litre — roughly two and a half cents above where it sat the week before the war started. The number on the sign has come all the way back. The headlines have gone quiet. The Federal Budget in May put some never-again policies in place (see ITP006 for what they were.) And there are always other things in the household budget to worry about — the mortgage, the power bill, the cost of a weekly shop.

So if your working assumption is it spiked, it came down, we’re more or less through it, and we’ll be back to normal by year-end — that’s not a foolish read. Most of it is right. The price did fall. The fall lasted. The vibe feels better. Moving on is rational.

But In the Pipeline is about the data, not the vibe. Back to normal by year-end is the part worth a careful look. The relief we see at the bowser is two different things adding to one number. One of them is leaving in a few weeks’ time — and the other may not hold.

The bill that didn’t come home

The cost of living hasn’t come home the way petrol did.

In the Pipeline has used Sydney diesel as a touchstone before. The capitals run on slightly different price-cycles, but the shape is the same everywhere. Before the war, diesel at the bowser sat around 178 cents. It’s now around 213. Petrol over the same stretch went from about 170 to about 178 — back, near enough. Diesel went up further, and has stayed up: still more than thirty cents above where it started, long after petrol found its way back.

You might not buy diesel, but it reaches you anyway. Diesel is what moves freight, stocks the supermarket shelf, runs the tractor and the delivery van and the cold chain. When diesel stays thirty cents high, that sits inside the price of nearly everything we all buy. The petrol number is the one most people watch. The diesel number is the one everybody pays.

There’s a slower fuse on the same fire: fertiliser. The disruption that lifted diesel has also roughly doubled the price of fertiliser, and growers are managing nitrogen through the planting window — which is happening now. There’s nothing for a household to do about it today, but it works its way into the price of food into next year, and we’ll come back to it in a future piece.

Because we don’t buy crude

In the Pipeline has been tracking Brent crude — the global oil price — since March. The good news is that it has fallen from about 126 US dollars a barrel at its April peak to around 95 now. That’s a real retreat, and if you watched the bowser and the Brent price side by side, you could think the one flowed straight from the other.

So why hasn’t diesel come down with petrol?

Because Australia doesn’t buy much crude. We refine only around 20 per cent of our own liquid fuel. What we mostly buy is refined product — diesel, petrol and aviation fuel that have already been through a refinery and shipped in from Asia — and the price of that product is crude plus the cost of refining it. That refining cost has its own life, and for diesel it has been a wild one.

We showed this gap a month ago, and it’s worth seeing again now, because it shows what the headline doesn’t. For two years before the war, the gap between crude and refined diesel sat at around fifteen dollars a barrel. At the April peak it blew out past a hundred. It has since come down hard — but it has stopped coming down, settling at around forty-five dollars: three times where it started. Petrol’s equivalent gap widened too, but far less, and petrol behaved roughly as you’d expect — it moved with crude. Diesel didn’t. Diesel tore, and the tear has only half-healed.

So “oil came down” is true, and at the diesel pump it’s largely beside the point. The barrel that got cheaper isn’t the barrel we’re buying. The crisis didn’t end; it moved downstream — from crude, where it makes the news, to refining, where it doesn’t.

Part of it is the refining diet. The Asian refineries that make our diesel run best on the heavy, sour crude that comes out of the Gulf; with less of that crude flowing, they’re processing lighter, sweeter crude that yields less diesel per barrel. Low global diesel stocks and refinery shutdowns have pushed the same way. The upshot is that diesel is simply the harder barrel to make right now — and we burn more than twice as much of it per day as petrol (about 93 megalitres, versus 43[1]). Harder to make, and largely imported: the price stays up.

Why this is the floor

If diesel explains why our costs are still up, the calendar explains why they’re about to go up again — and why the next few weeks are roughly the bottom.

The main prop holding the bowser down is the excise cut. Since April the government has halved fuel excise; under the deal struck with the states, GST relief came too, bringing the total relief at the bowser to about 32 cents a litre. The Budget confirmed the cut isn’t funded past 30 June — and because the GST relief is tied to the excise cut, it lapses with it. So on 1 July the whole 32 cents comes back on, mechanically, unless the government acts to stop it, onto a price that’s otherwise already at its floor.

The 32 cents will land on petrol and diesel alike. And nobody seriously expects prices to fall a further 32 cents over the rest of the year to cancel it out. Here’s why.

The most optimistic crystal ball going is the Brent futures market — and even it has crude only drifting from about 95 dollars to the high 80s by year-end. Even if all of that reached the pump, it’s worth perhaps ten to fifteen cents a litre. And it won’t all reach the pump: the wide gap on diesel will eat most of it. Against 32 cents coming back, that’s not a contest.

That’s the optimistic case, and it still leaves prices stuck. But the pessimistic case is live too. The fall in crude rests on a fragile, on-again-off-again de-escalation in the Gulf — and if that slips, the 95-dollar barrel doesn’t stay 95. One half of today’s relief is leaving on a date. The other half is borrowed against a calm that hasn’t actually arrived.

And even if the Strait opened tomorrow, we’ve argued before why that wouldn’t reach the pump for months. The Strait would have to be demined; insurers would need enough confidence in the peace to write cover again; trapped ships would need to get out; refineries would need to restock and resume; nations would need to rebuild depleted strategic reserves; and operators would need the nerve to sail back in to refill. That’s not weeks. It takes us into next year.

Meanwhile, the government’s emergency settings don’t all expire on the same day. The 20 per cent cut to the strategic stockholding obligation — and the relaxed fuel-quality rules — have been extended to 30 September, a full quarter past the excise. So 30 June isn’t a supply cliff; it’s a price cliff. But the stock reduction has to be unwound eventually, and when companies rebuild to the full obligation, that extra buying is one more gentle push upward — a fourth-quarter pressure, not a 1 July one.

Behind the MSO vibe

Since March, In the Pipeline has been saying to watch the Minimum Stockholding Obligation — the MSO. It used to be a quarterly measure of strategic fuel reserves. Through the crisis, it’s been published weekly.

It’s still the best weekly read we have on the state of fuel in Australia. But it isn’t sharing the data we’d actually use. Ideally we’d want two trends to set against each other: fuel arriving, by type, and fuel being used, by type. The government tracks the boats — it reports on them. It reports the reserves weekly too. So in theory the weekly change in our reserves is just what arrives minus what we burn:

fuel delivered − fuel used = change in reserves

Trend that week on week and you’d see whether we’re eating into the cupboard or still stocking it, ideally in days of cover, by fuel type. But that isn’t what we get. Instead, we get a snapshot of the level and a percentage above an already-reduced minimum — no trend, measured against a moved goalpost, and in percentages rather than days.

It’s well presented, but it’s a vibe-chart. Three reference lines, a comfortable-looking percentage, a big days-of-cover number out the front: it’s hard to picture what you’d add to make it more reassuring, but it still only gives you a fuel gauge — not fuel consumption. The information they’re obliged to publish is in there. The information you’d actually use isn’t.

So here’s the same data recut into numbers we can use — measured in days, against the real minimum, using the March-quarter report and current stocks:

A few notes on the table. To turn megalitres into days we’ve used DCCEEW’s own annual consumption figures — for 2025, so the days are probably a touch conservative for 2026, since higher prices have likely trimmed consumption (DCCEEW would have a better idea by how much). The “March quarter average” is the Jan–March average of reserves as reported by DCCEEW; through that quarter, seasonal use and uneven boat arrivals moved the levels around by some 20–25 per cent of MSO — call it five to six days of stock from low-water to high-water. For “MSO” we’re using the real minimum — what the government itself says we need for resilience — not the reduced one it dropped to during the shock. “Buffer” is simply whatever sits above that real minimum: what we have to play with before we’d be eating into strategic reserves.

This tells us three things.

First, the government has done what it can to rebuild, after drawing the obligation down 20 per cent when the shock hit in March.

Second, that rebuild really only shows up for petrol — which now sits on an 18-day buffer above the real minimum. Diesel’s buffer is 7 days and jet fuel’s is 6 — only about one bad supply week beyond the normal seasonal swing, which puts both close to the line the government itself says we need for resilience.

Third, these aren’t normal times. If the market tightens for any reason, thin buffers like these will get eaten. And we are expecting it to tighten: the International Energy Agency coordinated a global drawdown back in March, and that’s expected to expire in July.

So it’s worth keeping an eye on the buffers — in days, against the real minimum — and not banking on a meaningful fall in fuel prices this year. That’s not doom and gloom. It’s more of the same grind.

What could turn this around

This is a firmer call than we’ve made before: that the bowser is at or near its floor for the year, and that 30 June marks the turn from cheapest to dearer. A call like that earns its keep only if it can be checked — so here is what would break it.

• Crude collapses. If Brent falls toward 60 dollars — a genuine global glut overwhelming the war premium — product would follow far enough to blunt the excise return. The sticky diesel margin still softens it, but this is the one that would most clearly prove the call wrong.

• The government re-props. If Canberra extends or replaces the relief — the excise cut and the GST tied to it — the 1 July step doesn’t happen. It declined to in the Budget, but a sharp jump at the bowser, landing in the middle of a cost-of-living argument, is exactly the pressure that revives the option. This is the one I’d watch.

• The dollar climbs. A sharply stronger Australian dollar makes the US-priced product we import cheaper in our own money, pulling the pump down without anything else changing.

• The diesel margin cracks. If the refining margin that’s been stuck at three-times-normal suddenly narrows — another coordinated product release, or the global restock resolving faster than expected — diesel could come home after all. Neither looks near-term.

If none of those moves, our call stands.

What to do about it

Nothing dramatic. At time of writing, some 176 stations had fuel outages — that’s around 2% of all stations, which has been fairly stable since after the initial price shock settled. So there’s no new nudge to go and fill jerry cans, and topping up is still price-sensitive for everyone. The suggestion for this piece is quieter: reset the expectation, and then the budget.

The expectation first. If you’ve been waiting for fuel to keep falling, you can stop — this is about as good as it gets this year. Whatever you’re planning that turns on a fuel price — a long drive over summer, a holiday booked three or six months out, a season’s running costs — plan it on a number at or above today’s, not below. The cheap window is the one you’re standing in.

The budget second. The single date to mark is 30 June. The morning of 1 July, expect the bowser to step up — the full 32 cents — and expect it to stay up, because the thing underneath it that never came home is diesel, and diesel isn’t coming home this year. The one development genuinely worth watching is whether the politics of that step pushes the government to put the prop back. If it does, you’ll know — it’ll be right there at the bowser — and we’ll tell you what we make of it.

That’s the whole of it. The crisis didn’t end in March. It got quieter, and it moved to where you can’t see it. We’ll keep watching the part you can’t, and keep you company through the part you can.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

[1] Based on DCCEEW consumption figures for 2025.

Early this month In the Pipeline drew a line between the price you’re paying at the bowser and the price the world is paying for crude. The bowser was falling; the floor — the price the world is paying once the temporary props come off — was sitting higher than the bowser. We suggested: plan for the floor, not the bowser.

Mid month and that’s still where we are, only now with a Federal Budget. Bowser prices have softened a little further. Brent crude is bouncing around US$110 a barrel, roughly where it was when the war started. The Treasurer handed down the budget on 12 May, and committed Australia to a long-term rebuild of how this country handles fuel supply — fifty days of strategic reserves, a domestic gas reservation regime, support for low-carbon liquid fuels, feasibility studies on new refining capacity. Multi-year work, much of it commencing in 2027.

Useful to help prevent this from happening again, but none of it will put fuel in your tank in June.

So where will we stand over coming months?

Between now and the end of June, the price you’re paying is being held down by three policy measures: the temporary excise reduction, snapping up spot fuel cargoes the government has underwritten through Export Finance Australia, and a lot of recent diplomatic effort with Southeast Asia. The Budget has now made it clear: the excise reduction isn’t being funded past 30 June. The other two have their own limits. The relief at the bowser is real, but it’s propped up by the policy equivalent of chewing gum and baling wire — and the props don’t have indefinite shelf life.

This issue is about what’s holding prices down, what to expect when the props come out, and what’s worth watching as that happens.

What the Budget decided

The Budget on 12 May committed $14.8 billion to what the government has called “Strengthening Australia’s Fuel Resilience.” It’s a comprehensive package, and the headline numbers are large. But what tells you what the government has actually decided isn’t the total — it’s where the money goes.

The package roughly falls into three piles.

The first pile is fixing what’s happening now. In place since April, the temporary fuel excise reduction costs about $2.9 billion and runs out on 30 June. A billion in interest-free loans through the National Reconstruction Fund. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission gets more money and stronger powers to police fuel prices for the next two years — a mandate that runs well past the excise suspension and past Treasury’s central forecast for prices to ease. And the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility — administered by Export Finance Australia — has already underwritten the purchase of around 450 megalitres of additional diesel and 100 megalitres of jet fuel.

The second pile is making sure this doesn’t happen again. A $3.2 billion Australian Fuel Security Reserve, holding around a billion litres of diesel and jet fuel under government control. An expansion of the Minimum Stockholding Obligation to lift Australia’s diesel and jet fuel cover to fifty days. A $1.1 billion Cleaner Fuels Program to support domestic production of low-carbon liquid fuels (think biodiesel and similar.) A twenty per cent domestic gas reservation scheme starting July 2027. Permanent (but reduced) fringe benefits tax concessions for electric vehicles to continue businesses transition incentives. Protection for the two remaining refineries and feasibility studies on expanding domestic refining capacity. These are multi-year commitments, most of them starting in 2027.

