Australia’s largest petrol station operator is racing to lock in alternative fuel shipments from the United States and Europe but it says it has more than enough stock on hand to meet demand even as some outlets struggle to keep up with panic buying and temporarily run dry.
Ampol, which runs more than 1800 service stations across the country, confirmed on Friday that the escalating war in the Middle East had begun to choke the traditional flow of crude oil and refined fuels into the Asian region, a key source of Australia’s imports. The crisis is being compounded by China’s recent move to suspend exports of petrol, diesel and jet fuel, which has halted roughly 15 per cent of the region’s supply.
“Yes, there has been some industry disruption,” Ampol chief executive Matt Halliday said. “But we continue to have a lot of stock.”
The federal government and the fuel industry say Australia has enough refined fuel stocks and shipments still arriving on schedule to more than meet demand. Ampol still had about 45 days’ worth of fuel supply either held onshore or on ships bound for Australia, Halliday said. But the longer the crisis persists, the greater the danger of even bigger price rises, or even shortages, hitting home.
Halliday said Ampol was working on securing “additional sources” with key suppliers, aiming to boost orders of crude oil and refined fuels from other parts of the world.
“To the extent that this runs for longer, what ends up happening is more cargoes come from further afield,” he said.
“We buy refined product out of the US or Europe from time to time. My expectation is that would become a larger part of the portfolio the longer this goes.”
Following reports of some Ampol petrol stations running dry across Sydney on Friday, Halliday acknowledged that certain sites were under pressure. But he said this was due to the “bring-forward” of petrol and diesel demand – driven by customers rushing to fill up their tanks or seeking to stockpile fuels unnecessarily – rather than the result of any actual supply shortfall.
He said instances of petrol stations temporarily running out of fuel tended to be resolved within a matter of hours.
“The inventory is still there, it just might be in a slightly different location,” he said. “It’s all relatively short term.”
The price of petrol in Australia jumped again this week to reach an all-time high as the war in the Middle East continued with no end in sight.
Petrol stations across the country are selling unleaded for an average price of $2.19 a litre, an increase of 20 per cent since the conflict began, according to the Australian Institute of Petroleum.
Ampol, which also runs the Lytton oil refinery in Brisbane, agreed on Friday to delay a temporary shutdown by two months so it can pump out an extra 300 million litres of petrol, diesel and jet fuel amid deepening worries about the fragile state of the nation’s energy security.
The company had planned to temporarily close the plant for a major maintenance overhaul, known as a “turnaround”, in June, but on Friday it said it would defer those works until the start of August.
Ampol’s 109,000-barrels-a-day Lytton refinery and Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery, both of which process crude oil into usable fuels, are the last two left in Australia following a decade-long exodus, leaving Australia reliant on imports to meet 90 per cent of its liquid-fuel needs.
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Nick Toscano is a business reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
