The 44 Ships Between Australia and Empty Bowsers

Somewhere between Singapore, South Korea and the Australian coast, 44 tankers are steaming toward our ports with the fuel you'll be pumping a few weeks from now. Most motorists have no idea those ships exist, let alone that the federal government now counts them every week and publishes the tally like a weather report. Here's what's really going on: that count just dropped by 20 per cent, and almost nobody noticed.

The fuel gauge Canberra doesn't advertise

While everyone was watching the excise climb back onto the price boards this week, the government quietly got on with running something Australia has never had before: a public national fuel gauge. The Fuel Plan statistics page, published by the federal energy department, now reports exactly how many days of fuel the country holds and how much is on the water heading our way.

The latest figures, current to 28 July, show Australia holding 43 days of petrol, 39 days of diesel and 34 days of jet fuel. In raw terms that's roughly 1,825 megalitres of petrol and 3,640 megalitres of diesel sitting in tanks around the country. On top of that, 44 tankers were on the water as of 31 July, six carrying crude oil for our remaining refineries and 38 carrying refined fuel ready for the terminals. At least 3.1 billion litres is locked in to arrive over the next four weeks.

Sounds comfortable. But independent supply analysts picked up something the official commentary skipped past: two weeks earlier there were 55 ships on the water. That's a 20 per cent drop in the incoming fleet, and forward orders have been sliding since May.

Fewer ships today doesn't mean empty bowsers tomorrow. It does mean less slack in the system a month from now.

Why we're suddenly counting ships at all

To put this in perspective, go back to March. When conflict in the Middle East escalated and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel carrying roughly one fifth of the world's oil, came under genuine threat, Australia discovered just how thin its buffer really was.

On 13 March, Energy Minister Chris Bowen did something no minister had done since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He tapped the nation's minimum stockholding obligation, releasing about six days' worth of petrol and five days' worth of diesel to keep suppliers moving, and temporarily relaxed standards so higher sulphur petrol could be sold. The rainy day the stockholding rules were written for, as Bowen put it at the time, had arrived.

The uncomfortable backstory is that Australia has been flying below international standards for more than a decade. As a member of the International Energy Agency we're supposed to hold 90 days of import cover. We've routinely held far less, at times around 30 days, while more than 90 per cent of our liquid fuel comes from overseas. Only two refineries still operate on Australian soil, Viva Energy's plant at Geelong and Ampol's refinery at Lytton in Brisbane's east, and together they cover only a fraction of what we burn.

Compared to other countries, that's remarkably exposed. The United States keeps a strategic petroleum reserve measured in hundreds of millions of barrels. Japan and South Korea, which import almost everything just as we do, hold comfortably more than their IEA obligations. Until this year, Australia's plan was essentially to trust the shipping schedule.

A billion litres, five years late

That changed on 6 May, when the Prime Minister announced a fuel security package worth more than $10 billion. The centrepiece is a $3.2 billion government owned reserve that will hold around 1 billion litres of diesel and jet fuel, the first fuel stockpile the Commonwealth has ever owned outright. Bowen's justification was blunt: Australia sat in the minority of IEA members with no government owned fuel reserve at all.

Alongside it sits a $7.5 billion facility covering fuel and fertiliser supply, storage, loans and price support, plus $10 million for feasibility studies into expanding domestic refining. The minimum stockholding obligation on fuel companies rises by roughly ten days, which should lift national cover to around 50 days across the board.

Not everyone is applauding. Opposition leader Angus Taylor called the package too little and too late, arguing the obligation should rise to 60 days. Energy researchers writing in The Conversation went further, calling the plan sensible but about five years behind schedule, pointing out that analysts had warned a fuel crisis was likely as early as 2020 after a string of refinery closures left the country leaning almost entirely on imports. And a billion litres of storage doesn't appear overnight. Tanks take years to build, which makes the new reserve protection for the next crisis rather than this one.

What this actually means at the bowser

Here's the practical upshot for your wallet: the stockpile numbers don't set the price you paid this morning. The excise returning to its full 53.7 cents a litre on 3 August and higher international refined fuel prices are doing that job, which is why the ACCC's latest weekly report had capital city petrol averaging 193.6 cents and diesel at 232.8. If you're filling up in Melbourne, you're still doing better than most, with Victoria holding its title as the cheapest state for petrol, while motorists in Darwin pay the most in the country.

What the stockpile does determine is whether a distant conflict shows up here as expensive fuel or as no fuel. Those are very different problems. The March release worked exactly as designed: prices spiked, but no Australian servo ran dry. That was the system doing its job.

The number genuinely worth watching is diesel. On paper 39 days sounds fine, but analysis of the government's own figures suggests only about 15 days of diesel sits above the reserve floor suppliers are legally required to hold. Diesel moves every supermarket delivery, every harvest and most of the mining fleet, so a diesel squeeze reaches your grocery bill before it reaches the pump. Keep an eye on diesel prices as the trend to follow through spring.

For everyday fill ups, the story is more mundane and far more manageable. Prices above $2 a litre in the capitals are a tax and global market story, not a shortage story, and the usual rules apply. The spread between the cheapest and dearest servo in the same suburb is often 20 cents or more, so checking unleaded petrol prices and your local price trends before you fill will save you more this week than any national policy. That's as true in Sydney as it is in Perth, where regulars already know to fill on Tuesday before the Wednesday price jump.

The bigger picture

Australia is quietly becoming a country that counts its fuel in days and shows its workings. Between a government owned reserve, tougher stockholding rules, weekly ACCC price monitoring locked in until at least the end of September and a public dashboard tracking every inbound tanker, the era of simply assuming the ships will always turn up is over. That's a bigger shift in how this country thinks about fuel than any single price move.

A few things worth pinning to the fridge:

The fuel industry rarely makes headlines until prices spike, but the ship count is the story to follow this month. Keep an eye on this space.