The third pile is what the government has deliberately not done. There’s no replacement instrument for the excise reduction after 30 June. There’s no formal triggering of the Liquid Fuel Emergency Act, no rationing, no priority access regime. There’s no commitment to actually build new refining capacity — only $10 million in feasibility studies.

The cost weight sits overwhelmingly on the second pile. The first pile is mostly already-deployed or expiring. The third pile — the silence — is where the government has chosen, at least for now, not to spend.

What this tells us about where the government has landed: it has decided that this crisis is the kind of thing that could happen again, and it’s spending most of its political and fiscal capital on rebuilding the system rather than smoothing the present. That’s a defensible choice. It’s also a choice with a visible edge: 30 June, when the excise cut ends and isn’t replaced. That’s the moment the chewing gum starts to come out, and the price we pay reflects what’s underneath.

What’s holding prices down right now

Three things, each with a shelf life. And one observation worth making before we get to them: all three are levers Australia can pull at home. The forces they’re pulling against — the crude price, the diplomatic temperature, the war-risk premium, the availability of refined product on the global market — are being set elsewhere. What Australia controls is what it can do domestically, and how hard it can lean on the relationships it has abroad.

The first instrument is the fuel excise reduction. From 1 April to 30 June, the government has been collecting about thirty cents per litre less in excise on petrol and diesel. That money isn’t disappearing — it’s just not being collected. The Budget tells us it won’t be extended. On 1 July, the thirty cents comes back on, mechanically, the morning after.

The second is the Export Finance Australia mechanism. War-risk insurance premiums on tankers running through the Strait of Hormuz are high, and have been since the conflict began. The commercial market would price those cargoes differently if forced to bear the full risk. The government, through Export Finance Australia, has been underwriting cargoes — guaranteeing the financial backstop so the cargoes get bought and shipped at terms the market wouldn’t otherwise support. Around 550 megalitres of additional diesel and jet fuel have been secured this way, with a further 150 megalitres of diesel confirmed in mid-May from Ampol, Viva and IOR.

This works at Australia’s scale because Australia is a relatively small buyer in the global product market. Every cargo Australia secures is a cargo another buyer — somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Asia — doesn’t get. In a hot housing market, this would be called ‘gazumping’. The other buyers may tolerate this while they can backfill. But they also have trading relationships with Australia. Their tolerance can get strained.

The third is diplomatic effort. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister have made many international visits in recent months. The Budget formally records bilateral supply-chain commitments with Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. Some of these are old relationships being firmed up; some are new arrangements. They are real work, and they have produced real cargoes. They also depend on the calculations of other governments, which can shift.

None of these three instruments is permanent. The excise reduction has a hard end date. The Export Finance Australia underwriting has limited budget and is politically contested. The diplomatic effort is subject to availability — other countries’ availability, on their own terms. And none of them changes the upstream picture — the crude price, the refinery margins, the war-risk premium — that determines what the rest of the world is paying.

So the question, going into the second half of 2026, isn’t whether the props come out. The Budget has told us the excise prop comes out on 30 June. The question is what the price will be when the props are gone — and that depends on forces that won’t be settled in Canberra. That’s what the next section is about.

Three things to watch

We’ve talked about most of these before. What’s changed is what they’re telling us.

Most readers won’t want to spend their weekends tracking oil markets. We don’t want to either, but we are tracking them, and will continue reporting what we see about fortnightly. What follows is the framework we’ll be watching over the coming weeks, and a guide if you want to look in occasionally yourself.

Brent today pricing

Brent crude is the world price of oil before any of it gets to a refinery. It’s the headline number. It’s what the news reports when oil makes the news, and it’s what Treasury watches.

Brent has been oscillating around US$110 for weeks. That’s about 67% above where it sat a year ago — and roughly where it was during the worst weeks of the Russia–Ukraine invasion in 2022. Treasury’s central planning assumption is that Brent will glide back to around US$80 by mid-2027. The market is, sort of, behaving consistently with that. We’ll come to “sort of” in a moment.

For now: Brent at US$110 is the cost of making fuel today. That’s what’s underneath the props.

The market expectation curve

This second chart is drawn from the same source — the same Brent futures contracts — but cut differently. The first chart showed today’s price for the front-month contract. This one shows the prices the market is currently paying for delivery months and years into the future.

This is one we also reported in the last issue. It’s where the Budget’s planning assumption comes from, and is worth another look.

When traders are buying and selling oil, they’re not just buying barrels for tomorrow. They’re buying contracts for delivery months and years into the future. Add up all those contracts, and you get a curve — a picture of what the global oil market is pricing for the next decade.

The curve says: about US$105 by the end of June this year. High US$80s by end of 2026. Low US$80s by end of 2027. Around US$72 by 2030, and drifting down beyond. The market is pricing the current crisis as a temporary disturbance to a long-run price that was going to flatten and decline anyway.

Treasury is reading off this curve when it tells the country to expect fuel prices to start improving from July. The Budget’s central case sits along this curve.

In ITP005 we explained why this isn’t the expected case — it’s the rosiest end of a credible range that needs six things to go right. A month later, none of those six conditions has visibly improved. The curve has barely moved.

Here it gets awkward. The curve is real — real money is positioned around it, traders are making real bets — but it isn’t a forecast that anyone in the analytical community is making. The International Energy Agency’s May report says global oil could be materially undersupplied through October even if the war ends next month. Goldman Sachs, ING, and the major hedge-side analysts have all spent April and May raising their forecasts and walking back their hopes of an earlier resolution. Not one of them can tell you a coherent story of how the world gets from where it is now to where the curve says it’ll be in eighteen months.

So the curve is the picture Treasury is reading off. It’s also the most cheerful picture in the room, by some distance, and no analyst will quite stand behind it. It’s not a forecast anyone is making. It’s a market signal for best hopes — useful, but a different kind of thing.

What we are keeping an eye out for: whether the curve adjusts upward in the coming weeks and shakes hands with the analysts, or whether the analysts worry less and adjust their forecasts down toward the curve. One of those things has to happen, eventually.

MSO

The third signal is the closest to home, and it’s the one we think is most worth readers checking from time to time.

Long-time readers will remember the Minimum Stockholding Obligation — the rules requiring Australian fuel companies to keep certain levels of stock on hand at all times. We’ve talked about it across most of the issues this year. What’s new isn’t the MSO itself. It’s the role it’s about to play.

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water publishes a snapshot every week or so, showing how much fuel is actually being held in Australian storage. As of 12 May: petrol stocks 122% above the (reduced) minimum, kerosene 46% above, diesel 54% above. Roughly forty-four days of petrol, thirty-five of jet, thirty-six of diesel if Australia had no other supplies.

That’s the cupboards. Through March, April and May, the cupboards have stayed broadly full — because the Export Finance Australia–underwritten cargoes have done the work of keeping them full. The government has been securing cargoes that, under current war-risk insurance premiums, the market would price differently. That’s part of what we mean by chewing gum and baling wire.

The question for the second half of this year is what happens when that mechanism strains — and it will, eventually, because every cargo Australia secures is a cargo another buyer doesn’t get, and the patience of the other buyers will wear thin if the fuel doesn’t return. When that strain starts, the cupboards will start emptying faster than they’re being refilled. The MSO snapshot is where you’ll see it. Not in real time — DCCEEW publishes in arrears — but in a form you can read without subscribing to anything or watching markets.

So that’s the signal: if the days-of-cover numbers in the next MSO snapshot are roughly where they are now, the chewing gum is still holding. If they’re noticeably lower — and especially if diesel days-of-cover drops below thirty — the system is straining in a way that’s worth attending to.

It’s not a forecast. It’s an in-arrears reading of what’s actually happening to Australian supply. That’s what makes it useful: it doesn’t ask you to take anyone’s forecasts on trust.

Three signals, three different questions

Each signal answers a different question:

• Brent now tells you what fuel costs to make right now.

• The market expectations curve tells you what the global market is pricing for the next decade — and right now, that picture is more optimistic than anyone watching the market for a living can quite explain.

• MSO tells you what’s actually arriving in Australia, in arrears.

If you only have time for one, the MSO snapshot is the one — because it’ll speak to your actual circumstances when something changes. The other two are upstream signals: they’ll move first, but they require more interpretation. We’ll be watching them, and reporting what we see.

The Australian Budget is something most of us read for the parts that affect us and then put down. Pick our top three items, move on. It’s background.

What is different this time: regardless of the Treasury forecast, our fuel security is still held together with chewing gum and baling wire, the chewing-gum is coming out, and what happens after is being shaped almost entirely outside Australia. The government has chosen the long-game: rebuilding the system rather than smoothing the present — and we’ll first see that when the excise cut ends on June 30, and isn’t replaced.

So is it getting better or worse? We think it’s a mixed bag.

The markets are pricing better, but the analysts don’t quite believe the pricing; Australian supply is steady in arrears but only because the props are still in. The honest answer is that nobody — including the people whose job it is to know — can quite tell you which way the rest of 2026 lands.

What we can tell you is what we’re watching, and what we’re seeing as we watch it. Brent and the market expectations curve will give the earliest signals — we’ll be checking them fortnightly and reporting what we see. The MSO is the one worth your own eye, periodically, because it’s the cleanest reading of what’s actually happening to Australian fuel. Three signals, three different rates of change, three different questions about the same picture.

The 30 June moment is coming. When it arrives, the bowser will reflect, for the first time since March, the price of fuel without the excise cut underneath it. That’s the political cushion coming off, and the start of the long-term repair work. Whether the rest of the props hold, and for how long, is something none of us will know until we get there. We’ll keep you company through it.

Correction: This article was amended to note reduced FBT concessions for electric business vehicles.

A friend asked me at a regional fair last weekend what diesel prices we’d see this year. His family needed to know — it would shape their whole season. I told him the truth, which is that I couldn’t give him a number. But I could offer something more useful: a way of reading the situation that would let him pick his own number, knowing which way the risk leaned. That’s what motivated this article.

Bowser prices have fallen substantially over the last three weeks. Across the five largest Australian cities, average retail petrol has dropped 65.4 cents per litre against where it sat on 31 March; average retail diesel has dropped 45.5 cents per litre over the same period. That fall is real, and most of it has reached the household. The trouble is what’s underneath it.

This piece is about the gap between what the bowser is telling us and what the system underneath it is doing. The summary version: the relief is real, but it is being produced by mechanisms that cannot continue. The crude oil price itself is sitting at levels last seen during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, only partly masked at the bowser. And the costs that sit between crude oil and the pump have grown at several layers, in ways that won’t simply unwind when crude eases.

A note on the word floor, which this piece comes back to. The bowser price we see today is the bowser: the number on the sign this week. The floor is the lowest price the broader market thinks is plausible over the months ahead — what fuel can credibly cost at the cheapest, given everything that would have to go right. The two are different numbers, and the gap between them is where most of the year’s surprises will sit.

Plan for the floor, not the bowser.

What’s pulling prices down at the bowser

Four things are pulling pump prices down right now. Each of them is either temporary, or depends on conditions that may not hold.

The excise cut. From 1 April through 30 June 2026, the Commonwealth has halved fuel excise on petrol and diesel. With state and territory governments giving up GST revenue on fuel over the same period, the total cut at the bowser is 32 cents per litre. This is a three-month measure. On 1 July, the full excise returns unless the government extends it — and whether it extends is a political and budget question, not a market one.

Refined fuel prices easing overseas. The international prices Australia pays for already-refined petrol and diesel — what gets shipped here from refineries in Asia and the Middle East — have come off their early-April peaks. The competition watchdog (the ACCC) notes that this easing followed the 8 April announcement of a two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States. The ceasefire is fragile and conditional. The price easing tracks it.

The ACCC watching whether retailers pass it on. The Commission has been publishing weekly reports through the closure period, and has been explicit about checking whether the excise cut and the easing in international prices are reaching the household. That kind of public scrutiny does work. It is also not a permanent feature of the market.

The largest coordinated emergency-stocks release in history. Many readers will remember Australia’s Minimum Stockholding Obligation (MSO) drawdown on 13 March (covered in ITP001), but the international drawdown might have slid past. On 11 March 2026, the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency (the IEA — the body that holds the world’s emergency oil reserves) unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels of stockpiled oil onto the market. That is more than double the release after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the largest in the agency’s history. The United States contributed 172 million barrels over 120 days. Japan released 80 million barrels and announced in mid-April it was looking at a second release for May. South Korea released 22.46 million barrels — its largest ever. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Austria all confirmed contributions. Substantial portions of these releases have already hit the market; the rest is being released now.

The Brent crude price we can see settling in the chart above is the price after all four of these mechanisms have run together.

What the bowser isn’t showing

The bowser price is built up from a stack of costs: the crude oil itself, the cost of refining it into petrol or diesel, the cost of moving it to a service station, the retailer’s margin, and tax. When we say prices “go up” or “come down,” we usually mean the whole stack moving together. What’s happened over the last two months is that the layers in the stack — particularly between crude oil and refined diesel — have grown wider, and not all of that widening has unwound.

The most striking case is in diesel. For two years before the closure, the gap between crude oil and refined diesel sat at around fifteen US dollars per barrel. By early April, that gap had widened to over a hundred dollars per barrel. Even now, with international diesel coming off its peak, the gap is still around forty-five dollars — three times what it was before the closure.

Petrol behaved roughly as expected during the spike. Refined petrol moved with crude; the system stretched, but it didn’t tear. Diesel didn’t behave that way. Diesel tore.

