Hundreds of service stations across Australia have run empty, fuel prices are elevated and oil shipments have been cancelled.
Australia is battling a fuel crises as Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz continues to bite. The federal government has released fuel reserves, cut fuel excise taxes and rolled out a national fuel security plan.
While we know there have been outages and price increases, it can be difficult to get a full picture of what’s happening, in part due to the thousands of independent businesses and different governments involved. We have brought together the latest data on prices, outages and oil tanker deliveries.
Looking at the averages for petrol and diesel across Australia, we can see how much prices have risen since the US and Israel’s war on Iran began in late February.
There can be a huge variation in price and availability, even across a relatively small area. Fuel outages aren’t static – stations can run out and regain stock as governments and companies race to fill gaps in supply chains and release more fuel.
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The map below shows the number of fuel outages across Australia, day by day. You can hover over the stations for a macro view, and click through the dates where data is available.
Since we began collecting data on 27 March, you can see a spike in outages in New South Wales and Victoria on 30 and 31 March.
The next chart shows the total number of stations out of at least one kind of fuel on each day. This is an estimate and may be an undercount given the different timescales that each state reports data.
At least six fuel shipments to Australia have already been cancelled or deferred, and experts say there will probably be more delays or cancellations.
The next chart shows the total number of “port calls” – or stops – at Australian ports by tankers with shipments of fuel and crude oil, which is refined to make fuel.
The data does not distinguish between imports and exports, but it does show a slight decline in the number of tankers in February and March compared with the last six years.
The same dataset shows a complete collapse in tankers travelling through the strait of Hormuz in the first weeks of March. Before the war, about a fifth of global oil and a third of fertilisers were shipped through the strait.
Notes and methods:
Data is sourced from government fuel websites and apis on a daily basis.
Average petrol, e10 and diesel prices are sourced from Motormouth once a day.
Some government fuel data is live, while some is refreshed on a delay or when stations change prices – all displayed dates are when the data is retrieved.
Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory explicitly indicate in their data whether fuel is available.
Outages for NSW and Tasmania are estimated based on the types of fuels each station tends to carry compared to what is currently available.
Outages for Western Australia are based on temporary outage dates for each station. WA data for 26 to 30 March has been extracted from historic Fuelwatch data, with outages estimated in the same way as NSW and Tasmania.
Daily total outage counts are based on the sum of all the data displayed for each date in the map.
Tanker data is sourced from Portwatch from the University of Oxford, using data from the IMF. Counts are port visits by tanker ships, which could be either imports or exports.
Tanker data is sourced on a daily basis but is not updated every day.
This page will be updated and added to as the fuel crisis continues. Any significant corrections made to this or previous versions of the article will continue to be footnoted in line with Guardian editorial policy
