Essay by Eric Worrall
Bowen suggested Aussies should replace fossil fuel use with electricity, if they are worried about the impact of the Iran conflict on gasoline prices.
Panic buying risks petrol supply crunch, Bowen warns
Phillip Coorey and Michael Read
Mar 3, 2026 – 7.19pmEnergy Minister Chris Bowen has urged drivers not to panic-buy fuel, despite Australia holding barely half the oil reserve it is obliged to have in case of a global emergency.
As long queues formed at petrol stations across the country, Bowen insisted Australia had ample supplies to handle the fallout from the Iran conflict, with a little over a month’s worth of petrol, diesel and jet fuel, based on normal consumption patterns, in addition to what is in service stations and vehicle fuel tanks.
…
“There’s no need to rush to the service station and fill up,” Bowen said. “There are real challenges, but there is no need for panic buying; that will just make the situation worse.”
…“We were told in Parliament this week that we have 36 days of oil stores in Australia, which is not very long” he said.
“One way to improve our oil security is to use less oil. The electrification of the economy and the replacement, wherever you can, of liquid fossil fuels, actually enhances our security.”
…
Read more: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/panic-buying-risks-petrol-supply-crunch-bowen-warns-20260303-p5o6ye
Electrification is not a viable solution for most Australian industry, nor for anyone who lives in the countryside. Electrification might work for inner city commuters who ride their e-scooter to work, at least in good weather, but for Australia’s long distances and harsh climate, or delivery people who need more than a few hours of capacity, relying on electricity is a bust.
At least 5 times in the last decade I’ve had to use a small generator to keep the freezer running, because of electricity outages caused by bad weather, while being thankful my cookers run on gas.
In addition, electric vehicles are still way more expensive than gasoline vehicles, especially for people who can’t afford a new vehicle.
The multi-decade regulatory neglect of Australia’s refinery capacity and domestic energy production is a disgrace.
Our energy supply lines are intensely vulnerable to the slightest geopolitical upset in a vast region spanning the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. Even if we scrape through the current oil supply crisis, one day Australians pay dearly for the short sighted neglect and carelessness of our leaders.
Western countries should have invested far more in renewables and EVs in the past. But fossil fuel lobbying prevented that. Now everyone is paying the price.
Fortescue seems to manage just fine going electric.
Fortescue has received a truckload of subsidy money, including money for abandoned projects which has not been paid back, as of February 6th. I’d be managing just fine as well if I received hundreds of millions of dollars of soft money grants without having to fulfil the grant conditions.
Myusername, you seem to have forgotten your sarcasm tag.
Bulletin:
Renew Economy Feb 13, 2026:
Fortescue has officially unveiled the first of its first two battery locomotives …
“These two locomotives are the first two. We’re going to test them now” …
Currently, Fortescue’s 70 diesel locomotives use about 80 million litres of diesel a year …
The two battery additions will save about 1 million litres a year, the company says.
Hilarious – less duty time between refills.
I sometimes wonder what it is like being a chief engineer at Fortescue.
Maybe “it won’t work!”
”Who cares if it works, that’s maintenance and subsidies for 20 years!”
(Robocop homage)
Great. So now the company has two electric locomotives using grid electricity I suppose? Australia’s grid is approximately powered by half coal and one third gas. What Fortescue really bought then is two coal and gas powered locomotives to replace some diesel locomotives. Just where is the climate advantage?
No grid where they run their trains. If the battery lasts, well done, if it performs as expected, you could expect the train to remain at the station.
Nothing but a shunter.
Give a rest.
I find it hilarious when renewable energy and electric vehicle propagandists tell us that these things are failing because fossil fuel interests are paying huge amounts of money to prevent their adoption. It’s almost as if you imagine that fossil fuel companies extract fossil fuels for fun, and then force you to buy their products!
You rely on fossil fuels to survive. Renewable energy cannot produce the energy you need to survive. There isn’t enough reliable electricity to support the electric vehicles you think we need, and even if there was, they’re far too expensive and impractical for the vast majority of users. So you depend on ICE vehicles to survive too.