Some of this is visible at the refinery. Both Australian refiners have reported their refining margins doubling. Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery reported a margin of USD 22.0 per barrel for the first quarter of 2026, up from USD 12.1 the previous quarter. Ampol’s Lytton refinery reported USD 25.45 per barrel, up from USD 15.14. These are figures the companies disclosed to the ASX, cited by the ACCC in its weekly monitoring report. The ACCC also noted in its December quarterly that the system was already running marginally hot before the closure, with refiner margins 2.5 cents per litre above the ten-year average. The closure didn’t break a system at rest. It doubled a system already running warm.

Some of it is visible at the retail end. The ACCC observed in its 24 April report that retail diesel prices have reduced over the last week, however, the movements are yet to fully reflect the recent steep falls in international refined diesel prices. The Commission added that we are continuing to scrutinise movements in retail diesel prices closely. That is the regulator saying, in its own voice, that diesel prices are coming down at the bowser more slowly than they went up.

And some of it shows up in how unreliable the wholesale prices have become. The ACCC noted that since the supply disruptions, it is likely there have been fewer than normal transactions at or near terminal gate prices, and that some transactions have been at quite different prices to published terminal gate prices. Translation: the published wholesale prices that everyone uses to work out what diesel “should” cost at retail are, by the regulator’s own admission, currently less reliable than usual. When the people whose job it is to watch the system are saying their measuring tools are off, the readings need to be held loosely.

Underneath all of this: Australia’s diesel demand has been steadily rising for a decade, while diesel supply is the layer that’s been most damaged by the closure. That isn’t an interpretation; it’s the long-run direction of the freight, agriculture, and mining sectors that the country runs on.

The Australian piece: what Sydney shows

Sydney makes the dynamic visible. Through January and February, the relationship between wholesale diesel (the price service stations pay) and retail diesel (the price you pay at the bowser) was stable: wholesale around 155 cents per litre, retail around 180, gap around 25 cents. That gap is the retailer’s margin on diesel, and it had stayed inside a tight band for the previous two years.

When the spike hit, the gap collapsed. Retailers couldn’t keep up — the cost of replacing their stock was rising faster than they could put prices up, and for a brief period in early April, the price of diesel at the bowser was actually below the wholesale cost of replacing it. That isn’t generosity. It’s what happens when a service station spends a few weeks selling fuel at a loss to keep customers coming through, hoping to ride out the panic. Note too that many servos make their biggest margins on food and drink; fuel just gets drivers pulling in. Some retailers told the ACCC they had moved to pricing on replacement cost rather than the cost of the fuel currently in their tanks — which is a different way of saying the same thing. The system was tearing in a particular direction.

What’s happened since is the part worth watching. Wholesale has eased sharply — it’s now around 245 cents per litre, down from a peak around 325. Retail has also eased, but more slowly — it’s now around 285. The gap is around 40 cents. That is wider than the pre-closure baseline of 25 cents. The relationship hasn’t returned to where it started — it’s settled at a wider equilibrium. Whether that’s a temporary settling or a permanent shift is something the regulator is watching, and so should you.

Around all this is the institutional response, which the bowser doesn’t show. On 22 April, the federal government announced an additional 200 megalitres of diesel secured through a partnership with BP Australia, bringing the total to 300 megalitres in the previous seven days. Cargo arrangements are being brokered through Export Finance Australia. Ampol postponed scheduled maintenance at its Lytton refinery to keep supply flowing. The Northern Territory government introduced a daily fuel-price lock with penalties on 21 April. Reciprocal arrangements have been struck with Asian partners — LPG, coal, and iron ore traded for fuel access in ways that look less like normal commercial relationships and more like coalition-building.

None of this is normal. The fact that it’s been necessary tells us something the bowser price doesn’t.

The wider picture: where Brent really is

Brent crude — the global benchmark price for oil — is sitting at $108 per barrel as of 2 May 2026.

For context: between mid-2022 and the start of this closure, Brent traded between $60 and $95. The middle of that range — about $80 — was where the system found its rest for nearly four years. Today’s $108 is above that whole band. The only point in the last five years where Brent traded higher was during the peak weeks of the Russia–Ukraine invasion in 2022.

Here’s what’s startling about that. Today’s price is what survives after the largest emergency-stocks release in IEA history has been deployed; after refineries around the world have cut their daily runs by around 6 million barrels to manage feedstock scarcity; after substantial demand destruction in petrochemicals has absorbed roughly 1.5 million barrels per day in the second quarter; and after China — uniquely — has been adding to its own stocks rather than drawing them down. All of these mechanisms are running. Brent is at $108.

The IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said as much on 1 April:

“This is only helping to reduce the pain, it will not be a cure. The cure is opening up the Strait of Hormuz. We are gaining some time, but I don’t claim that this will be a solution, our stock release.”

That is the most authoritative voice on global oil supply saying the relief is a stop-gap, not a settlement.

China is the wildcard in this picture. Chinese strategic reserves are not publicly accounted for, but the IEA’s April Oil Market Report estimates China added 40 million barrels to its crude stocks in March. The country with the most sophisticated read on the global oil position — the one with the best data and the best analysts — has been building reserves rather than running them down to soften today’s prices. That is a signal worth weighing, even if we don’t yet know how it will unfold.

There’s also a permanent change to refining capacity that’s separate from any of this. Around eighty production sites have been damaged since the start of the conflict. The IEA estimates roughly 80% of that lost capacity can be brought back online quickly. The remaining 20% may take years to restore, if it can be restored at all. That capacity loss doesn’t unwind when Brent eases.

The damaged refineries, the eventual rebuild of emergency stocks, and the structural widening of costs at home all point in the same direction. The system that emerges on the other side of this is unlikely to be the system that existed before.

What the market is pricing — and what it isn’t

The chart above shows what’s called the futures curve — the prices at which oil contracts for delivery in future months and years are actually trading right now. It’s the closest thing the market has to a public forecast. It is also the most easily misread chart in this whole picture.

What it shows: today’s $108 declining smoothly to about $92 by mid-2027, $80 by mid-2028, $74 by 2030, and $68 by 2033. The line is unbroken. There are no kinks at any of the dates where a political or military resolution might plausibly land, no premium pricing for tail risks, no inflection points where the market is signalling uncertainty about the path.

What that smoothness implies is worth sitting with. The curve isn’t an average across a range of plausible scenarios — it’s the price at which contracts are actually trading. For that price to make sense as the expected outcome, the market has to be assuming a particular world: that the Strait of Hormuz reopens and stays open; that there is no major escalation between any of the conflict’s parties; that OPEC+ holds output discipline (the major oil-exporting countries co-ordinating to prevent prices falling much below around $80 a barrel); that demand destruction proceeds at the pace consensus expects; that the energy transition proceeds at the pace consensus expects; and that no major new disruption appears.

Six conditions, all needing to hold over the timescales in question. Even if we think each one individually has a two-in-three chance, all six holding together is below one-in-ten.

The curve isn’t the expected case. It’s the optimistic floor of a credible range, drawn as a single line. It’s where prices go if everything that could go wrong, doesn’t.

The space above the curve — between the smooth line and where prices could plausibly sit if any of those six conditions slips — is where the actual risk lives. That space isn’t priced. It isn’t priced because individual contracts have to settle on a single number, and the number that clears the market is the one that assumes the world settles down. There is no contract that pays out on “structural premium continuing for five years.” There is only the front-month price and the curve.

So when you read the futures curve, read it as the floor the market thinks is plausible — not the centre of where prices might actually land.

What this means for the year

I told my friend I couldn’t give him a number, and I won’t offer you one either. But we can note the asymmetry, which is what I think we most need.

If the conditions for the futures curve hold, the floor through 2026 sits somewhere not far from where the curve is drawing it — maybe a little above, maybe a little below, but in that neighbourhood. If any of those conditions slips, the floor sits higher than the curve, possibly substantially higher, with the gap depending on which condition slips and how badly. The uncertainty isn’t symmetric: prices can rise considerably above the curve if things go wrong, but they’re held back from falling much below it by OPEC+ discipline at a roughly $80 floor.

What this means for planning: the case where prices come in well below current levels for the rest of the year requires a sequence of things to go well that have not yet gone well. The case where prices stay where they are or rise from here requires only one of the conditions above to slip. If you’re locking in contracts, hedging fuel costs, or making a multi-year decision that depends on a fuel price assumption — the conservative number isn’t on the futures curve. It’s somewhere above it.

The bowser today reflects an excise cut that expires in two months, an international price easing that depends on a fragile ceasefire, regulatory pressure that won’t last forever, and the largest emergency-stocks release in IEA history substantially deployed. The price you’re paying at the pump is the price after all of these have run. The price you’ll be planning around for the rest of the year is the price after some of them have stopped.

Plan for the floor. Not the bowser.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

Sources: ACCC weekly fuel price monitoring report (24 April 2026); ACCC Australian petroleum market report (December 2025); IEA Oil Market Report (April 2026); IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, “In Good Company” podcast (1 April 2026); Japanese METI, South Korean MOTIE national release notices; Vortexa and Kpler analyst commentary via secondary citations; TradingView Brent crude futures (BRN1!), captured 2 May 2026.

There’s a ceasefire. Oil prices dipped. The Prime Minister talked about stability. And the natural thought over the first coffee of the day is: good, so it’s nearly over.

Unfortunately, it’s not. Not even close. This isn’t a piece about whether the ceasefire holds, or whether the peace talks in Islamabad produce a deal, or whether Israel stays out of it. Let’s hope so, and let’s imagine all that holds. This piece shows why even then, the fuel doesn’t come back for months.

The problem isn’t just politics. It’s what happens between a peace agreement and fuel arriving at the local bowser at a price we can afford. That pipeline — from deal to delivery — runs through insurance boardrooms, mine-cleared shipping lanes, damaged refineries, a global queue for supply, and an Australian economy that sits at the very end of that pipe.

This piece walks you through that pipeline. Not to depress, but to equip, because if we understand why recovery is so slow, then we can make better decisions than assuming that a ceasefire will fix it.

Let’s grant every hope

Before we go any further, let’s grant the best case. Not what normally happens in the Middle East, but let’s imagine for a change that everything goes right:

Israel, despite still attacking as this article is written, makes no more attacks. Iran, despite losing senior leaders, stays coherent and negotiates in good faith. The United States, despite its recent history stops policy-by-pronouncement and holds a consistent diplomatic line. Lebanon, despite its damage and displacement, stabilises. The Gulf states get the stability they want.

A ceasefire becomes a durable peace. Iran and Oman share a toll on Hormuz passage — a “peace levy” or similar, structured so nobody is humiliated. Iran’s allies transit free. Perhaps the US is exempt to avoid provocation. Europe, Asia, and everyone else pay roughly $2 million per ship — but that amounts to only about ten to fifteen cents a barrel. A rounding error on the price of oil.

That’s the scenario. Everything we could reasonably hope for. No political argument in this piece depends on any of these conditions failing.

Now let’s look at why fuel still doesn’t come back quickly.

The three hurdles: why even the best case is slow

The recovery pipeline has three kinds of delay. They’re three sequential hurdles — each one has to clear before the next starts producing results. Australia is last in the queue at every stage.

Hurdle 1: A deal is not a ship

A peace agreement is a political event. Ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz is a commercial event. They’re connected, but they’re not the same — and the gap between them is measured in weeks to months.

The choke here is insurance, not diplomacy. Commercial shipping doesn’t resume at scale because a ceasefire is announced. It resumes when the insurance industry decides the strait is safe enough to cover. That decision runs through Lloyd’s Joint War Committee — the body that designates high-risk zones — and through the Protection and Indemnity clubs that insure ships against liability. Without P&I cover, a ship can’t sail. No port accepts it. No bank finances it. Insurance isn’t a cost you can absorb; it’s a gate you have to pass through.

And here’s the problem with even our best-case deal: Iran retains control of passage. The toll regime is coordinated — Iranian Revolutionary Guard vessels escort ships through, collect the fee, decide who passes. That’s a discretionary system. Access can be modified or revoked by political decision. Underwriters don’t price on the average case; they price what they pay out on: the worst plausible case. A regime where access depends on a political decision keeps insurance premiums elevated even after a peace deal, because the risk being priced isn’t “will there be an attack” but “could access be denied.”

There’s also the practical matter of mines. Iran laid mines in and around the strait. They have to be cleared before unrestricted passage. Mine clearance operations take weeks to months depending on the area and density. Ships don’t transit until the corridor is certified safe.

What this means for us: The ceasefire was announced. International oil prices dipped. But no additional fuel arrives at Australian terminals because of that announcement, so we’re still seeing pre-ceasefire prices and availability at the bowser. The path from announcement to ship movement runs through insurance boardrooms and mine clearance operations, not press conferences.

Hurdle 2: the pipe isn’t just blocked — parts of it are broken

Even once ships start moving, the supply chain that feeds Australia has been damaged, depleted, or redirected. Restoring it takes months.

Start with the source. Gulf refineries — in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE — have been struck. The crude and refined product that normally feeds Asian refineries isn’t flowing at pre-crisis volumes even after Hormuz reopens, because the upstream infrastructure has been bombed. Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility alone will take years to restore.

Move to the middle. The refineries that actually produce Australia’s fuel are in Singapore, South Korea, India, and Malaysia. They’ve been running on reduced feedstock for weeks. Several have imposed export restrictions — India has added diesel export duties, China has banned certain exports, South Korea has restricted naphtha. These restrictions don’t lift automatically when Hormuz reopens. Each country lifts them when its own stocks recover — and their stocks recover before Australia’s, because they’re closer to the source.

