Australia could be close to running out of diesel by mid-April at the current rate of consumption, an energy expert has projected.
Hundreds of service stations are out of at least one kind of fuel each day as the war in the Middle East continues.
The nation’s primary producers and transport workers have been the hardest hit.
The government has acted to investigate the fuel companies and installed a national fuel czar, but some crossbench and Opposition MPs have called for further action including rationing.
Centre for Independent Studies director of energy research Aidan Morrison told Sky News that Australia could suffer a dire diesel shortage in a month.
“By the time we get to … another month or so, mid-April, something like that, at the current rate, we’re going to be seeing a very severe shortage indeed,” he said.
“Because I think some people are anticipating that shortage and buying more, we’re seeing supply chains seize up and people not being able to get calls back from their distributors, not being able to actually get a delivery on the date they scheduled it.”
He claimed Australia would have an issue with diesel supply “much, much sooner” than petrol.
“That’s because our country actually uses twice as much diesel as we do petrol, a little more than twice as much,” he said.
“Australia is overwhelmingly a very heavy diesel-demanding country. We’ve got huge agriculture, mining sector, (and) long, distributed freight routes for trucking.
“Our refineries produce roughly the same of each, in fact, slightly more petrol.”
Mr Morrison said he had been surprised by how soon Australian service stations began running out of petrol following the outbreak of war in Iran.
“This is one of the things that I didn’t anticipate, when I thought there was 30 days or so of fuel in the country, I thought it would take us at least a couple of weeks before people actually couldn’t get their fuel delivered,” he said.
“But within about a week, immediately we’re hearing from farmers in the country that had placed orders and not had them delivered.
“It seems that a month’s supply does not actually give many people in the supply chain the assurance they need to be able to keep on delivering fuel to all the places and not (hold) it up.”
He took the recent developments to signal Australia had to consider producing more of its own fuel.
“The government has to look at using our own resources for that, otherwise we just don’t have a serious solution for this,” he said.
“In Australia’s case, we do have some oil, there’s more that could be exported and drilled for.”
However, he said diesel would again be an issue for Australian refineries.
“A lot of Australia’s oil reserves, crude oil reserves are very light, light crude oil and even condensate and that’s pretty good for petrol,” he said.
“It’s not great for diesel.”
It comes as the Prime Minister announced he would convene a second National Cabinet meeting to address fuel issues related to the Iran war.
Barnaby Joyce urged the federal and state governments to consider rationing to get ahead of what he saw as an inevitable “panic”.
Chris Bowen and his colleagues have repeatedly argued Australia does not have a supply issue, with Mr Bowen telling Sky News on Wednesday there was the same amount of fuel in the country now as at the beginning of the Iran war.
Australian consumers have still been slugged at the bowser in past weeks with petrol more than 250 cents per litre in Australian capitals on Thursday, and diesel remaining at more than 300 cents per litre.
Hundreds of individual service stations have suffered outages at different points since the beginning of the crisis.
Senator James Paterson on Thursday said if the government’s claims about supply were true, rationing should not be a consideration for the National Cabinet.
“Rationing should be completely unnecessary, whether it’s soft or hard rationing,” he said.
“The problem is that fuel is not getting to where it needs to go, and that is a supply problem, and one that Chris Bowen can fix.
“He has extraordinary powers under the Fuel Security Act… he should use them.”