Renewable energy companies and electric vehicle manufacturers keep going bust as soon as taxpayer subsidies dry up. They’re completely unviable. Nobody needs to lobby anyone, just stand back and watch them crumble. Any lobbying is in your paranoid fantasies.
Renewable energy consumed – 232 GJ
Non-renewable energy consumed – 37,621,628 GJ
https://tracenable.com/company/fortescue/energy
Says it all really.
You don’t understand.
Last year Renewable was only 231GJ. At this rate everything will be renewable before you notice.
Renewables wouldn’t even exist without lobbying, let alone subsidies
as they are the fat ugly chick in a beauty contest.
They are only there because energy-DEI made feminist looking women mandatory at those contest.
A less crazy Griff with no warmophobie and an hoenest approach would argue that Western countries should have invested all this money in nuclear and increasing battery capacity(we would have twice the battery capacity by now if we’d invested renewable money into battery research) and 0-1% in renewables,
as cheap energy production and storage is the way out of energy dependence and,in your case ,co2 release.
But this would not lead to your desired ” own nothing and love it”scenario.
You’re not wrong: if we had sabotaged our economy earlier, we might perhaps now be starting to realize that this obsession with renewables was a lamentable, harmful, and self-destructive mistake.
Right, I’ve heard that the ff companies have given Anthony Watts millions to maintain this web site so it wouldn’t have to have extremely lame advertisements on every page. 🙂 /s
Its all part of our subtle plot… 🙂
Boy, one stupid comment by MLR and look at all the money he makes. 🙂
// … comment by MLR …
Major League Rugby?
I am amused at the kind of ads that show up here. They’re targeting old fat white men with ED. I only have three of those problems!
Now looking at “A Teaspoon On an Empty Stomach Burns All Parasites Extremely Fast” popup. Ugh. Where’s that f— oil money going!!
Well, I’m sure the editors here are all paid 6 figure salaries. 🙂
“How to Clean Your Yard In 5 Mins (No Back Pain)”
Ugh.
While:
“Anthony Watt’s renowned car collection consists of approximately 180 to 250+ unique automobiles and 160 motorcycles, valued between $52 million and $100 million. Located in Burbank, CA, the “Big Dog Garage” houses a diverse range of vehicles from 1906 steam cars to modern hypercars, including a $20 million 1994 McLaren”
Oh, no, never mind, that’s Jay Leno. Typo.
bingo!
Western of which exactly place?
FYI: The types of energy are : thermal, electrical, solar, wind, and wave. In modern industrial and commercial economies, thermal energy is the type of energy most used by far. The heavy industries and heavy transportation systems will always use large amounts of fossil fuels. The heavy machinery used in agriculture will also use large amounts of fossil fuels. Space and water heating will always use fossil
fuels. Large amounts of fossil fuels are used by the chemical process industries.
I could on for quite sometime about the use fossil fuels, but I’ll stop for now. You got the picture about fossil fuels?
It’s a good thing you stopped. You’d just be wasting your time and breath on a response to MLR. You can’t have a rational conversation with irrational people.
… with irrational people
But I can always try to educate them that that CO2 produced from the use of FF does not cause warming of the air.
Change fossil fuels to carbon fuels or hydrocarbons and coal.
“Fossil fuels” was a marketing trick to make oil seem like a higher price was justified.
Really? Australian mining giant to make UK job cuts.
Western countries should have invested far more in
renewablesNuclear andEVsoil/gas in the past. Butfossil fuelso-called Big Green lobbying prevented that. Now everyone is paying the price.Fixed it for ya
AND COAL !! The cheapest most reliable energy source.
Funny how everything that doesn’t go the way you want it to, is the result of lobbying.
The idea that electrifying everything doesn’t work and is rightly being rejected by those who have a choice.
Fortescue shares have dropped 12 percent in the 3 weeks
Point 1: If WTG and SV were economically advantageous, it would be here without tax dollar subsidies. If it was profitable, the oil companies would have jumped on it long ago. They are not.
Point 2: If EVs were economically advantageous and the infrastructure was in place they would be mainstream today. They are not.