Now add geography. Even after Asian refineries have product to export, the transit time from Singapore or South Korea to Australian terminals is two to six weeks. That’s the physical floor. Even with everything else perfect, there’s a multi-week lag built into where we are on the map.

What this means for us: The pipe isn’t just blocked. Parts of it are broken. Even after the blockage clears, the broken sections have to be repaired, and the pipe has to refill before anything comes out our end.

Hurdle 3: everyone orders at once — and we’re at the back

When supply starts flowing again, every country that’s been running down its reserves tries to rebuild them at the same time. This is called a restocking surge. Once stock becomes available, all the wholesalers, distributors and retailers want stock yesterday and it happens after every major disruption. Demand temporarily exceeds even the recovering supply. Availability doesn’t increase for most but demand does, so price could actually rise.

Australia’s position in this queue is poor. We’re at the end of the supply chain. We have no bilateral supply agreements with Iran. We have no sovereign tanker fleet. We depend entirely on commercial shipping and on Asian refineries choosing to export to us rather than keep product for themselves or sell it to closer, larger buyers. China, India, Japan, South Korea, and ASEAN countries all get served before we do — they’re closer, they buy more, and some of them have government-to-government supply arrangements that we don’t.

The restocking surge also keeps prices high even after the physical supply constraint eases. Competition for early cargoes on the spot market drives premiums up. The halved fuel excise — currently saving you about 26 cents a litre — expires on 30 June. If supply hasn’t normalised by then, bowser prices jump again.

And the shortages don’t hit evenly. Six weeks into the crisis, with the government releasing emergency stocks, cutting excise, relaxing fuel standards, and dispatching 53 ships — over 600 stations still can’t supply all fuel types. That number fluctuates, but it hasn’t come down. The pattern is consistent: outages concentrate in regional towns, independent retailers, and farming areas.

There are three reasons a servo runs dry, and they’re not all the same problem:

Physical shortage — fuel just isn’t available at the terminal serving that region. This is the supply-chain problem the hurdles describe. The only fix is the pipeline delivering.

Allocation priority — fuel is available at the terminal, but contract customers and high-volume buyers get served first. Independents and small operators get what’s left. The fix is either government-directed allocation or waiting until supply exceeds contracted demand.

Price-driven non-stocking — fuel is available at wholesale, but the regional servo doesn’t buy it because the restock cost exceeds what the local market will bear. The pump goes dry not because there’s no fuel, but because the economics of restocking don’t work at that price, at that location. We have already had this in some regional servos since March as wholesale prices climbed.

That third one is invisible in the reporting — it looks identical at the pump. But the mechanism is different. A metro servo turning over 50,000 litres a week can absorb a thinner margin or pass through the cost because volume covers the overheads. A regional servo doing 5,000 litres a week can’t — the margin disappears or enters the red, and the rational decision for some operators is: don’t restock that grade. Wait.

Our tourism demand collapse makes this worse. Regional servos that normally cross-subsidise low local throughput with tourist-season traffic are losing both revenue streams at once. Locals buy less because of price. Tourists aren’t coming because of availability anxiety — families are cancelling Kimberley and Pilbara trips, caravanning plans are being abandoned. The May-to-September dry season is the cash flow that carries many remote servos through the year. If they can’t stock reliably through April and May, they lose the early-season tourists. If they close temporarily, they may not reopen — because the seasonal revenue that would have kept them viable never arrives.

What this means for us: Even after the pipe is unblocked, repaired, and refilling — we’re in a queue, and the queue is long. Prices stay high. Availability stays patchy, especially outside the cities. And the patchiness isn’t random — it follows the economics of restocking. The places that need fuel most — regional, remote, low-throughput — are the last to get it back reliably. Some may not get it back at all.

What to watch, and the question that matters

We’ve been told what happened. We’ve been told what the government is doing. What we haven’t been told is what to watch for ourselves — what information exists, what it tells us, and where the gap is.

The one lead indicator we have

The price of Brent crude isn’t on the radar for most motorists. Industries in Europe care. A family towing a caravan doesn’t.

The spot price on a given day doesn’t matter, but the direction it’s moving over the last fortnight tells us what may be happening in Australia a week or two out.

Here’s what it tells us:

Brent trending down (for example, $103 towards $90) — if we’re still seeing ships coming in and there’s no MSO draw-down, then bowser prices will follow in one to two weeks. The recovery pipeline is probably working. Maintain current plans. Don’t panic-buy.

Brent flat at elevated levels (holding above $100) — bowser prices stay high. The pipeline is stalled somewhere. Conserve. Don’t assume improvement is coming.

Brent rising (back above $110) — bowser prices will rise further. Something in the recovery has failed or reversed. Conserve hard. Prepare for restrictions.

The decision Brent helps us make is: how much financial headroom do I need to preserve over the coming weeks? It gives us one to two weeks’ notice that most people don’t have, because most people react at the bowser.

What Brent doesn’t tell us is how much. The normal rule of thumb is that a $10 change in Brent per barrel produces roughly 7–10 cents per litre at the bowser, lagged one to two weeks. But during a supply crisis, the refining and shipping costs in the middle of the price stack expand dramatically and don’t shrink as fast as crude falls. A $10 drop in Brent might produce only 4–5 cents of bowser relief. Prices went up fast — retailers shifted to replacement-cost pricing almost overnight. They’ll come down slowly. That’s not intuitive and doesn’t feel fair, but it’s rockets and feathers.

What Brent especially doesn’t tell us if you’re in a regional area: even a sustained Brent decline doesn’t tell you when your local servo will restock. The price at which restocking makes commercial sense for a metro servo is different from the price that works for a servo with a fifth of the throughput. Brent falling from $103 to $85 might reopen city pumps while regional pumps stay dry — because the wholesale price hasn’t fallen far enough to make restocking viable at that location. If you’re regional, you’re further from the signal than the metro reader — not just geographically but economically.

What you can confirm

Once Brent starts moving, you can watch for confirmation that the trend is reaching you:

• Bowser price. Is the downward trend arriving at your pump?

• Station outages in your area. Are they improving or getting worse? FuelCheck (NSW), FuelWatch (WA), or MotorMouth give you local visibility.

• The MSO days-of-cover number. This is the government’s own weekly report on how many days of fuel reserves Australia holds. It’s published by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. It’s the number that tells you whether the buffer is holding.

The gap you should know about

Unfortunately, there is no mid-range indicator that tells you whether fuel is actually on its way to Australia specifically. Hormuz transit data doesn’t flag Australian-bound supply. Asian refinery export figures are lagged and paywalled. Ship arrival schedules at Australian terminals aren’t publicly reported in useful form.

The government can see the middle of the pipeline. It has the Liquid Fuels Gateway data — it knows what’s contracted, what’s on the water, what’s arriving when. But it doesn’t publish this.

This gap matters. The panic-buying we saw, which the government’s own modelling warned about is in part the public reacting reasonably to not having this information. If you knew — “supply is arriving in three weeks” — you’d behave differently. Without that signal, you react at the bowser. And by then it’s too late to be ahead of the problem.

Acknowledging this gap seeks to respect the reader’s intelligence in a way that government reassurance often doesn’t. The reader who knows they can’t see the middle of the pipeline makes different decisions from the reader who takes the reassurance at face value.

The structural question: does the buffer outlast the pipeline?

Everything in this piece connects to a single question. The three hurdles are the pipeline — the stages between a ceasefire and fuel arriving at Australian terminals. The MSO buffer is what has to outlast that pipeline. If the buffer holds until the pipeline delivers, we avoid rationing. If it doesn’t, the government’s own thresholds come into view.

Here’s the government’s own arithmetic, from PM&C modelling reported by the ABC on 31 March. Based on a mid-March assessment incorporating preliminary DCCEEW analysis:

If imports run 20% below normal from late April or early May, Australia’s diesel stockpile is depleted by around the end of September — roughly six months. The best-case recovery timeline from the research underpinning this series puts reliable diesel supply at three to six months out. That’s a tight fit. The buffer and the pipeline end at roughly the same time. No margin for the pipeline running late.

If imports run 40% below normal, the stockpile is depleted by early June. The pipeline isn’t close to delivering by June, even under the best case.

The government has a four-stage plan. We’re in Stage 2 — “Keeping Australia Moving,” the stage where the message is “only buy the fuel you need.” Stage 3 — voluntary practical measures to limit fuel use — triggers at 15 days of stock. Stage 4 — rationing — triggers at 10 days.

The government’s preferred approach is quiet drawdown from emergency stocks — steady releases, avoiding the political and economic costs of formal rationing. Rationing is the option nobody wants: the government that rations gets punished at the polls, and formal restrictions risk tipping the economy into recession.

But drawdown is a bet with two variables: how fast you draw, and how soon supply recovers. The government is drawing buffer while talking confidence, hoping the pipeline delivers before the thresholds come into view.

The panic-buying trap compounds this. The government can’t publicly prepare for Stage 3 without accelerating the drawdown it’s trying to slow. The more transparently it communicates about thresholds, the more likely consumers try to outguess them. So it has to manage the buffer quietly while talking about confidence.

The reader who understands this poker-face is better equipped than the reader who takes the reassurance at face value. You can watch the weekly MSO number. You can track the Brent trend. And you can hold the structural question: is the buffer going to outlast the pipeline?

If it does, we come through this with high prices and patchy availability but without rationing, and that of course is the hope. If it doesn’t, the 15-day and 10-day thresholds are where the conversation changes.

One more thing

Even under the best case — even if the pipeline delivers, the buffer holds, and supply returns to something approaching normal — there’s a question this piece has raised but not answered.

Under the deal we’ve stipulated, Iran controls passage through Hormuz. It charges a toll. Its allies pass free. Countries like Australia — no bilateral arrangement, no special relationship — pay our part of the toll at the bowser and face insurance premiums that reflect the discretionary access. That means Australian fuel may cost more than Chinese or Indian fuel for the same barrel of oil, drawn from the same strait, under the same deal.

“Back to normal” may not mean what it used to mean. Not for motorists; not for industry. This is a structural question — not about this crisis but about what comes after it — and it’s one this series will return to.

What this piece is for

This isn’t a forecast. There are no price targets and no specific dates — only bounded ranges drawn from the structural logic of how supply chains recover. It isn’t a political analysis — the politics are stipulated, not argued. And it isn’t telling you what the government should do.

It’s a frame. The situation will change week to week. The causal structure — the hurdles, the signal hierarchy, the buffer question — won’t. Future pieces in this series will cover where we are in the pipeline this piece describes. You can come back to this when you need to revisit why it’s taking so long, or what to watch, or what question to hold.

The disruption arrived fast. The recovery, sadly, won’t. Now you know why.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

On Wednesday night the Prime Minister addressed the nation. It was only the fourth such address since the pandemic, and the first triggered by a supply crisis rather than a health one. Australians were watching. What they heard was three minutes of reassurance, a request to conserve fuel, and a warning that the months ahead may not be easy.

What they didn’t hear — because a three-minute televised address can’t deliver it — was the strategy that sits underneath those words.

This is a short addendum to ITP003: The Ladder We’re Standing On. That piece explained the National Fuel Security Plan’s four-level escalation framework. This one explains what the government appears to be doing within that framework — and what to watch as the picture develops through April and into May.

The strategy nobody spelled out

Read the PM’s address alongside Monday’s press conference, the bilateral announcements, and the Export Finance Australia legislation, and a layered strategy comes into focus:

First: keep Asian refineries supplying Australia. Australia’s refined fuel comes overwhelmingly from Asian refineries — South Korea, Singapore, Japan, India, Malaysia and others. Those same countries buy Australian coal, LNG and iron ore. The trade relationships are mutual, and the government is using them. Energy Minister Bowen met Singapore’s Energy Minister in Canberra this week. Bloomberg reported that Resources Minister King and Foreign Minister Wong are engaging with South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan. The Australia–Singapore joint statement of 23 March committed both countries to maintaining flows of petroleum and LNG between them — the strongest bilateral signal so far.

This isn’t just diplomacy. It’s the primary supply mechanism. If these relationships hold, fuel keeps arriving.

Second: supplement with spot cargoes from further afield. The EFA underwriting — now legislated — lets the government absorb the financial risk of buying fuel on international spot markets. That means Australian importers can bid for cargoes from the US or elsewhere that would otherwise be too expensive or too uncertain to pursue. Six April ships cancelled; nine replacements secured. That arithmetic is the underwriting at work.

Third: manage demand, informally but pointedly. The PM’s address asked Australians to conserve fuel. But listen to who he named as the people conservation protects: farmers, miners, tradies, shift workers, nurses. That’s not just rhetoric. It’s building a social order of fuel priority without legislating one. Combined with free public transport in Victoria and Tasmania, the message is clear: if you can catch the bus, do — so that people who can’t drive less don’t have to.

Fourth: use the MSO buffer only if replenishment falters. The government has already drawn down reserves — roughly six days of petrol and five of diesel since early March. But the MSO isn’t being drained; it’s being used to smooth distribution while bilateral supply and spot purchases do the heavier lifting. Simple arithmetic: if imports were to run 20% below normal consumption from May onward, 30 days of diesel reserves would stretch to roughly 150 days — out to around September or October. That’s the strategic depth behind the PM’s “months” warning. The buffer exists to buy time for diplomacy and supply chain adaptation, not to replace imports.

