Aust reliant on Middle East oil: experts

“Only about 13 per cent of the crude oil that we import comes from the Middle East, but we import increasing amounts of refined petrol and diesel from Singapore and Singapore gets most of its feed stock from the Middle East,” Graeme Bethune, chief executive officer of energy advisory firm EnergyQuest, said.

“So if you take account of all that, about a third of our liquid fuels come from the Middle East now.”

“So if you take account of all that, about a third of our liquid fuels come from the Middle East now.”

Mr Bethune says Australia receives more oil from the Middle East than the US does, to make up for declining local output.

“We’re getting a little bit of a kick up now through three or four new oil projects, and BHP announced one called Pyrenees that starts in 2010,” he said.

“But that’s basically all there is in the pipeline at the moment.

“So after that we’ll expect oil production to keep falling quite quickly.”

It is a similar story the world over.

Local supplies are dwindling and so there is a growing need to secure a continuous oil supply from the Middle East.

“The United States, essentially since the end of the Second World War, has functioned as the predominant power in the Middle East region,” said Michael Wesley, director of Griffith University’s Asia Institute.

abc