Australia imports about 90% of its refined fuel through shipping chokepoints thousands of kilometres from Australian shores. MMA programme retires diesel demand by electrifying freight at scale, and the corridor structure can carry an oil pipeline if and when the country decides to build one. The platform provides the infrastructure. The country chooses what to put in it.
Australia imports about 90% of its refined fuel, holds the developed world’s thinnest reserve — barely 30 days of diesel against the IEA’s 90 — and pays on the order of $64 billion a year for the arrangement — more, in 2025–26, than the nation’s entire LNG export income.
In 2000 the country produced and refined more than 560,000 barrels a day and met 98 per cent of its own needs; it now produces about 5.6 per cent of the crude it consumes. Imported fuel is only “cheap” on a calm day.
From here there are two paths: stay a price-taker on imported fuel, or make it here and export the surplus. Two memos carry it. Australia’s Fuel Security — Part 1: The Position and the Government’s Response sets out where the country stands, what the arrangement costs and what the Government is doing about it. Australia’s Fuel Security — Part 2: Every Method of Domestic Production sets out every method of replacing an imported litre. MMA is how it gets built — in six moves.
1 · Cut the demand we canThe largest single line in the oil-import bill is freight diesel, and it moves onto the corridor’s electrified rail — the same elevated right of way carrying passenger maglev and the high-voltage transmission that runs both, so the vehicle and its fuel supply are one build.
Maglev takes the intercity car journeys and much of the domestic aviation task, which is the hardest fuel demand in the country to replace by any other route. Passenger, mining and farm fleets electrify; high-speed rail takes much of the domestic aviation task. An all-electric passenger fleet alone would replace roughly a third of Australia’s imported oil with domestic electricity. One policy pulls the wrong way: the Fuel Tax Credit rebates around $10 billion a year of off-road and heavy-vehicle diesel, keeping imported fuel artificially cheap — redirect it toward electrification and domestic fuel and the switch pays for itself far faster.
2 · Grow the fuel that’s leftWhat can’t be electrified — long-haul aviation, shipping, heavy industry — is made from what the country grows. Australia already grows fuel: the 2025–26 canola harvest alone is worth on the order of 2.2 billion litres of biodiesel — about a month of national diesel, needing no tanker, no chokepoint and no foreign government’s permission. Reserve half of each year’s crop for domestic processing and that is a standing 18–22 days of diesel, every year — before the renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel the world is short of and pays a premium for.
Australia has almost nowhere to process it: about 1.6 million tonnes of crushing capacity against a 6 to 7.6 million tonne crop, in eight plants — six in the eastern states and two small ones in Western Australia, the biggest growing state. Six million tonnes of seed leaves each year, almost all unprocessed, worth more than two billion litres of renewable diesel if it were crushed here.
The answer is capacity built through the growing zones themselves, at two scales: macro plants at grain-belt hubs sized to a district’s harvest, and micro plants at co-operative and farm scale. Freight falls, the protein meal stays local as stockfeed, and the fleets that work the country run on fuel made in it. The jobs land there too, in three waves — building the plants, fabricating them in Australian workshops because the designs repeat, and then running them on permanent shift work for the life of the plant. Loading seed onto a train is a handful of shifts; crushing it and making fuel from it is a workforce. Regions that already crush show steadier prices than export-dependent zones.
Hemp adds a second crop with two fuels in it — about 800 litres a hectare of biodiesel from the seed, and roughly 4,500 litres a hectare of ethanol from a stalk that also gasifies to methanol — on country too poor for much else. Ethanol from grain and sugar, tallow and used cooking oil, and biomethane from waste complete the set.
Algae yields more oil per hectare than any crop and grows on non-arable land in saline water, but demonstrated production and cost keep it at pilot stage — a research line, not yet a delivery line. The feedstock is here; the processing is the gap to close.
3 · Drill, explore and refine our ownThe claim that Australia has no oil is a claim about price, not geology — and it is undercut by the fact that the country stopped looking. Dorado, off the Pilbara, was the largest oil discovery in Western Australia this century, found in 2018 in the barely-drilled Bedout Sub-basin — some seventeen exploration wells against more than fifteen hundred in the basin next door — by a well that was chasing gas. It is light, low-emission crude holding a gross contingent resource of 344 million barrels of oil equivalent — and eight years on it still has no investment decision, with the operator’s partner saying in June 2026 that one could come in late 2027 and first oil about three years after that.