Fifth, and only if the rest fails: formal rationing. The ABC reported this week that PM&C modelling from mid-March assumed voluntary measures would begin at 15 days of diesel cover, with formal rationing at 10 days. The Prime Minister dismissed this as “speculation.” But the modelling gives the public something the National Fuel Security Plan deliberately withheld: a threshold. And the structure of the strategy — bilateral supply first, spot purchases second, demand management third, reserves fourth — is designed to ensure that threshold is never reached.

The strait as tollbooth

Our Hormuz Explainer described the Strait of Hormuz as a tap being turned off. A month on, the picture is more nuanced. The strait isn’t closed — it’s controlled.

Iran has set up what amounts to a vetting system for transit. Nations it calls “friendly” — China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iraq — have passage. Malaysia and Thailand secured access through bilateral talks. South Korea has been classified as “non-hostile” but has no confirmed arrangement; its last tanker passed through on 20 March. Some Egyptian-flagged ships have also been allowed through. Daily non-Iranian transits have crept up from single digits in mid-March to around eight by late March — nearly double, but still a fraction of normal traffic.

Iran’s parliament has moved to make this permanent, approving a toll plan that includes fees for transit and a ban on US and Israeli vessels. At least two vessels have paid fees in yuan through a Chinese intermediary.

What this looks like in practice: seven Malaysian-owned tankers were granted clearance by Tehran. But as of late March, cargo vessels had begun to move while tankers were still waiting for a safe window. Diplomatic approval and physical transit aren’t the same thing — and the gap between them is the gap between what Tehran announces and what its forces in the strait can safely coordinate while military strikes continue around them.

For Australia, the implication is structural. We’re not on any friendly list. We declined to join the US-led naval coalition, but that doesn’t buy us diplomatic access either. Every drop of Gulf-origin fuel that reaches Australian terminals comes through someone else’s relationship with Iran — refined in a South Korean or Singaporean or Malaysian facility, from crude that transited Hormuz under another nation’s flag. Our supply chain depends not just on those refineries running, but on those countries maintaining their own access to the strait. That’s a dependency on a dependency — and it’s as good as it gets for a non-aligned Western economy.

What to watch through April

ITP003 gave five indicators. This addendum narrows to three — focused on the strategic picture rather than the weekly data.

The MSO trajectory — and the tone around it. The same drawdown number means different things depending on context. If the government draws down reserves to smooth distribution while bilateral supply is arriving, that’s the strategy working as designed. If it draws down because replenishment is falling short, that’s the strategy under strain. You won’t see the difference in the numbers alone. Watch the rhetoric: a government confident about supply talks about what it’s securing. A government that’s worried talks about what it’s asking you to do.

Regional diesel over Easter — and who gets served. Easter concentrates holiday travel into exactly the regional areas where supply is thinnest and agricultural demand is highest. The PM said “enjoy your Easter” and “don’t take more fuel than you need” in the same breath. For regional servos, that’s a contradictory signal. If you see diesel being treated differently depending on whether the vehicle is towing a caravan or a livestock trailer, that’s Level 3 arriving in practice before it’s announced in Canberra. It’s not rationing. It’s community-level allocation under pressure. And there’s nothing preventing a local distributor from making those calls.

Bilateral announcements — concluded or aspirational. The Singapore joint statement is real architecture. The engagement with South Korea, Japan and Malaysia is diplomatic activity. The distinction matters. Watch for whether the outreach produces formal reciprocal commitments — or stays in the language of “engagement” and “discussion.” The former means the supply strategy has structural support. The latter means it’s running on goodwill.

Where this leaves us

The PM’s address did something important: it put “months” into the national conversation. Until Wednesday night, the government’s language had been calibrated to avoid giving the disruption a duration. Now it has one — and that word sets the frame for everything that follows.

The strategy behind that word is sound. It uses Australia’s genuine strengths — resource trade relationships, fiscal capacity, strategic reserves — in the right sequence. The bilateral supply mechanism is real and producing results. The demand management is happening, even if the government hasn’t called it that.

But the strategy depends on things Australia doesn’t control: other countries’ willingness to keep exporting fuel rather than hoarding it, Iran’s willingness to keep the tollbooth open for nations Australia depends on, and a conflict trajectory that nobody — including the combatants — can predict.

April’s fuel is secured. May’s is being worked on. The question this series will keep watching is whether the strategy can stay ahead of the drawdown — and whether Australians can sustain the discipline of buying only what they need, for months rather than weeks.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. This addendum responds to the Prime Minister’s address to the nation on 1 April 2026.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

On Monday, 30-Mar-26, the Australian Government released a National Fuel Security Plan. It’s the first time since the Hormuz crisis began — one month ago today — that Australians have been offered a structured picture of what the government will do if things get worse, and in what order.

The plan is a four-level escalation framework. We’re at Level 2. If we understand what that means, and what the levels above it look like, we can read the weeks ahead more clearly than most of the commentary allows.

This piece explains the plan, then sets it against what the fuel supply data actually shows heading into April and May.

The plan: four levels

The National Fuel Security Plan sets out four levels.

Level 1: Plan and Prepare. Fuel supply operates normally. Governments monitor. This is peacetime.

Level 2: Keeping Australia Moving. This is where we are now. Supply continues, but localised disruptions are occurring. The government is taking precautionary steps — engaging trading partners, underwriting additional fuel purchases through Export Finance Australia, managing reserves, and adjusting fuel standards to free up extra supply. States and territories are monitoring fuel station supply and considering measures like longer trailer hours for freight.

At Level 2, the key instruction is voluntary: “Only buy the fuel you need. Make voluntary choices to use less.”

Level 3: Take Targeted Action. Ongoing disruptions mean governments step in to direct fuel where it’s needed most. The language shifts from voluntary to guided: “clear guidance will be provided on how you can help.” National Cabinet would develop nationally consistent measures to reduce fuel demand.

Level 4: Protecting Critical Services. Government action to ensure essential users — hospitals, utilities, emergency services — get fuel first. A nationally consistent framework for prioritising supply, with clear conditions for when measures can be eased.

Read carefully, Levels 3 and 4 are rationing by degrees — first guided demand reduction, then managed allocation. The plan doesn’t use the word. It doesn’t need to. The structure says it clearly enough: if voluntary measures at Level 2 aren’t sufficient, the government will progressively take control of who gets fuel and in what order.

What the plan doesn’t say is equally significant. There are no published thresholds for moving between levels. The indicators are described in general terms — stock levels, supply outlook, distribution patterns, community need. The plan notes that Levels 3 and 4 are “under consideration and may change, depending on circumstances.”

This is deliberate. Publishing the exact stock level that triggers Level 3 would invite the very panic buying that Level 2 is trying to prevent. But it also means we’ll learn about stage transitions when they’re announced, not before. If you’re reading ITP to understand what’s coming before it arrives, the thing to watch is the gap between the indicators the plan names and the data DCCEEW publishes weekly.

What the government has done this week

The plan is a coordination framework. The concrete measures sit underneath it. Between Saturday 28-Mar and Monday 30-Mar, the government announced or progressed several:

Fuel excise halved for three months. The 52.6 cents per litre excise drops to 26.3 cents, effective Wednesday. That’s roughly $19 off a 65-litre tank. The heavy vehicle road user charge drops to zero for three months. Treasury estimates the combined $2.55 billion package will reduce headline inflation by about half a percentage point through the June quarter.

This is direct cost relief. But it also weakens the price signal that was starting to slow demand. Higher prices at the pump are uncomfortable, but they do one useful thing: they discourage unnecessary driving. Halving the excise takes some of that natural brake off. The government is simultaneously asking Australians to use less fuel while making fuel cheaper. Both positions are defensible; they pull in opposite directions.

Export Finance Australia underwriting. Legislation amending the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Act was introduced to parliament on Monday. Through Export Finance Australia — the government’s export credit agency — this gives the Commonwealth the ability to underwrite private-sector fuel purchases — guaranteeing the financial risk when Australian importers bid for fuel on spot markets that would otherwise be too expensive or too uncertain to pursue.

This matters. Australia is now competing directly in distant spot markets — Asia, the US — for fuel that wouldn’t normally make commercial sense to buy. The government absorbs the risk of a shipload arriving late, at a higher price, or into a market that’s moved against the purchase. The effect is to widen the pool of fuel that Australian companies can bid for, because the downside is covered by the Commonwealth.

The plan also explicitly covers urea, fertiliser, and plastic resins — not just fuel. That’s a quiet signal about how far downstream the government expects the disruption to reach.

Refinery support adjusted. The Fuel Security Services Payment — the subsidy that keeps Australia’s two remaining refineries running — has had its trigger mechanism adjusted to better reflect current market conditions. In practical terms, Ampol (Lytton, Brisbane) and Viva Energy (Geelong) can access support payments more easily. Ampol has responded by deferring planned maintenance to keep production at full capacity. That’s additional domestic supply — modest against a backdrop of 90% import dependence, but every barrel refined here is a barrel that doesn’t need to arrive by ship through contested waters.

Fuel quality standards relaxed. Refineries can now produce petrol with 50 parts per million sulphur content — five times the usual 10 ppm standard. This adds roughly 100 million litres per month for two months. The trade-off is real: higher sulphur reduces fuel efficiency by 2–3% and may accelerate catalytic converter wear in newer vehicles. It’s a calculated compromise between supply security and environmental standards.

Higher Advance to the Finance Minister. The Finance Minister already has up to $1B advance discretionary expenditure for when parliament isn’t sitting. This has been increased to $3B.

Free public transport in Victoria and Tasmania. Several states are also considering regulatory changes to improve freight efficiency — longer trailer configurations, extended trucking hours.

The April shipping picture

The Prime Minister said Monday that all fuel ships scheduled for March arrived. Six ships scheduled for April were cancelled — but nine replacement ships have been secured, meaning more fuel is expected in April than was originally planned.

That’s better than the trajectory ITP002 described heading into Easter. The bilateral engagement and emerging EFA underwriting appear to be producing results. But it needs context.

The fuel arriving in April was largely purchased and loaded weeks ago, before the full severity of the supply squeeze was felt in Asian markets. The replacement cargoes secured through EFA underwriting will have been sourced from whatever was available on spot markets — likely at elevated prices, from further afield, and competing against buyers from every other import-dependent economy in the region as supplies further constrict.

The question isn’t whether April has fuel. It’s whether April has enough fuel to hold Level 2 through to May without drawing reserves further down.

Where the buffers stand

The most recent MSO stock snapshot — as at 24 March — shows:

Petrol: 39 days of cover, 97% above the reduced MSO floor. Stocks held: 1,687 megalitres against a reduced floor of 855 ML. This is comfortable. Petrol was already the strongest category and has actually improved since early March (from 37 days).

Jet fuel: 30 days, 25% above the floor. Stocks: 828 ML against a requirement of 663 ML. No MSO reduction has been applied to jet fuel — the government hasn’t released jet fuel reserves. That makes sense: jet fuel was already the thinnest category, and aviation is absorbing supply cuts directly through schedule reductions.

Diesel: 30 days, 24% above the reduced floor. Stocks: 2,726 ML. Here’s the detail that matters: the original MSO floor was 2,742 ML. Diesel stocks are below the pre-crisis minimum. The only reason diesel is compliant is because the government reduced the MSO by 20% — dropping the floor to 2,197 ML. That 24% margin above the reduced floor represents roughly 529 ML — about six days of cover at normal consumption rates.

Diesel is the fuel that runs the economy — freight, agriculture, mining, construction, emergency power — and it’s operating with a six-day margin above a floor that was itself lowered to prevent a breach. That’s not a crisis. But it’s a narrow lane.

The fact that diesel has held steady at 30 days since early March is decent news — arrivals are roughly keeping pace with consumption. But the margin is thin enough that a demand spike (farm stocking, resumed hoarding), a cancelled cargo, or a delayed arrival could erode it quickly.

One important caveat on these numbers. The “days” figures use historical consumption rates — what stocks would last at normal demand. Demand has not been normal since late February. Panic buying in the first two weeks spiked demand by up to 50% in some areas. That wave has subsided, but agricultural users are now stocking up for autumn planting — the Prime Minister described this as sensible and necessary. At elevated consumption rates, 30 days of diesel cover lasts fewer than 30 days. The government almost certainly has better demand data than what’s publicly available, but the published figures use the normal-rate denominator.

Two roads from here

Everything about the next six weeks turns on the Strait of Hormuz.

If Hormuz reopens in April

President Trump extended his deadline for Iran to reopen the strait to April 6. Iran has not complied with previous deadlines. The IRGC declared the strait closed on March 27. Negotiations — through Pakistani intermediaries — have not produced a ceasefire. Israel killed the IRGC naval commander reportedly responsible for the closure. Iran has allowed a handful of tankers through as a negotiating gesture, and has offered limited passage to “friendly nations” including India and China. France convened 35 countries to discuss military escort options — but explicitly for after hostilities decrease, not to force the strait open.

The honest assessment: reopening in April is possible but unlikely. Bloomberg’s analysis is blunt — reopening without a ceasefire looks improbable. The CNBC analysis from March 28 puts it more specifically: oil executives and analysts warn that if Hormuz isn’t reopened by mid-April, the supply disruption gets significantly worse as the buffers that cushioned March — strategic reserve releases, pre-crisis fuel on the water — run down.

