Edited graphic fuels fears about Australia's petrol reserves
- Published on March 23, 2026 at 07:37
- Updated on March 23, 2026 at 08:51
- 4 min read
- By Dene-Hern CHEN, AFP Australia
Panic buying since the outbreak of the Middle East war has driven petrol shortages in Australia, but a graphic shared in posts claiming the country only has 18 days' worth of petrol in its reserves has been manipulated. The graphic was altered from one created by local broadcaster SBS showing petrol reserves at 36 days. Experts also told AFP the fear of Australia running out of fuel has been "blown out of proportion" and tankers are still coming to the country.
"If this is NOT a perfect example for Australia to go back to being self sustainable and refine our own fuels and resources, I don't know what is," reads a Facebook post shared on March 15, 2026.
"Australia's airlines are mostly going to be GROUNDED in about 2 weeks or so."
Attached to the post is a graphic bearing the logo of broadcaster SBS and supposedly compiled using data from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (archived link).
It says Australia has 18 days' worth of fuel in its reserves, with diesel sitting at 16 days and jet fuel at 14.
The same graphic also circulated elsewhere on Facebook.
Posts claiming Australia's energy minister had said the country only had 18 days' worth of fuel remaining also proliferated in similar Facebook and X posts, without the graphic.
They spread as Australia -- reliant on oil imports for fuel -- saw petrol prices spike due to panic buying since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East.
The war erupted when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, prompting Tehran to retaliate with strikes across the region and sharply restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz (archived link). Around a fifth of global crude oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the waterway in peacetime.
Price gouging by retailers combined with a doubling of demand as motorists stockpiled fuel has seen "real and unacceptable shortages", Energy Minister Chris Bowen said after the government moved to increase supply to rural areas (archived link).
But claims the country's petrol reserves have dipped to 18 days -- or that Bowen had said so -- are false and rely on a manipulated graphic.
Fuel stocks
A keyword search on Google brought up a March 14 article from SBS with a similarly formatted graphic that says Australia's petrol reserves in fact stands at 36 days (archived link).
Bowen had addressed Australia's fuel supplies during a press conference on the same day.
"Firstly, in terms of petrol, we have 1.6 billion litres. That is actually now, 37 days worth of supply," he said, according to a transcript released by his office on the day of the press conference (archived link). The minister added that Australia has about 30 days of supply for diesel and 29 days of supply for jet fuel.
He also said the government would slash the Minimum Stockholding Obligation -- which guarantees a baseline level of fuel stock -- for petrol and diesel by 20 percent, allowing the release of up to 762 million litres from Australia's domestic reserves.
"These can be targeted towards localised market disruption," he said.
The numbers cited by Bowen and used by the SBS graphic broadly tally with the weekly stock levels reported on the website of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, which says Australia's petrol supplies were at 38 days (archived link).
Iranian state media
A reverse image search of the falsely shared graphic found it had been published by Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency.
The graphic appears to have the watermark of Google's AI tool Gemini in the bottom-right corner, though results from Google's SynthID detector were inconclusive for signs of AI manipulation.
SBS told AFP on March 23 that they did not produce the graphic used in the Tasnim article.
Fears overblown
Lurion de Mello of Sydney's Macquarie University said the fears of fuel reserves running dry is "kind of blown out of proportion", reiterating the government's assurances that fuel is still coming in (archived link).
"I have access to the shipping data -- all those ships, all the oil tankers are still coming in," he told AFP on March 20.
"Fuel has still been coming into Australia. It's been costing more, but it's still coming in and so we're not running out of fuel," Tony Wood, energy and climate change senior fellow at Grattan Institute, told AFP in a March 20 phone interview (archived link).
He explained that some of the shortages are happening in regional and rural areas where people have to drive long distances in their daily lives, which makes sense why the public might want to stockpile petroleum.
But panic buying more fuel would not translate to people using it more.
"So the fuel is still in our supply chain -- it hasn't been consumed," he said. "What the government's decided to do is release some of that strategic reserve... That won't change anything, except it will help people be a bit calmer, I hope."
The false claims about Australia's fuel reserves have also been debunked by the Australian Associated Press and NewsGuard (archived here and here).
AFP has debunked other false claims related to the war in the Middle East.
This story was amended to update the archived link in the second paragraph, and to include comment from broadcaster SBS.March 23, 2026 This story was amended to update the archived link in the second paragraph, and to include comment from broadcaster SBS.
Copyright © AFP 2017-2026. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