Fortescue has not gone electric. They are a green company with a goal of going all electric. Too soon to say they are managing just fine as it has not happened. They are doing well because the price of copper is going up.
https://www.fortescue.com/en
Poor Marie Antoinette, to whom that dreadful remark is attributed! Our contemporary eco-aristocrats might say, “Let them eat vegan! Better for the planet, and for their wallets!”
I suggest we stop ruining people’s lives and lecturing them.
In Europe, people talk a lot about the originality—and the dangerousness—of Australian wildlife. I wonder what box jellyfish, inland taipans, saltwater crocodiles, great white sharks, dingoes, and other uncooperative kangaroos think about it.
The friendliest are probably the wombats—although a bite and a good swipe of the paw are quite possible if you bother them. And, my God, those koala claws…
There’s a school of thought that the “Let them eat cake” quote was revolutionary propaganda to poison the reputation of someone who spent a lot of her time trying to help the poor and unfortunate, so the public wouldn’t object when they executed her. You know, lying proto-communists.
But it’s still a good metaphor for out of touch politicians.
I think that idea is very accurate! Marie Antoinette was a very unhappy woman, I believe, and she did not deserve to end up on the guillotine. Louis XVI didn’t either, for that matter. The revolutionary turn was catastrophic in many respects. They executed scientists who had done nothing to anyone, as well as writers and poets.
Moreover, Maximilien Robespierre is a real idol for leftists and other French eco-extremists. These people are warmongers, agitators, and ultimately, I greatly fear, bloodthirsty.
Did you not know, Charles, that all revolutions are run by idiots? “Kill all the intellectuals!” was the cry in one far-eastern country. So they did and the new rulers found, when a nasty virus started going round, that the mobs had killed most of the doctors! It didn’t end well.
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. George Washington probably wasn’t an idiot.
Well, George and the American Revolution is sort of very successfully history-storified. There was a taxpayer uprising in the 13 colonies, but a real war going on with Napoleon. The British were largely in control in North America having had military scuffles there with the Spanish and French…But then, the British army was ordered to march to New Orleans to board ships and go back to Europe to fight Napoleon in 1814. On their way, they burnt down Washington and a few other towns for entertainment, kept the would-be colony gov’t in hiding in the woods for 2 years just to prove who was boss. Once the troops left, those militiamen declared themselves the “winners”, as is the accepted norm for the side manning the civilian checkpoints.
The British continued on and thumped Napoleon in Europe, barely acknowledging the American skirmish.
A bit over a century later, the American banking system had lent so much money to the British to win 2 world wars, then entered those wars to ensure loan repayment… that the entire British empire collapsed under the weight of that debt.
See….who writes up is “history” has a bit of revisionist story-telling licence.…
DMac:
Nice mash-up of an alternative history! For a minute there I thought I was reading more historical fiction by Howard Zinn. Lol
Actually not only had the American bankers put a lot of pressure on their gov’t to “ get shootin’” so their loans weren’t defaulted on by the British…..but they had also previously lent a lot of money to Germany that allowed the Germans to rebuild their huge war machine (post 1925) in record time after Hitler came to power. With the Germans however, US bankers made sure to get paid in gold…
Meanwhile in the Pacific, the U.S. was blocking Japanese access to the oil production available in Indonesia that they considered vital to their economic development. The Japanese decided a preemptive strike on the U.S. was required and undertook the Pearl Harbour attack….not unlike present day Trump’s decision to have a preemptive strike on Iran. The banking system pressure was strong enough that the US military sent men and equipment to Europe first, to make sure Britain could pay its war debts instead of lose….
The Japanese had greatly underestimated the capacity of the military equipment factories that had been built with the benefit of British borrowing in North America and it was a matter of time until they would not be able to keep up due to lack of raw materials.
So there’s some more revisionist history for you….or is it ?
But he wasn’t running it, Eric; he was the one they had the sense to vote in as the guy-in-charge afterwards. Maybe I should have said “mostly”.