Even in the best case — Hormuz reopens in early April — the relief doesn’t arrive quickly. Shipping from the Gulf to Asian refineries takes 10–15 days. Refining takes days to weeks depending on the product. Shipping refined product from Asia to Australia takes another 7–14 days. Under the most optimistic scenario, Australia wouldn’t feel normalised supply until late May at earliest. And that assumes Gulf export infrastructure — some of which has been damaged by Iranian strikes, including Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility — is operational.

If Hormuz stays closed through April

This is the more likely path. JP Morgan’s commodity team estimates roughly 16 million barrels per day of oil and fuel are currently offline globally. Policy responses — strategic reserve releases, pipeline workarounds, diplomacy — can recover about 6 million of those. The remaining 10 million barrels per day will be balanced by what amounts to forced reduction: prices rising high enough, or supplies tightening enough, that people and industries simply use less.

JP Morgan estimates oil prices would need to reach roughly $150 per barrel to force enough demand reduction to rebalance the market. Brent crude is currently trading in the $100–$114 range. The gap between where prices are and where they’d need to be tells you the adjustment is happening through allocation and shortage rather than price alone.

For Australia, a continued closure through April means:

The buffer shrinks. Diesel at 30 days with a six-day margin above the reduced floor is manageable for weeks, not months. Every week without sufficient new arrivals erodes the buffer. The EFA underwriting buys time — it widens the pool of available cargoes — but it doesn’t close the structural gap if global supply is 10 million barrels per day short.

Farm demand adds seasonal pressure. Winter crop planting in southeastern Australia runs from late April through June. This is diesel-intensive work — tractors, headers, transport. The Prime Minister acknowledged that agricultural stocking is sensible and necessary. But every litre of diesel that goes into a farm tank is a litre that doesn’t go through a bowser. The agricultural demand spike arrives precisely when the supply squeeze deepens.

Level 3 comes into view. If diesel reserves approach the reduced MSO floor — roughly 2,200 ML, or about 24 days of cover at normal rates — the government will face a choice about whether voluntary measures are enough. The plan doesn’t publish the trigger, but the shape of the decision is visible: at some point, “buy only what you need” becomes “here are practical measures to reduce demand,” which becomes “critical users get priority.”

The timing depends on variables nobody controls: how many cargoes Australian companies can secure on spot markets, whether Iran allows any transit to non-hostile nations, whether the ceasefire negotiations that have so far produced nothing produce something, and whether Australian consumers and businesses moderate their own demand enough to stretch the buffers.

What to watch

Between now and the next update, the indicators that matter most:

The weekly MSO snapshot. DCCEEW publishes this on Fridays. Watch diesel specifically — the gap between stocks held and the reduced MSO floor tells you how much room remains. If petrol stays above 35 days and diesel stays above 28 days, Level 2 holds. Below that, the conversation changes.

The ACCC weekly fuel price update. Now covering 190 regional locations as well as the eight capitals. Watch for the effect of the excise cut — if retail prices don’t fall by roughly 26 cents per litre within a week of Wednesday’s implementation, that’s a sign of margin-taking at the retail or wholesale level. The ACCC has flagged this explicitly and has new enforcement tools.

The April 6 deadline. Trump’s extended deadline for Iran to reopen Hormuz. The chance of compliance is low, but the deadline itself matters: what Trump does after it passes — whether he escalates, extends again, or pivots — shapes the rest of April.

Farm diesel signals. NFF and state farmer federation reporting on planting-season fuel access. If regional diesel allocations start tightening ahead of planting, that’s the demand-side factor that could accelerate the move toward Level 3.

Parliamentary passage of EFA legislation. The Export Finance Australia underwriting depends on amendments to the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Act. If passage is delayed, the government’s primary tool for securing additional cargoes loses its legislative foundation.

Where this leaves us

The government has done something useful this week. The National Fuel Security Plan gives Australians a framework for understanding what comes next — not a guarantee, but a structure. The concrete measures — excise relief, EFA underwriting, refinery support, fuel standard relaxation — are real interventions that buy real time.

But time is what they buy. Not resolution.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. The structural gap between what the world needs and what it can get remains 10 million barrels per day. Australia’s diesel buffer is operating on a thin margin above a floor that was itself lowered to prevent a breach. The government’s plan is staged, coordinated, and deliberately flexible — which also means the triggers for escalation are opaque and the public’s ability to anticipate transitions is limited.

April will likely be manageable. The ships are coming. The excise cut will ease the immediate pain at the bowser. The EFA underwriting will bring cargoes that wouldn’t otherwise have been bid for.

May is less certain. If Hormuz hasn’t reopened by mid-April, the buffers that cushioned the first month of this crisis — strategic reserves, pre-crisis fuel on the water, goodwill from trading partners — begin to thin. Winter planting adds demand. The global competition for non-Gulf fuel intensifies.

The government has avoided two words in its public communications: rationing and recession. The plan’s structure makes clear why: Level 2 is designed to make both unnecessary. Whether it succeeds depends on how long the strait stays closed, how much fuel Australian companies can secure on the spot market, and whether 25 million Australians can maintain the discipline of buying only what they need.

That last part isn’t up to the government. It’s up to us.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. This piece responds to the National Cabinet’s adoption of the National Fuel Security Plan on 30 March 2026 and the associated policy announcements.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

In the Pipeline has spent the past week looking at what’s upstream of the bowser — not the pipeline inside Australia, which our first issue covered, but the countries that actually supply the fuel we import. Nine of them, accounting for virtually all of Australia’s refined liquid fuel.

As of 25 March, only one of those nine countries is exporting without constraint. That’s Brunei, which produces and refines its own crude oil. It accounts for about nine per cent of our imports.

The other ninety-one per cent is either formally restricted by government, physically constrained by supply, or tightening under domestic-first policies that show no sign of easing. That is the picture right now — before the supply impact of these constrictions has fully arrived at Australian terminals.

Easter is ten days away.

Diesel, petrol, aviation fuel — three different problems

Three fuel types tell three different stories, and all of them are bad. The charts beneath are produced from import data supplied by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water. They show who Australia imported key liquid fuels from last year, in what volume (measured in megalitres, ML), and to that we have added their ‘traffic light’ status at time of writing, based on international news updates. Beside each map, in the pie-chart you can see how much of each imported fuel volume is expected to be at risk.

Diesel — the fuel that moves freight, powers agriculture, and keeps regional Australia running — has the broadest exposure. About 86 per cent of Australia’s diesel imports come from countries whose supply is constricting. Another five per cent is formally suspended. Nine per cent — Brunei — is exporting normally. South Korea, our single largest diesel supplier at 29 per cent of imports, has capped exports and is actively discussing a full ban. Malaysia’s third-largest refiner has shut a major refinery crude unit for lack of feedstock.

Petrol is worse by the raw numbers. Roughly 89 per cent of imports come from constricting suppliers. Singapore — our largest petrol supplier, responsible for over half of what we import — has confirmed its major refinery is running at about 60 per cent capacity because it can’t get enough crude. That’s not a policy choice. That’s a physical constraint. The remaining eleven per cent still exporting is spread thin.

Aviation fuel has the worst suspended ratio of the three. About a third of supply by volume is formally suspended, 56 per cent is constricting, and eleven per cent is still exporting. For an island continent that depends on air freight for remote community access and medical logistics, that matters.

Why the taps are closing — and how long each one stays shut

Three different mechanisms are tightening supply, and understanding them tells you how long each constriction is likely to last.

Some refineries can’t get enough crude oil to run. Singapore and Malaysia — two of our top three suppliers — are in this category. Singapore’s Jurong Island refinery is at 60 per cent capacity. Malaysia’s Prefchem facility, a Saudi Aramco joint venture, has shut its crude processing unit entirely — more than 70 per cent of its feedstock came through the Strait of Hormuz. These refineries don’t resume normal output until they find alternative crude sources or the strait reopens. That takes weeks to months, not days.

Some governments have restricted exports. China banned refined fuel exports in early March and shows no sign of lifting. South Korea capped exports on 13 March, and every signal since — naphtha restrictions being prepared, a full export ban under active discussion with refiners, the president calling for a preemptive emergency response system — points toward tightening, not easing. The UAE’s exports are physically blocked by the Hormuz closure itself.

Some countries are quietly keeping fuel for themselves. India has invoked the Essential Commodities Act, mandated comprehensive export reporting, and publicly declared that domestic consumption is the priority — but hasn’t formally banned refined fuel exports. Japan has released strategic reserves and reintroduced fuel subsidies; its major refiners are reportedly reluctant to issue export tenders. Taiwan hasn’t restricted exports, but its refineries face the same crude feedstock stress as Singapore’s, and its government is absorbing billions in domestic fuel price costs. None of these countries has closed the door. All of them are leaning on it.

What this means in practice: the constrictions aren’t going to ease simultaneously. Physical constraints take longest. Policy restrictions depend on government decisions that are trending the wrong way. Countries keeping fuel at home are the most likely to reverse — but also the most likely to tip into formal restriction if the situation worsens.

Why Easter is the problem

The fuel arriving at Australian terminals right now was loaded onto tankers before the worst of these constrictions took hold. Transit times from Asia are typically seven to fourteen days. That means the March constrictions — the Singapore throughput reductions, the Malaysian refinery shutdown, South Korea’s tightening export posture — haven’t fully shown up in Australian supply yet.

They will begin to arrive in mid-to-late April. That’s after Easter.

Six tankers bound for Australia have already been cancelled, originating from Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea. They were due between mid-April and mid-May. Out of roughly 81 tanker deliveries per month under normal conditions, that’s a visible reduction — and it reflects decisions made in the past fortnight, not the full constriction picture.

Now layer Easter on top. The long weekend concentrates petrol demand in regional areas — families travelling, caravans moving, service stations in small towns draining faster than their usual resupply cycle can handle. Regional stations that empty over Easter need resupply in the days immediately after. That resupply window — the week after Easter — coincides with the period when constricted supply starts arriving at Australian import terminals.

Less fuel. Later. To stations that just drained.

What’s being done

The government is aware of this. The National Fuel Supply Taskforce is active. Australia has relaxed fuel quality standards to allow domestic use of fuels that we normally export. Australia is purchasing refined fuel from the US Gulf Coast while it’s cost-effective, though transit times are 30-plus days compared to seven to fourteen from Asia, and it’s not clear the US will continue to supply into the medium term. Two domestic refineries — Ampol at Lytton and Viva at Geelong — are running at full capacity, but they supply less than a fifth of national demand. The IEA coordinated reserve release is about four weeks in. These are buffers, not solutions, and they are already being drawn down.

What about rationing?

Issue 1 explained that there’s a national policy on rationing, which has never been invoked. The states and territories each have their own legislation, and can coordinate through NOSEC. The media are rumbling about rationing but it would be a politically brave government who brought rationing in just before or during Easter. On the other hand, it will get tighter into April as actual supply shakes out, so the post-Easter fuel hangover is a real possibility. States and territories each have different consumption patterns and different supply exposure; if they ration, then they may do so at different times.

What you can do

This isn’t a piece designed to alarm anyone. It’s designed to give you a week’s notice.

If you’re planning an Easter road trip, particularly into regional areas, the practical considerations have shifted. Not dramatically, not catastrophically — but enough to be worth factoring in. In the Pipeline does a lot of regional travel. Here’s what we think is sensible, but everyone should make their own decisions.

Keep your tank above half. This is always sensible for regional Australian driving. Right now it carries more weight than usual. If you’re heading bush, top up before you leave rather than counting on finding fuel along the way.

Check fuel availability before committing to remote routes. Station-level outages are already occurring — as of 23 March, over a hundred NSW service stations were out of diesel, and similar numbers were affected in Queensland and Victoria. Easter traffic will concentrate demand in the same places that are already stretched. Regional stations are already imposing local rationing, which favours local buyers travelling shorter distances. Having fuel available doesn’t mean they’ll sell you all you want.

Plan for aviation disruptions. Domestic flying to regional areas may be more impacted sooner, and flights may be cancelled or consolidated just because of supply.

Shorten where you can. If you have a choice between a longer regional loop and a shorter trip through better-serviced areas, the shorter trip has a better fuel margin right now.

Don’t panic-buy. One in four Australians is reportedly buying more fuel than usual. Panic buying is the mechanism that converts a tight supply into localised shortages. If everyone tops up when they’d normally top up, the system holds better than if everyone tries to fill every jerry can in the shed.

Watch diesel if you’re in agriculture. Farmers are already deferring pre-seeding activities to conserve fuel for seeding proper. If you’re in a diesel-dependent operation, the supply picture for your fuel type is the tightest of the three. Plan accordingly.

What we don’t know

Good analysis names its limits.

South Korea’s export ban decision is the single highest-impact pending event for Australian fuel supply. South Korea is our largest diesel supplier. The government is modelling a full ban with refiners. No timeline has been announced. If it proceeds, the diesel picture gets materially worse.

Singapore’s refinery throughput — whether the 60 per cent figure stabilises, improves through alternative crude sourcing, or deteriorates — determines how much petrol reaches Australia over the coming weeks.

April consumption patterns are genuinely uncertain. Normally, April sees a modest dip in petrol consumption after the March peak. Whether that pattern holds this year — or is overwhelmed by precautionary buying — will shape how far reserves stretch.

US supply continuity. The American fuel purchases are welcome but may not last. Longer transit times, competing global demand, and domestic US politics all introduce uncertainty.

The Hormuz diplomatic window. The Trump administration shelved a 48-hour ultimatum against Iran on 24 March, citing productive talks. Iran denies direct negotiations. The postponement expires around 29 March. A diplomatic resolution would change the entire supply picture, though that would still take weeks to shake through. A further escalation — Iran has threatened to mine the entire Persian Gulf — would make it dramatically worse.

