Are we heading for a fuel shortage?

Publishing articles in tabloids about fuel shortages and petrol pump queues is a self fulfilling prophesy.

Same thing happened last year in the UK when there were a shortage of truck drivers post Brexit which impacted fuel deliveries to forecourts, in turn it made people panic go out and queue for fuel which resulted in fuel disappearing from filling stations even quicker.

These type of articles just add fuel to the fire (no pun intended).

Whatever about fuel, i’ll start panicking when there’s no bog roll left.

Imagine we had potential as a country to supply our own oil and gas.

Wouldnt that be something ay!??

We'll never supply our own oil and our gas will only ever meet a small portion of energy demand.

Well we definitely won’t know now thanks to the greens.

I have a vamat so don't need to worry about the bog roll 😁

Filled up there in Ballina, Mayo and the lad on the till reckoned the cheaper stations in the locality ran out of diesel earlier today

Picked up some unleaded tonight €1.89, I remember during the depths of Covid paying €1.12, I still have the receipt 😁

I got 500L on Thursday for €550. I didn't want it delivered until Friday but my supplier said if I waited a day then it would be €670. He expects to run out of everything except green diesel today.

(He's also only been serving regular customers for the past week or so due to panic buying).

Most defiantly going to be a fuel shortage. ESB will be turning away a shipment of coal from Russia next week at moneypoint, electricity security especially with these data centres drawing untold power may also see hits. Most scary thing of all is the food shortage that will 100% come. Farmers journal reporting between Ukraine and Russia alone 29% of global wheat exports, 26% of global barley exports, 20% global maize exports, 65% of global sunflower oil exports. RUSSIA also accounts for 25% of global fertiliser exports with another 25% coming out of Europe which is dependant on Russia gas to make it. Because of a fertiliser shortage and ridiculous cost (urea €340/ton last year €940/ton now), grassland agro fertiliser ceo said urea may be in the region of 1400-1500/ton come summer. No fertiliser reduced yields hence food shortages couple this with Russia and Ukraines exports being diminished this may be catastrophic.

In that article the IRHA are quoted as being the source of concern, not a place I'd be going for my economic insights. The US and others will be releasing a lot of oil from reserves so our only concern is the absolutely inevitable price surge. OPEC+, Russia are aligned with them, are in no great rush to increase supplies. They have a small increase scheduled for this month.

We essentially gave away the rights to the oil and gas off our coast for exploration, people complained about how little tax Shell paid on Corrib, yet there's only been 2 gas fields that ever produced commercially. We may have a lot of oil/gas off shore but it's never been recoverable.