In the middle of a national fuel crisis that has exposed just how dependent Australia is on imported refined product, a small piece of good news has emerged from central Queensland. The Queensland government this week announced a Taroom Trough Development Plan and formally called on the federal government to fast-track approvals for what could become Australia’s first new oilfield in 50 years. And quietly, production from the basin has already begun.
About seven weeks ago, Shell began producing liquid condensate from one of its appraisal wells at the Taroom Trough, a basin about 480km northwest of Brisbane that has been largely inactive for 50 years. Shell is now producing around 200 barrels a day of condensate, which is being trucked to iOR’s Eromanga refinery in southwest Queensland, where it is processed into on-road diesel and a specialised low-particulate diesel used in underground mining. The Eromanga refinery is Australia’s smallest, with capacity to process around 1,250 barrels a day, but it is an independently owned and operated facility that has quietly been doing exactly what the country now desperately needs: refining Australian hydrocarbons into Australian diesel on Australian soil.
Two hundred barrels a day is a small number. Australia imports roughly 330,000 barrels of crude per day, and the closure of the Lytton and Altona refineries in 2021 left us with just two large-scale refineries. Taroom Trough at its current level will not move the dial on national supply. But it is a proof of concept with government backing to scale. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli has called on the federal government to designate the project as one of national interest and fast-track approvals under the National Interest Fast-Track Assessment Pathway. Shell, Beach Energy, Omega and Tri-Star E&P are all exploring the basin through joint ventures, and the early results have been encouraging enough for the Queensland government to commit to streamlining roads and trunk infrastructure under the new Taroom Trough Development Plan.
Crisafulli put it simply: “Never again should we be left without the ability to generate domestic fuel supply. This is a generational opportunity to ensure we’re not left at the end of a global supply chain. National fuel security is about drilling, refining and storing fuel locally for refuelling family cars, transporting food, and harvesting crops.”
For independent operators, there are a few things worth noting in this story. The first is that the infrastructure doing this work right now is an independent refinery. When the conversation turns to rebuilding Australia’s refining capacity, iOR Eromanga is proof that smaller, nimble, independently owned facilities have a role to play, not just the large refineries. The second is that the Queensland government is explicitly framing this as a fuel security issue and tying it directly to the current crisis. That matters because the window for structural reform is usually narrow. It opens during a crisis and closes again when things return to normal. The industry voices calling for domestic refining and storage investment need to make their case now, while governments are still listening.
The timeline is long. Even if Taroom Trough gets fast-tracked through federal environmental approvals and scales production significantly, it will be years before this translates into any meaningful impact on retail diesel prices or wholesale supply. The federal government has already indicated it cannot exempt fossil fuel projects from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, though Environment Minister Murray Watt has said the government is open to considering concrete proposals. The politics will be contested. But the direction is welcome, and for the first time in decades, there is a conversation about Australia producing its own fuel that is backed by real production, real investment, and the backing of at least one state government.
In a crisis that has given our members very little to be optimistic about, Taroom Trough is a reminder that the long term is not entirely out of our hands. The question is whether the political will to back domestic production lasts beyond the immediate shock.