In the Pipeline will update this analysis as the picture shifts. If significant developments occur before the next scheduled piece, we’ll publish earlier.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. Supplier assessment based on research conducted 24 March 2026 across government sources, trade media, and energy industry reporting for all nine countries supplying significant volumes of refined fuel to Australia. (Updated 26-Mar-26 to correct an error in the text that misreported Brunei’s exports of diesel to Australia as 5%. It was correctly reported in the graphic as close to 9%.)

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly analysis of Australia’s fuel crisis and its impact on households. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

Most Australians hadn’t heard of the Strait of Hormuz before March. Now it’s on the news every night, usually next to footage of service stations with long queues or empty bowsers. But between those two images — a waterway on the other side of the world and the pump down the road — there’s a chain of dependencies that rarely gets explained. Understanding that chain is the difference between watching headlines and reading signals.

In the Pipeline aims to help planning by making the right information visible at the right time. But our fuel plumbing runs offshore, so what other countries decide affects what happens at the bowser. This piece explains how we got there, and what offshore issues matter now.

Why we don’t make our own fuel

The short version: we used to, and stopped.

Australia had one serious oil province — Bass Strait, in the Gippsland Basin off Victoria. Discovered in the mid-1960s, it peaked at roughly 450,000 to 500,000 barrels a day in 1985 and declined steadily for four decades. By 2024, oil production from Bass Strait had ceased entirely. Decommissioning is underway.

Bass Strait crude was what they call ‘light’ and ‘sweet’ — easy to refine, high quality. Between 1949 and 1965, Australia built eight refineries around that crude, from Altona in Melbourne to Kwinana in Perth. It was a postwar nation-building exercise: domestic crude feeding domestic refineries, turning imported dependence into self-sufficiency. For thirty years, it worked.

Then it didn’t.

As Bass Strait depleted, the refineries had to import crude from further afield — Southeast Asia, the Middle East, West Africa. But they were now competing against a new generation of Asian mega-refineries with every structural advantage. Singapore, South Korea, India, and China built refineries processing 400,000 to over a million barrels a day — against Australian plants running at 85,000 to 146,000. India’s single Jamnagar refinery exceeds Australia’s entire national demand. These weren’t just bigger. They were closer to the same crude sources, backed by state investment, integrated with petrochemical production, and equipped with technology that could turn cheap heavy crude into fuel more profitably.

Six of Australia’s eight refineries closed between 2003 and 2021. Two remain: Lytton in Brisbane and Geelong in Victoria, with a combined capacity of roughly 237,000 barrels a day against national demand of about a million. Australia now imports roughly 90 per cent of its refined fuel.

This isn’t a policy failure that someone can reverse with a decision. The domestic crude is gone. The economics of small-scale refining against integrated Asian mega-plants don’t close. The structural position took decades to arrive at, and it isn’t going back.

Our western and northern hydrocarbon provinces — the North West Shelf, the Timor Sea, the Browse Basin — produce gas, not oil. They feed LNG export contracts to Japan, South Korea, and China. They don’t produce refinery-grade crude, and they don’t feed domestic fuel supply. Australia exports enormous volumes of energy as LNG. It imports the refined fuel it actually runs on from the same region.

From the Strait to the bowser

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage between Iran and Oman, roughly 50 kilometres wide at its narrowest navigable channel. In normal times, about 20 million barrels of crude oil pass through it every day — roughly a fifth of all the petroleum the world uses. That crude flows predominantly to Asia.

Australia doesn’t import much fuel directly from the Middle East. Only about 15 per cent of our crude and 5 per cent of refined products come straight from Gulf countries. If that were the whole story, Hormuz would be someone else’s problem.

It isn’t, because the chain has more than one link.

First link: Gulf crude to Asian refineries. The refineries that make Australia’s fuel — in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and increasingly China and India — depend heavily on Middle Eastern crude transiting Hormuz. South Korea sources roughly 70 per cent of its crude imports from the Middle East. Japan, about 95 per cent. Singapore jumped to more than 70 per cent last year, up from about 50 per cent in 2024, after a major refinery expansion that needed heavier Gulf crude. These refineries aren’t buying from the Gulf by habit. They’re physically built for it — their desulphurisation units, their catalytic crackers — all configured for the heavy, sour crude that comes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, and Kuwait. That’s a hardware constraint, not a purchasing preference.

Second link: Asian refineries to Australia. Those same refineries process the crude into petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, then ship it to Australian import terminals. Transit time from Singapore to Sydney or Melbourne is roughly 10 to 14 days. From South Korea, 12 to 16 days.

So Hormuz is upstream of Australian fuel twice: once as the source of crude feeding the refineries that make our fuel, and again through the global price and supply effects of any disruption. Estimates of Australia’s composite Hormuz dependency range from about 30 to 59 per cent, depending on how you count it. The lower figure tracks only the crude that physically becomes the product we buy. The higher figure counts the total Hormuz dependency of our supplier countries — and that’s the more relevant measure. When a refinery runs short of feedstock, it doesn’t selectively cut only the Hormuz-derived output. It cuts total throughput, and every customer feels it.

What happens when the tap closes

The Strait has been effectively closed since early March. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls the passage. Insurance markets voided war risk coverage before the formal closure, making transit commercially unviable even where it remained physically possible. War risk premiums surged from a fraction of a per cent to roughly 5 per cent of hull value — for a $100 million tanker, that’s $5 million per voyage.

But supply doesn’t stop overnight. There’s a pipeline of fuel already on the water — already dispatched before the closure — and that pipeline takes weeks to drain.

The chain breaks in sequence. First, crude stops flowing to Asian refineries through Hormuz. Second, those refineries draw down their own crude stockpiles — Japan holds roughly 150 days of supply, South Korea about 208 days, but Singapore only weeks. Third, refineries cut throughput as feedstock depletes. Several Southeast Asian facilities have already reduced output. China has gone further, directing refiners to halt new fuel export contracts. Fourth, the volume of refined product available for export shrinks. Fifth — and this is where it reaches us — every importing nation competes for what’s left.

The buffer period — roughly the first three to five weeks from the closure — is the time during which pre-crisis cargoes arrive, domestic refineries keep running, and the government’s MSO (Minimum Stockholding Obligation) release — an emergency drawdown of mandatory fuel reserves — provides cushion. The transition period — weeks four to eight — is when reduced Asian refinery throughput starts hitting Australian imports. We’re in that window now.

The sushi train

Here’s the frame that matters for what comes next.

Australia doesn’t sit at the fuel table negotiating its own deal. It sits at the end of a conveyor belt — a sushi train — and what reaches us depends entirely on what everyone ahead of us takes, leaves, or pulls off.

China restricts fuel exports — plates removed from the train before they reach us. China was supplying about 28 per cent of Australia’s jet fuel imports; that supply is being cut from April. Thailand bans oil exports except to its immediate neighbours — more plates gone. If South Korea or Japan begin prioritising domestic supply over export refining — and both have strong reasons to — the train gets sparser still.

Australia is a small buyer in this market. We consume about a million barrels a day. China imports fifteen times that. India, Japan, and South Korea are all larger customers, all geographically closer to the refineries, and all with deeper strategic reserves or stronger supplier relationships. Japan is actively building priority arrangements with Gulf Cooperation Council states. China has diplomatic leverage with Iran that allows selective Hormuz transit for Chinese-owned vessels. Australia has no comparable arrangement.

We’re not waiting for fuel to arrive. We’re watching what the world does with it before it reaches us.

That’s why offshore signals matter as much as domestic ones. The weekly stockholding numbers tell you what’s in the tank right now. But the signals that tell you what’s coming — or not coming — are upstream: Asian refinery throughput, export restriction announcements, spot price gaps between delivered-to-Asia and delivered-to-Australia product, and whether the countries that make our fuel are keeping it for themselves.

What to watch

This isn’t a prediction. It’s a monitoring frame — a way to read the signals that determine what reaches the end of the train.

Refinery behaviour. Are Singapore, South Korea, and Japan maintaining export-oriented refining, or pulling back to serve domestic markets? Singapore is the most exposed — its Hormuz dependency jumped to 70 per cent last year, and its strategic reserves are measured in weeks, not months. Any reduction in Singaporean refinery throughput hits Australia’s supply line directly.

Export restrictions. China and Thailand have already restricted fuel exports. If South Korea or Japan follow — even informally, through guidance to prioritise domestic supply — the pool Australia draws from shrinks fast. Each restriction removes plates from the train.

Spot prices. Singapore gasoil hit $143.88 a barrel by mid-March, up 57 per cent from pre-crisis levels. Jet fuel surged 114 per cent. If refined product prices keep rising faster than crude, it signals that refinery throughput is the bottleneck — which is exactly the scenario where Australia’s position is most exposed, because we can’t process crude ourselves. And if the gap between delivered-to-Asia and delivered-to-Australia prices widens, it means we’re being outbid.

Alternative supply routes. Saudi Arabia is rerouting crude through the East-West Pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, bypassing Hormuz — but Yanbu’s practical loading capacity is well below what Hormuz carried, and cargoes leaving Yanbu for Asia must pass through the Bab el-Mandeb strait past Yemen, where Houthi interference is a live risk. The UAE has a pipeline to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, but capacity is limited and the port has already been hit by drone strikes. The US has dispatched emergency cargoes, but Houston to Australia is a 25 to 35 day voyage. These are mitigations, not replacements.

Competitor behaviour. Every signal above interacts. Japan releasing 80 million barrels of strategic reserves sustains its refineries — good for Australian supply, for now. But if Japan decides those reserves should serve Japanese consumers rather than export customers, the calculation reverses. India is maximising discounted Russian crude and has no reason to leave surplus product for distant buyers. The competitive landscape is the train — and the question is always: what’s left when it reaches us?

The plumbing matters

Australia’s fuel position didn’t become fragile in March 2026. It became fragile over decades, as domestic crude depleted, refineries closed, and the country settled into a structural position at the far end of a maritime supply chain running through contested waters.

What March did was close the tap at the source and start the clock on when the pipeline drains.

The stocks on hand — the 30-odd days of consumption cover the government cites — are real, and they matter. But they’re a buffer, not a solution. The solution is continued flow, and flow depends on decisions being made right now in Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, and Riyadh — not in Canberra.

That’s why we’re watching the train. Not because the situation is hopeless — it isn’t, and the buffer period exists precisely to allow adjustment. But because informed households make better decisions than anxious ones, and the information that matters most right now isn’t at the bowser. It’s upstream.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. This piece was produced as an explainer to fill a gap between the Hormuz headlines and the reality at the pump — the connecting plumbing that determines what reaches Australian fuel terminals and when.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.

Three weeks ago, a war started in the Persian Gulf. For most Australians it’s still distant news — terrible for people with connections to the region, but not yet personal. At the petrol station, though, it’s getting personal fast.

I’m an informatician supporting government policy analysis, based in Canberra. My professional work includes distribution-chain analysis for the Australian government. I live in a city, but volunteer and travel through the outback as far as Broken Hill and Darwin. I have skin in this — personally and professionally.

What I’m seeing is a two-speed crisis. In the cities, people are watching bowser prices climb and hearing the government say don’t stockpile. In regional Australia, people are already seeing rationing and closures. Both groups share something: nobody’s watching the framework — the actual legislation, the escalation pathway, the decisions that determine who gets fuel and who doesn’t.

The government is being reassuring in the lead-up to Easter, and perhaps that’s part of why some people are stocking up — optimism that doesn’t quite land creates its own anxiety. But on the far side of Easter, the constriction can be expected to continue. The fuel arriving now is what was on the water before the Strait of Hormuz closed. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil transits that strait, including much of the crude that feeds the Southeast Asian refineries Australia depends on. The pipeline is thinning, not filling.

This isn’t something that stockpiling solves. It’s something that planning addresses — prioritising, reducing consumption, coordinating with the people around you. But planning needs reliable information, and that’s something I do for a living.

I did something similar during COVID: read the epidemiology and the public policy response, used that visibility to plan rather than react. This is the same volunteer gig. The middle ground between mass media — which serves people who don’t want to think about it until it happens — and specialist analysis that assumes you’re deep in the framework.

This is the first instalment of In the Pipeline — a fortnightly series tracking what the fuel disruption means for Australian households, grounded in Australia’s actual legislative and policy framework, and real measurements where available. Each update will cover where we are, what decisions are coming, and what to watch. The aim is practical: to give you enough visibility to plan.

What follows is the map. Not the politics — the structure. I won’t tell you what to do. You pick your own way ahead.

What the Government Can Actually Do

Australia has a layered framework for managing fuel emergencies. It wasn’t built for this crisis specifically, but it was built for crises like this one. Understanding it takes about ten minutes, and those ten minutes will change how we read everything until this is over.

The centrepiece is the Liquid Fuel Emergency Act 1984 — a Commonwealth law that gives the government broad powers to control fuel distribution during a declared national emergency. Once an emergency is declared, the Minister can direct fuel companies to allocate supply, implement rationing at the retail level, direct refineries to change what they produce, and prioritise certain users over others. Broad tools, surrounded by procedural safeguards — consultation requirements, time limits, democratic accountability.

The Act has never been invoked. Not during the Gulf Wars, not during the 2008 oil shock, not during COVID. It was tested once — on paper. In 2019, NOSEC ran a simulation called Exercise Catalyst that modelled almost exactly this scenario: a Middle East conflict closing the Strait of Hormuz, cascading supply failures, eventual activation of the Act and rationing. The exercise findings, obtained under Freedom of Information after a struggle with the Department that held them, noted public concern about why the government was not more prepared. Then came the 2019–20 bushfires, then COVID. The review was never completed.

