New Zealand’s fuel supply five months into the Hormuz crisis

New Zealand had 53.9 days of petrol cover, 55 days of diesel and 49.1 days of jet fuel as at 2 August, counting stock in tanks here and cargoes already on ships heading our way. Five months after the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed to commercial shipping, the pumps still work, and most of us have stopped thinking about it.

That is a very different picture from April, when we first examined how exposed New Zealand’s fuel supply had become and petrol was heading for its wartime peak. What has changed since then is worth setting out, because the calm at the pump is the product of a supply chain that has been substantially rebuilt in real time, a government diesel reserve that now physically exists at Marsden Point, and a run of luck that has so far held.

How much fuel New Zealand has in August 2026

New Zealand currently holds around 50 days of cover for each of the three main fuels. Days of cover measure how long normal demand could be met if no new fuel arrived at all. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment publishes the figures fortnightly, split between stock already in the country and cargoes at sea, some up to two days away and some up to three weeks away.

Fuel	Days of cover in New Zealand	Total including ships en route
Petrol	28.9	53.9
Diesel	22.9	55.0
Jet fuel	25.0	49.1

The figures come from MBIE’s fuel stock and shipping update of 2 August, which counted 13 fuel ships on the water and reported that importers have confirmed orders covering the next three months. The ministry’s assessment, updated on 7 August, is that supply is stable, stocks remain well above minimum requirements, and shipments continue to arrive as expected. New Zealand remains at phase one, the lowest of four, of the Fuel Response Plan it stood up on 27 March.

How the fuel kept coming

Since the Marsden Point refinery stopped refining in April 2022, New Zealand has imported every litre of finished fuel it uses. Before the crisis, about 48 percent of it came from refineries in South Korea and about a third from Singapore, and those refineries run largely on crude oil from the Gulf. When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran on 28 February, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed, and the crude those refineries depend on looked like it might stop arriving.

The International Energy Agency calls what followed the largest disruption in oil market history. Flows through the strait fell from around 20 million barrels a day to an average of 2.7 million across March, April and May, and cumulative supply losses have passed 1.3 billion barrels. Within two weeks of the war starting, IEA member countries agreed to release 400 million barrels from emergency stocks, the biggest release in the agency’s 50 year history. The IEA has published a detailed account of how global supply readjusted.

For New Zealand, the readjustment worked through three channels. Saudi Arabia’s East West pipeline, which crosses the peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu and bypasses Hormuz entirely, has been running at its full capacity of about seven million barrels a day, keeping crude flowing to the Asian refineries that supply us. More crude has come into the market from the United States, Brazil and Guyana. And China has relaxed its own limits on petrol and diesel exports, easing pressure on the refined fuel market across Asia. We traced that supply chain in detail in May, and it has held since.

The strait itself is not fully shut. Tanker tracking data in early August showed outbound energy tanker transits averaging around six a day, up from about two the week before, against a pre-war norm of 25 to 30. But nobody in the fuel industry is planning around Hormuz reopening. The system that supplies New Zealand today is built around it.

The diesel reserve at Marsden Point

The closest New Zealand has come to trouble was early June, when diesel stocks slipped to their lowest level since the war began, as 1News reported at the time, just as the Government’s first strategic reserve shipment was still at sea. The gap closed, the ship arrived in mid June, and a second followed in early July.

That reserve now exists in physical form, two former crude oil tanks at Marsden Point refurbished by Channel Infrastructure with a combined capacity of about 93 million litres. MBIE puts the secured volume of diesel at just over 90 million litres, bought by the Government together with Z Energy, which is roughly nine days of the country’s typical diesel demand. The diesel is controlled by the Government, sits outside fuel companies’ minimum stockholding obligations, and is deliberately excluded from the published stock figures above. We covered the first shipment’s arrival in June, and the detail is in the Beehive’s announcement of the programme.

It is worth pausing on what that means. Four years after the refinery shut, its tanks are storing Crown diesel as a national insurance policy. The site that once symbolised New Zealand’s fuel vulnerability is now the centrepiece of its fuel resilience.

Petrol prices and the $50 a week payment

Prices tell the same story in a bumpier way. A litre of 91 octane peaked at around $3.48 in the autumn, slipped under $3 in late June after a ceasefire pulled oil prices back, then jumped again in late July after a tanker was reportedly struck off the Saudi coast and Brent crude hit a six week high near US$96 a barrel. Fuel company forecasts at the time picked 91 settling just under $3, with Westpac’s chief economist warning the shock was not over by any stretch of the imagination. Since then the pressure has eased again, with monitoring in the first week of August showing prices drifting a few percent below their July levels.

That yo-yo matters beyond the forecourt, because a $50 a week payment to about 143,000 working families is wired directly to it. The temporary lift in the in-work tax credit, introduced on 1 April as the Government’s cost of living response to the fuel shock, ends automatically if 91 octane averages under $3 a litre for four consecutive weeks. Petrol dipping below that line in June started the clock, and the late July spike stopped it. Cabinet is now weighing what to do with the scheme, with ministers openly split between ending it and holding on through the volatility.

What would have to break

The picture is not risk-free, and it is worth being precise about what the remaining risks are. They are step changes, not gradual declines, and there are three that matter. This is our reading of the official data and reporting, not an official forecast.

• The workaround gets hit. The East West pipeline and the Red Sea route now carry the load Hormuz used to. Houthi forces in Yemen threatened Red Sea shipping again in late July, and a serious strike on either the pipeline or Red Sea traffic would put the Asian refineries that supply New Zealand back under crude pressure.
• Our suppliers turn inward. South Korea restricted naphtha exports for five months earlier in the crisis, a sign of a government prioritising domestic supply. If crude feedstocks tighten again, restrictions on petrol, diesel and jet fuel exports would be the next step, and New Zealand is a small customer at the end of a long shipping route.
• Shipping reprices. War risk insurance premiums have already pushed freight costs up. A sharp escalation could make some routes uneconomic or uninsurable faster than governments can respond.

Against those risks sit the defences built since February. The response plan has three further phases of escalating measures if supply genuinely tightens, the Marsden Point reserve adds a buffer that did not exist a year ago, and IEA membership gives New Zealand a claim on coordinated emergency releases. So far, not one scheduled shipment has failed to arrive.

What to watch from here

• MBIE’s next stock update on 12 August, and whether the roughly 50 day buffer holds
• Cabinet’s decision on the $50 a week fuel payment
• Whether the Gulf ceasefire holds, and with it the slow recovery in Hormuz transits
• Jet fuel stocks as summer tourism lifts demand on the tightest of the three fuels

Five months in, the honest summary of New Zealand’s fuel supply is that the system bent, was reinforced, and did not break. The risk now is not the one everyone watched in March. It is that the workaround holding everything up gets tested again while the rest of us have stopped paying attention.

Has the fuel shock changed how you drive, commute or run your business this year? Share your experience in the comments below.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