Iran war: ‘Money talks’ in efforts to secure fuel supply ‒ economist
Friday, 10 April 2026
It’s not yet clear if the New Zealand Government will follow Australia’s lead in opening its chequebook to outbid competitors in the global tussle for fuel supply.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports the Australian Government has secured the support of the nation’s biggest fuel importers, Viva Energy and Ampol, to participate in a scheme to urgently boost shipments.
Under the scheme, taxpayers guarantee fuel companies’ losses if they bought expensive shipments before sudden oil price falls in an increasingly volatile market.
New Zealand - like Australia - is geographically disadvantaged in the oil supply chain that relies on crude oil making the long voyage through the Persian gulf to Asian refineries and then on to its delivery destination.
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Westpac chief economist Kelly Eckhold said available crude oil stocks had fallen - global exports plunging 25% - meaning the same number of people were now chasing fewer goods.
“The ongoing risk that we have here is that our visibility in terms of the incoming shipments is only extending out about three weeks and the challenge that the world has here is going to be for longer than three weeks.
“That big decline in global export volumes won’t be retraced in a week or two, even if the Strait of Hormuz opens up fully tomorrow [Saturday] … it’s going to take at least three or four months for crude oil to make it into refineries, for refineries to gear up again and start replacing those lost stocks.”
The tenuous situation underscored the importance of having an “active strategy” to manage these risks, though it was hard to know what was going on behind in the scenes in New Zealand’s fuel response, Eckhold said.
“I have to take the minister [Nicola Willis] at her word when she says that they are working quite intensively. I will note as well that some of those firms that are important in supplying energy into Australia are also important in supply energy to New Zealand as well.
“Ampol, for example, is a relatively big player here. So I would imagine that their group operations are thinking about how they’re going to supply all of their customers in the Australasia region.”
Cabinet last week agreed to explore additional options to guard against the risk of disrupted fuel supply and secure additional fuel security over and above existing minimum supply obligations.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Government was actively seeking proposals to support additional purchases of stock through to June as “an insurance policy”.
“The Government has already been approached by some parties with unsolicited proposals to increase supply, and we are now urgently progressing commercial assessment of those proposals,” she said on March 30.
On Friday, Willis’ office said there was no update on this work, other than it was progressing at pace.
Eckhold said it was probably reasonable to expect New Zealand could be lumped in with Australia when it came to securing fuel, but it couldn’t be complacent.
“In these situations, money talks. So we, New Zealand and Australia, are lucky in that sense that because we’re relatively higher per capita income countries that we do have the ability to pay. That ability to pay will be quite critical.”
As of Friday afternoon there had been no reports of material disruption to fuel ships en route to New Zealand.