The Act is the stick. It comes with a set of guidelines, a pre-determined list of who gets priority access, and an operational playbook developed through NOSEC — the National Oil Supplies Emergency Committee, a standing committee of Commonwealth, state, territory, and industry representatives.

In 2021, the Fuel Security Act added two mechanisms that matter right now. The first is the Minimum Stockholding Obligation — the MSO — which requires fuel importers and refiners to hold minimum stock levels of petrol, diesel, and jet fuel. Think of it as a mandatory buffer. The second is a production subsidy that keeps Australia’s two remaining refineries — Ampol Lytton in Brisbane and Viva Geelong — operating during periods when they’d otherwise lose money. Those subsidy arrangements expire in 2027–2028, which is a question for another day but worth filing away.

The MSO is where the numbers live. The first weekly stock snapshot, dated 10 March and published on 16 March by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), showed diesel at 30 days of cover — just 2% above the mandatory floor. Petrol was more comfortable at 37 days, with 52% headroom. Jet fuel sat at 29 days with 23% margin. Diesel is the tight one. It powers agriculture, mining, freight, and remote electricity generation. It’s the fuel that moves everything else.

For context: Australia is a member of the International Energy Agency, which requires members to hold 90 days of net import cover in emergency reserves. Australia has not met that obligation since 2012 — the only IEA member that doesn’t comply. The MSO was designed as a more cost-effective alternative to building a physical strategic reserve, which the government has estimated would cost $20 billion over four years. The buffer we have is the buffer we chose under multiple governments.

Underneath the Act sits the operational playbook — formally, the National Liquid Fuel Emergency Response Plan. Its last substantive revision was 2013. It’s 82 pages long, and came after another Freedom of Information fight. It references institutions that no longer exist and refineries that have since closed. It was designed for a country with four domestic refineries and COAG. We now have two refineries and National Cabinet. The framework is real; it’s also not quite current. It could be updated at any time, quietly, without being published.

That’s the architecture. Broad powers, mandatory buffers, an operational plan, a coordinating committee. Now for the part that changes how we see everything else.

Who Gets Fuel When There Isn’t Enough

If the government declares a national liquid fuel emergency and implements rationing, most motorists would be limited to a fixed dollar amount per transaction at the bowser — the current worked example in the response plan is $40 per motorist per day, though some jurisdictional legislation sets higher limits. Your pump switches off at $40; you pay; you come back tomorrow. As fuel prices rise, that $40 buys fewer litres. The system is designed to work with existing retail technology — no ration books, no registration cards, just a pre-set limit on the pump.

But some users are exempt. Essential Users receive unrestricted fuel access during rationing. They are identified at the point of sale by their vehicles — marked ambulances, police cars, fire trucks. Not by the person driving, but by the vehicle itself. A paramedic driving her own car to work is not an Essential User. Only the ambulance is.

The pre-determined list of Essential User activities is set out in a 2019 Commonwealth determination. Here it is, in full:

(a) an ambulance service
(b) a corrective service
(c) a fire or rescue service
(d) a police service
(e) a public transport service
(f) a State Emergency Service or equivalent organisation
(g) a taxi service

That’s it. Seven categories. Emergency services and public transport.

Now here’s what’s not on that list.

Agriculture — farmers, farm machinery, planting, harvesting, livestock. Freight and road transport — including the trucks that carry fuel, food, and medicine to regional towns. Hospitals and healthcare. Pharmaceutical distribution. The food supply chain — supermarkets, cold storage, food processing. Electricity generation — including the diesel generators that power remote Indigenous communities. Utilities — water, sewerage, waste management. Telecommunications.

None of them have pre-determined priority access to fuel.

The Minister can expand the list. The legislation gives explicit discretion to designate additional essential activities at any time. But NOSEC’s standing policy advice is that the Minister should not expand it. The rationale is sound in its own terms: every exemption reduces the pool of rationed fuel available to everyone else. The more people who are exempt, the less fuel there is for those who aren’t. It’s a conservation argument.

The practical consequence is this. If rationing comes, the farmer who needs diesel to plant a winter crop has no pre-built priority access. The truck driver carrying food to a regional supermarket has no pre-built priority access. The hospital running backup generators has no pre-built priority access. Obtaining priority would require a new ministerial determination — during a declared emergency that hasn’t been declared.

The National Farmers’ Federation and state farmer federations are currently demanding priority diesel access. They are demanding something that does not exist in the legislative framework. It could be created — the Minister has the power — but the standing advice from the government’s own coordinating committee is not to do it.

This isn’t a criticism of the framework’s designers. The logic of a narrow list is defensible. But it means the gap between what the public probably assumes exists — surely hospitals and food trucks get priority? — and what the legislation actually provides is wide, and it’s invisible. Until we look.

The Escalation Ladder

To be clear: the government hasn’t declared a national liquid fuel emergency. It hasn’t activated the alert phase of the response plan — or if it has, it hasn’t said so. The plan explicitly allows silent activation. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s a design feature. The Minister decides whether to announce it.

What the government has done is deploy every tool short of a formal declaration, progressively, over three weeks. Here’s the sequence.

28 February — the war begins. US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil transits, is disrupted.

Early March — the government asks the ACCC to monitor fuel prices. Letters go out to the major fuel companies. First official acknowledgment that the domestic market is at risk.

10 March — Energy Minister Bowen tells Parliament the government has already convened three meetings of NOSEC and will instruct the department to convene it regularly. In the same debate, the government states that “right now we do not see a risk of national shortages of supplies or risks that warrant activating extraordinary powers.”

11 March — the International Energy Agency agrees to release 400 million barrels from emergency reserves worldwide — the largest coordinated release in IEA history. The scale of the action signals the severity of the disruption.

12 March — the Energy Minister temporarily relaxes fuel quality standards for 60 days, allowing higher-sulphur fuel that would normally be exported to be blended into domestic supply. This adds roughly 100 million litres a month of petrol. The expiry date — around mid-May — will be a signal. If it’s renewed, the government expects the crisis to last through winter.

13 March — the government temporarily reduces the MSO by 20%, releasing approximately 762 million litres from mandatory reserves. This also serves as Australia’s contribution to the IEA collective action. The buffer is being drawn down deliberately.

13 March — the ACCC begins weekly fuel price monitoring across eight capital cities, expanding to 190 regional locations. Crisis-frequency transparency.

16 March — the Department begins publishing MSO stock levels weekly instead of quarterly. For the first time, the public can see how full the buffer is, updated weekly. NSW confirms it is engaging with NOSEC twice a week through its Energy and Utilities Services coordination team.

17 March — the Reserve Bank raises the cash rate to 4.10%, citing fuel-driven inflation. Monetary tightening into a supply shock.

17 March — the ACCC convenes an emergency meeting with fuel suppliers in Sydney and Melbourne. Nine fuel companies, four motoring organisations, two industry associations. The ACCC chair signals readiness to use authorisation powers to coordinate fuel distribution — essentially giving competitors permission to cooperate on supply allocation without breaching competition law.

18 March — Iran strikes Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, one of the world’s largest LNG export facilities. This is escalation — systematic targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure beyond the original conflict zone.

19 March — the ACCC launches a preliminary enforcement investigation into four major fuel suppliers — Ampol, BP, Mobil, and Viva Energy — over diesel availability to independent wholesalers and distributors serving regional and rural Australia. The allegation: the majors may be restricting supply to independents, which is the mechanism by which regional fuel supply fails even when national stocks are adequate. The ACCC chair made the announcement publicly, which is unusual at the preliminary stage, citing the significance of the issue.

19 March — National Cabinet convenes on fuel supply. The Prime Minister describes the desire to be “over prepared.” The government announces the appointment of a national fuel coordinator to oversee distribution — a new institutional role that didn’t exist a week ago.

That’s the ladder. Every rung short of a declaration has been stepped on.

The response plan defines three triggers for activating the alert phase: a recommendation from the Australian Institute of Petroleum, an expectation that the IEA will commence coordinated action, or any other serious supply chain failure with widespread national impacts. The IEA acted on 11 March. The supply chain failure is self-evident. All three triggers appear to have been met.

Whether the alert phase has been activated is not publicly known. What is publicly visible is a government that has convened NOSEC at crisis frequency since early March, is coordinating with states twice weekly, and has now appointed a dedicated coordinator — while not confirming whether the formal alert phase is active.

There is one more thing the government has that the public doesn’t: consumption data. Through the mandatory reporting framework, the government has access to detailed, near-real-time information on how much fuel is being sold, where, and to whom. It publishes the stock data weekly now — how much is in the tank. It does not publish the consumption data at the same frequency — how fast the tank is draining. The Minister stated on 13 March that demand had doubled in some areas — a figure consistent with having regular access to reporting data the rest of us can’t see as often.

What to Watch

This section is where the series earns its fortnightly updates. Here’s what to track between now and the next update.

The fuel quality relaxation expiry. The 60-day window on relaxed fuel standards runs out around mid-May. If the government renews it, that tells you they expect the crisis to last through winter. If they let it lapse, that tells you they think supply is recovering. Watch for the decision, not just the expiry.

The ACCC enforcement investigation. The investigation into diesel availability to independents goes to the heart of regional supply. Outcomes — enforcement action, undertakings, or a finding that the market is working — will shape whether regional Australia gets fuel through the existing distribution chain or needs a different mechanism.

The weekly MSO snapshot. Published each Friday by the Department. The number to watch is diesel days-of-cover. It was 30 days on 10 March, with 2% headroom above the mandatory floor. If that number drops, the buffer is being consumed faster than it’s being replenished. If it holds or rises, supply is arriving.

The ACCC weekly fuel price report. Published weekly, expanding to 190 regional locations. The spread between wholesale terminal gate prices and retail prices tells you whether margins are normal or abnormal. A widening spread may indicate margin-taking; a narrowing spread may indicate that price pressure is flowing through.

The winter crop planting window. May and June. Australian agriculture — particularly in South Australia, where diesel demand rises 25–30% during winter sowing — hits a hard deadline. If diesel is rationed or restricted during planting, the downstream effects on food supply arrive six months later. This is the agricultural clock the farmer federations are watching.

The RBA rate decision around mid-May. The Reserve Bank is tightening into a supply shock. A third consecutive interest rate hike would signal that the inflation fight takes priority over the economic pain of the fuel crisis. A pause would signal that the Board has seen enough.

The Federal Budget in May. Potential fuel excise relief, energy subsidies, or agricultural support measures. The Budget is the government’s main fiscal response lever.

For daily or weekly tracking on your own: the ACCC weekly reports are published online and freely available. MotorMouth (most states) and FuelWatch (Western Australia) provide daily local price data. The Department’s MSO snapshots are published on the energy statistics page. You don’t need to wait for this series to watch the numbers — but the series will help you read them.

The Map and the Road

The framework exists. It has real powers — the government can direct fuel companies, implement rationing, prioritise essential users, coordinate across jurisdictions. It has real gaps — a narrow priority list that doesn’t cover agriculture or freight or hospitals, an operational plan last revised when we had twice as many refineries and different institutions, and a bulk allocation system with acknowledged deficiencies that are now the subject of an enforcement investigation.

Understanding this framework is practical knowledge. It doesn’t tell you what the government should do — that’s a judgment you’re entitled to form for yourself. It tells you what the government can do, what it has done, and what it hasn’t done yet. That’s the visibility that turns anxiety into planning.

One thing to carry from here into the next instalment: seventy-two remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory depend on diesel deliveries for electricity, water pumping, and essential services — roughly 75,000 litres a day. Depending on road access, their buffer ranges from six weeks to six months. When the fuel disruption meets the remoteness, the consequences aren’t abstract. That’s where this series is heading.

The next instalment of In the Pipeline will track what’s changed — which decisions were made, which signals moved, and what the numbers say about the buffer between where we are and where we might be heading.

The fuel that’s arriving now was loaded before the strait closed. The pipeline is thinning. The framework is real but imperfect. And the distance between what people assume the government can guarantee and what the legislation actually provides is something worth knowing before you need to know it.

Process Note

Written by Ruv Draba through In the Pipeline: Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. This is the first instalment of In the Pipeline, a fortnightly series tracking the Australian fuel disruption’s impact on households and communities, grounded in the actual legislative and policy framework.

Attribution: Ruv Draba, In the Pipeline

Research and editorial support: Claude (Anthropic), operating under the Finding Fathoms project scope. Analytical positions and editorial judgments are the author’s.

Primary sources: Liquid Fuel Emergency Act 1984 (Cth); Liquid Fuel Emergency (Activities—Essential Users) Determination 2019; Liquid Fuel Emergency Guidelines 2019; Fuel Security Act 2021 (Cth); National Liquid Fuel Emergency Response Plan, Policy Manual V1.3 (2019, FoI release via Michael West Media); Exercise Catalyst Report 2019 (NOSEC, FoI release); Hansard, House of Representatives and Senate, 10 March 2026; DCCEEW MSO weekly stock snapshot; ACCC weekly fuel price monitoring updates; IEA collective action communiqué, 11 March 2026.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share, adapt, and cross-post with attribution; adaptations must use same license.

In the Pipeline offers detailed fortnightly policy analysis of Australia’s Fuel Crisis Response. For more, visit In the Pipeline on Substack.