Shoring up our fuel supply

Commercially driving, in Oz and NZ over the past 30yrs or so, I have noticed one glaring thing...the roads in both countries have deteriorated badly. The so called 'road taxes' have not been reinvested into road maintenance. Fuel taxes and road user charges are just very convenient income streams for the successive governments, only interested in seeing out their next 3yr term.

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Originally Posted by 101RRS

This is an interesting issue for us. I am not sure whether we should be stockpiling our reserves as just crude oil and refining it here as needed - noting it would not need refining until needed which is a costly exercise to keep non profit making refineries operational. The alternative is to stockpile the fuels needed - petrol, diesel, lubricating oil with no dedicated refineries needed.

There are argument for and against in both options, but what is common we need to increase our onshore stockpiles and that importing either the crude or refined fuels and lubricants are just as problematic as each other, as the logistic chain from overseas is just as vulnerable.

Of course if we found more oil reserves so that we were self sufficient then things may be different but that is not going to happen.

Maybe we should stop all gas exports and change as a nation to having internal combustion engines (including trucks) running on gas and using our oil reserves for lubricants, strategic petrol and diesel - but then our oil is not good for producing heavier oils.

Whatever, the one thing we do need to do is increase out strategic reserves of fuel and lubricants but how we do this is the question.

Garry

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There's actually a gas to oil process (GTL) that the big oil companies are now using to make syn lubricants and cleaner fuel.

Shell GTL Fuel | Shell Global

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Originally Posted by travelrover

Agree 100%. In NSW in 1985 they introduced an ‘initiative’ called 3x3 whereby we were supposed to pay 3 cents a liter extra for 3 years to go toward road upgrade programs predominantly in the bush. Big blue signs everywhere in the bush with 3x3 on them. I don’t believe this tax was ever removed and just added to the apparent multitude of other taxes that make up what you pay at the bowser!

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And lets not forget oil parity priciing that came in at about the same time. In the mid 80s Australian produced fuel was a lower price than the international price so not to miss an opportunity the Govt of the time decided to tax aussie fuel so it matched the international price. After a couple of years the international price went lower than the aussie price and everyone expected the oil parity policy to continue and fuel come down in price - nope.

Hippocrasy in Governments run deep and they wonder why the public does not believe or trust them.

Garry

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Originally Posted by travelrover

Agree 100%. In NSW in 1985 they introduced an ‘initiative’ called 3x3 whereby we were supposed to pay 3 cents a liter extra for 3 years to go toward road upgrade programs predominantly in the bush. Big blue signs everywhere in the bush with 3x3 on them. I don’t believe this tax was ever removed and just added to the apparent multitude of other taxes that make up what you pay at the bowser!

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And the state of the roads where the signs were is still about the same..............

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Originally Posted by 350RRC

And the state of the roads where the signs were is still about the same..............

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Or worse!!

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Originally Posted by 101RRS

And lets not forget oil parity priciing that came in at about the same time. In the mid 80s Australian produced fuel was a lower price than the international price so not to miss an opportunity the Govt of the time decided to tax aussie fuel so it matched the international price. After a couple of years the international price went lower than the aussie price and everyone expected the oil parity policy to continue and fuel come down in price - nope.

Hippocrasy in Governments run deep and they wonder why the public does not believe or trust them.

Garry

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Not quite right AFAIK. The parity price was introduced to encourage more exploration and exploitation of Oz reserves by Hawke et al, from memory.

DL

I understood from what I read the idea is to store it as crude oil, which is much less flammable than refined fuels.
It could then be sent to the 4 refineries as required. I assume the fuel companies would pay for the crude and that money would be used to replace the storage.
I think the international standard is to have 70 days of fuel reserves.
The USA has a government/military fuel reserve system.
I would pay 1.1 cents a litre to fund fuel reserves.
This country would grind to a halt and we would starve if we ran out of fuel so this is a real national security priority, I think.

Those old enough to remember that we once had a government owned petroleum company called Commonwealth Oil Refineries or COR. Sold off to BP in the 50's.