12th August 2022
Memo to Jacinda
Welcome to the new normal minus the Marsden Point oil refinery. We now have the first evidence of how bad it can get for NZ with the news that we may suffer air travel disruptions due to supply of poor quality jet fuel from overseas suppliers.
Domestic and international flights leading up to Christmas will be hit by jet fuel rationing after contaminated aviation fuel was found in a shipment at Marsden Point.
The next shipment of fuel was not expected to arrive until December 12, said Cath O’Brien, executive director of Board of Airline Representatives of New Zealand (Barnz).
Airlines would try to avoid cancelling flights, and were working urgently on solutions including “tankering”, or filling up to capacity in short-haul ports such as Australia to help with onward flights.
Some aircraft might take off with fewer exports on board.
King said the likely problem was that water that had got into the refined fuel on board the ship.
She estimated that a tanker’s worth, or “hundreds of thousands of gallons”, of fuel would have to be dumped. “It is really significant.”
The closure of the Marsden Point refinery this year made flushing the whole system out much harder, King said.
You may talk about the suppliers being responsible and having to make it right but that doesn’t in any way solve the immediate problem, that NZ lacks a safe reliable source of jet fuel right now.
Yes it is the supplier’s problem in the long run but the immediate problem is ours. We are the ones that don’t have a secure good quality supply of jet fuel right now and we are the ones that will have to make accommodations to deal with this problem until such time as we can get the suppliers to deal with the quality issues.
This issue of a quality supply of fuel is only one of the perverse outcomes as a result of the decision to close the Marsden Point refinery. The refinery was one of the main sources of CO2 for food manufacturing in NZ and the constrained supply since the refinery closed has put many NZ manufacturers into a position where they have to evaluate whether or not they are able to carry on producing due to the shortage of CO2.
The refinery was also the source for most of the bitumen used as the basis of most asphalt and road sealing which now has to be sourced from overseas again leaving the road construction and maintenance industry in a precarious position in relation to supply of one of their main resources.
I have been told that NZ currently holds approximately (28 days for petrol, 24 days for jet fuel and 21 days for diesel) of storage and after that we are totally reliant on the vagaries of international shipping to ensure our further supplies.
And let’s be quite honest about NZ’s demand and acknowledge that with our volumes required we are not going to be front the queue if there is a problem with sourcing shipping. There is every likelihood that not only will we face quality issues in the future but there is every likelihood that we will also face supply issues from shipping problems at some time in the future.