Alison Reeve on the Australian fuel crisis

Australia’s Fuel Security and Transport Electrification: Joe O’Brien from ABC News interviews Grattan’s Energy Program Director Alison Reeve.

Video credit to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Joe O’Brien: Alison Reeve is the Energy and Climate Change Program Director at the Grattan Institute, and she joins us now from Canberra. Alison, welcome. There’s an ongoing discussion around Australia’s preparedness for something like the oil shock we’re seeing now. The IEA boss spoke in grave terms today about the global threat. Is Australia dangerously exposed, or well positioned to handle this?

Alison Reeve: On the latest figures, we’re still sitting at about 38 days of petrol, 30 days of diesel, and 30 days of aviation fuel. So we’re not any worse off than we were last week. As Minister Bowen keeps saying, the ships we were expecting to arrive have mostly arrived, though there have been some in the past couple of days that we know have not loaded up and will not be coming to Australia.

The agreement with Singapore today is useful, I think, because we get about half of our petrol and about 15% of our diesel from Singapore. What we’ve agreed to do is work as a team when it comes to pushing back on countries that are restricting the flow of fuel around the globe, and also commit to keeping the flow of energy between our two countries open.

The thing about Singapore, though, is that it’s a tiny island — it’s mostly getting feedstock from other countries in order to make the petrol it sends to us. So the real question around how much this agreement does for our fuel security will come down to whether Singapore is getting access to the crude oil it needs to refine. The Australian government has been eager to assure people that supply is continuing close to normal for now.

Joe O’Brien: The Australian government has been eager to assure people that supply is continuing close to normal for now. What do you make of the way the government has handled the messaging around this so far, and the potential challenges ahead?

Alison Reeve: It’s a tricky message to talk about. Chris Bowen is absolutely correct when he says we’re not using any more petrol than usual — we haven’t actually run out. But what people are seeing as they drive around are queues at petrol stations, or pumps without fuel. That’s happening because people are buying more petrol than usual — they’re not using more, but they’re stockpiling it. It reminds me a little of what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic. None of us actually ran out, but it was very hard to find in shops because everyone was stockpiling it.

The important thing — and I really hope the government leans into this as a message — is that we’re all in this together. If we want enough fuel for essential services, for ambulances, for getting food into supermarkets, we all need to act responsibly as a collective, which means not taking more fuel than we actually need.

Joe O’Brien: Now to the comments from Fatih Birol, particularly about transportation. The IEA boss spoke in Canberra today and was asked about Australia’s transport industry and the potential for electrification — specifically around the semi-trailers that move goods around the nation. To what extent does transport contribute to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, including cars, trucks and planes?

Alison Reeve: Transport is about 20% of Australia’s emissions altogether, and most of that comes from cars. That’s been going up a bit — partly because the population is growing, partly because we all started driving more after COVID, and partly because we’ve developed a taste for very large cars, those big utes you see around the place.

In terms of electrification, our immediate opportunity right now is personal transport — family cars and so on. You played the package from Fatih Birol saying Australia is a little bit behind, but we’re at close to 13% of new car sales now being electric. I saw something today saying Google searches for “how do I get an electric vehicle” have shot through the roof. So I think we can only expect those sales to go up.

The other challenge is trucking. Electric trucking is absolutely an option — about half of the new trucks sold in China at the moment are electric, and those are trucks capable of travelling very long distances. That’s a possibility for us, but to get access to those trucks, there are a couple of regulatory changes governments need to make around weight and width limits. We don’t make many trucks in this country, so we need to import them — getting those regulatory settings right will allow us to actually shift to electrifying our road transport.

We don’t have to do all of it. But if we electrified just the Sydney to Melbourne route, for example, that’s one and a half million individual truck trips per year. If we ran those on electricity rather than diesel, we’d improve our fuel security because that diesel would then be available for trucks travelling longer and more remote routes — say, Alice Springs to Darwin.

Joe O’Brien: Given the importance of this, are you surprised that those regulatory barriers to something like this?

Alison Reeve: I am a little surprised, but the best time to remove them — let’s not waste a good crisis. We’ve known about these barriers for a long time and it’s just been a very slow process to get rid of them. I think this current crisis really should be sharpening people’s minds about where we can simply remove barriers so that we have access to the electric vehicles the rest of the world is enjoying, and start to insulate ourselves from these kinds of global shocks.

Joe O’Brien: And that’s exactly what Fatih Birol was talking about today — countries realising what the barriers are and breaking them down in the wake of a crisis like this. Alison Reeve, really good to get your comments. Thanks for chatting with us.

Alison Reeve: Thanks, Joe.