I’m afraid it’s even sadder than that: often (not always, that’s true) it’s intellectuals who set revolutions in motion, only to be overtaken by their own extremists once there are no longer enough heads left to cut off — unless they manage to stay in their comrades’ good graces and die of old age after having their population slaughtered in the name of “the just cause.”
EDIT : Excuse me, this message is a reply to atticman. I got all mixed up.
Throw in teachers and anyone wearing glasses (because it made them look smart) and you have more recent Killing Fields in Cambodia. History doesn’t repeat, but it sure rhymes.
There is a story of Kublai Khan who, when petitioned for relief due to a devastating locust infestation, issued a decree giving the peasants permission to eat the locusts.
One version is that this remark originally was a meme, dark humour about the aristocracy in general.
If so, the petty aristocracy just passed the buck to her corpse between killing her and killing most of each other, and the survivors stuck to it.
That’s very possible! I actually find “let them eat brioche” rather funny, but I do have the slightly cynical mindset that goes with it, and I love dark humor — which is said to be the politeness of despair.
In the end, it was the executioner Sanson who came out of it best: he belonged to every faction, as long as there were people to execute. And then, his work completed, he would go to fetch his bread (or his brioche!) from the baker, who had carefully set it aside from the rest of the batch and turned it over, as custom required.
“One way to improve our oil security is to use less oil.”
Right … What if we brought back “factory cities”? Everyone walks to work.
Copilot AI …
“”The first American factory-centered communities emerged in New England textile towns, where mills were intentionally built alongside dense worker housing.
These were not just factories with nearby housing; they were fully planned urban environments built around a single industry.”
The oil-for-commute problem can be solved with electric cars and nuclear power.
Not a good fit for the modern gig economy…
But what if you don’t want to spend your life living in a boardinghouse, eating in the Company cafeteria and shopping in the company store? I suspect the whole concept wouldn’t get much traction for Gen X or Z.
The original 15 minute cities.
While this piece notes the author needed gas to cook, and a generator to run freezers, due to bad weather on at least 5 occasions in the last decade, there is a push in some states to eliminate gas from homes. If gas is banned in favour of electricity, and the grid is down, what then? Are off-grid solar+battery and generator homes the future for those living outside the handful of cities containing the majority of Australia’s population?
If you add Tesla’s satellite service for internet and phone, plus independent sewerage management, the entire concept of utility services and modern urban areas starts to unravel. Water aside, what needs to be connected, especially for those who work from home? And yes I’m aware there’s plenty that are off town water and rely on tanks for rainwater, but they don’t work so well in droughts.
What precisely is the purpose of a town?
Purpose? It is known as the “division of labor”.
See: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, [1776]
How many different grocery stores, gas stations, garages, restaurants, etc. do you need in a town? Or within driving distance?
Water asside? Many places one can drill a well.
While I agree with all the comments reacting to “myusername” all your attention paid to him are likely exactly his desired outcome – to hijack rational discussion.
Please consider simply ignoring myusername and proceed with the well-reasoned discussions the radical libs so fear.
He probably gets paid by the response so ignoring him would by like a boycott. Maybe when he loses his income he will go bother someone else.
A simple signage is needed: DON’T FEED THE TROLLS!
Australian ranking on the eia coal production by nation list Internet delivered:
5 (2024)
6 (2023)
5 (2022)
5 (2021)
5 (2020)
4 (2019)
5 (2018)
5 (2017)
4 (2016)
Australia is also, by far,the major coal mining for export country in the world with 46 such projects underway almost 50% of such projects ( 95) world wide
IEA ‘Coal 2024 Analysis and Forecast to 2027’ (Dec. 2024)
Can we blame Australia’s education system for the nonsense taking place there or is it something else?
Why does the heavy machinery used in mining and agriculture get a free pass on CO2 emissions?
It doesn’t 🙁
Tractors are regarded as almost as bad as belching cows.
Off-road diesel use is treated as being subsidised because of the road tax rebate.
Actually, the most logical solution is to build a huge nuclear power station/hydrocarbon processing facility (or two..) somewhere in the coalfields and make all of the petroleum based feedstocks that we would ever need. No more searching for oil, no more fracking. Total energy independence.Simples..