Diesel rationing could come in weeks and prices could top $4/ltr, says Saul Kavonic | The Business

MST Marquee's head of energy research, Saul Kavonic says rationing could come into effect in Australia within weeks, and the price of diesel could skyrocket to $4 a litre, if US President Donald Trump follows through with threats to ban US diesel exports. The price of diesel is close to $3 a litre at the moment. Energy minister Chris Bowen is travelling to Saudi Arabia and India this week to try to secure fuel supplies for Australia. Mr Kavonic says this latest crisis comes a month after the Australian government announced it would disband its fuel supply taskforce. "The only real hypothetical scenarios - which might see us have to revisit rationing - was if passage of oil through the Red Sea started to be disrupted, or the US started to ban fuel exports. A month later, both of these things are now potentially happening at the same time ... if the US does go down this path ... I think we'll be looking at that in a matter of weeks." He says Australia is the largest importer of diesel in the world because of the resources and agricultural economy, and that makes Australia particularly vulnerable. "We've seen a number of refineries taken offline both in the Ukraine-Russia war and in the Middle East ... We've seen Russia turn off its exports of refined fuels, China did that earlier in the year," he says. There is a real concern that the US could impose an export ban, even just for a short period of time, because "doing something like this into an election could at least provide some price relief for several weeks, which is what you need heading into the midterms ... and then the rest of the world's going to pay the price in that near term," he says. If that happens, in the most severe scenario, the diesel price could top $4 a litre, Mr Kavonic says. #abcbusiness Subscribe: http://ab.co/1svxLVE Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-2... Note: In most cases, our captions are auto-generated. #ABCNEWS #ABCNEWSAustralia