Australia's Precarious Fuel Supply

Reflections on "The Road Warrior" and a totally destabilized world

I’ve long wanted to ask a neuropsychologist why, when one is twelve years old, all images and emotions are hyper vivid. I was twelve when I and couple of my friends snuck into a cinema to watch The Road Warrior, starring Mel Gibson, and set in post-apocalyptic Australia. Every image in the film seemed to seer itself into my brain, and for years, Max Rockatansky was the ultimate masculine icon.

The film opens with a monologue about how civilization had been “swept away.” The narrator continues, “For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war, and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing.” Australia was therefore reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which small bands compete for resources—especially for gasoline.

If you had asked me in 1982 if something like this dystopian drama could actually happen, I would have laughed. Now I’m beginning to wonder.

Australia is now facing severe fuel shortages as a results of its dependency on liquid fuels from Asia, and “Asia is at the forefront” of what Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, calls “an energy crisis of historic proportions” due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Last night I listened to a podcast in which a man was musing that—though Trump may have been assured by his bizarre advisors that the Strait would NOT be closed by a war with Iran—every serious analyst who has ever war-gamed it knew this would happen. This being the case, he mused that the war on Iran should be viewed as part of the same globalist agenda that brought us COVID-19.

Given that the Australian government has been largely captured by globalists, this speculation strikes me as plausible. It’s almost as if the Australian government has been preparing for this moment in which it “sees its greatness flicker” to quote my favorite poem about an ineffectual man who doesn’t know what to do with himself or what to believe.

Consider that, at the turn of the century, Australia produced 563,000 barrels of oil per day, with eight refineries supplying 98% of the country’s petroleum product needs.

As noted in a recent report by Patrick Commins, Australian economics editor at the Guardian.

From that high point, oil and petroleum production has slumped to the point where the country relies on imports for 90% of its liquid fuel needs and oil production is at its lowest since the late 1960s.

Over the past 25 years, the number of local refineries has also dropped:

• Mobil’s Port Stanvac refinery in South Australia was mothballed in 2003 (and permanently closed in 2009).

• Shell’s Clyde refinery was closed in November 2013.

• Caltex closed its Kurnell refinery in Sydney in October 2014.

• BP did the same with its Brisbane plant in mid-2015.

• BP then closed its Kwinana refinery south of Fremantle in March 2021.

• ExxonMobil’s Altona refinery in Melbourne was shuttered in August of the same year.

Australia has not maintained its domestic petroleum industry because of high exploration costs, regulatory uncertainty, and shifting focus toward 2050 net-zero targets have limited investment in new fossil fuel exploration.

If I were asked to rewrite the opening monologue of The Road Warrior.. . .

Years of prosperity financed with debt resulted in the people becoming thoughtless and ignorant. Immoral and irresponsible imbeciles came to power—men who knew not wisdom, prudence, and restraint— only pride, greed, and lust, and they destroyed the beautiful world that they inherited from their parents.