It is not alone. In Queensland, Shell is already producing about 200 barrels a day of high-quality crude from the Taroom Trough, refined into diesel at Eromanga — the first new oil province the country has opened in fifty years, with more than $500 million committed to exploration behind it.
And the Great Australian Bight, which Geoscience Australia assessed at around five billion barrels, currently has not one petroleum exploration permit over any part of it: every company that held acreage there left on commercial grounds, not because the basin was proved empty.
Meanwhile Australia produces about 400,000 barrels a day and ships more than 94 per cent of it out to be refined by somebody else. That is not a country without oil. It is a country that exports its oil and buys back the products made from it. A serious, sovereign exploration effort across the frontier basins is overdue and should begin now.
And the oil it finds need not leave the country to be refined: modular refineries — skid-mounted units built in under a year, at a fraction of a legacy plant’s cost and matched to exactly the light condensate Australia produces — can process it here, ending the absurdity of shipping raw crude out and buying refined fuel back.
That capacity comes at two scales. Macro splitters at the coastal condensate hubs — Karratha, Darwin, Gladstone — where the light liquids are already gathered and loaded for export, taking their feed off a stream that exists today. And micro units inland, sized to a field and a regional market: the Eromanga refinery in south-west Queensland already does it, taking local crude by road and making diesel for the country around it.
4 · Convert coal, gas and power into liquid fuelAustralia’s three largest energy endowments each convert to transport fuel by proven routes. Gas-to-liquids is commercial at scale overseas and turns reserves among the largest on earth into diesel and jet fuel; methanol from gas is the simplest of the conversions and already accepted as a marine fuel; coal-to-liquids has fuelled much of South Africa’s economy for decades, and its higher emissions put it behind the cleaner routes in build order rather than out of the set.
Renewable power makes fuel too. Green hydrogen replaces diesel where batteries are hardest and gas in industrial heat; green ammonia is both a shipping fuel and the molecule behind nitrogen fertiliser and the AdBlue urea that ran to ten days of national stock in the 2026 crisis; and hydrogen combined with captured carbon produces methanol, kerosene and diesel that drop into existing engines. Hydrogen is also the input that lets renewable diesel and aviation fuel scale here without importing the very thing they are meant to displace.
Every one of those fuels is priced by the electricity that makes it: ammonia, methanol and synthetic kerosene are hydrogen with further steps added, and electrolysis power is the dominant cost in all of them. At high power prices they are a laboratory curiosity; at low ones they are an export industry. Cheap power is not a helpful condition for the hydrogen path — it is the path, and it is why the generation and the corridor that carries it belong in the same programme.
5 · Hold the bridgeWhile the transition runs, a real 90-day strategic reserve — built to the IEA standard Australia alone among members has failed for over a decade — holds the country through a shock. It is not the answer; a bigger tank still holds a fuel the country doesn’t make. But it is the prudent bridge until the demand is gone.
And it should be held underground. The United States stores its reserve in solution-mined salt caverns at roughly $3.50 a barrel against $15–18 for above-ground tanks — up to ten times cheaper — with geological pressure sealing any crack, the oil holding its quality for years, a surface footprint a tenth the size, and none of the exposure of a tank farm. Australia has salt-bearing basins and depleted reservoirs already used to store gas; whether they suit liquid fuel is a geological question nobody has asked at national scale.
6 · Become a net exporterSelf-sufficiency is the floor, not the ceiling. Australia already ships out raw crude, gas and coal and buys refined fuel back — handing the value-adding middle to others and keeping the strategic risk for itself. Flip it: cut the demand, make the rest at home, and turn what the country produces beyond its own needs into exports of finished and clean fuels to a region that will need them. From importing finished fuel to manufacturing and selling it — the developed world’s thinnest reserve turned into one of its most secure.
None of it requires a technology that does not exist. What is missing is the objective: a stated national target of 100 per cent domestic supply, with a date and the import share published against it, and the acreage, offtake guarantees and redirected fuel-tax credit that follow from setting one.