Nut Zeroes: Kiwis Are Up a Creek in 3 Weeks and Nearly No Diesel in the Land Down Under

Thomas Mukoya/Pool Photo via AP

What a shame one can't plop a spinning windmill on the back of a semi to make it go, huh?

This is the problem and the consequences currently faced by the English-speaking net-zero lunatics in the Southern Hemisphere. 

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In New Zealand, former fascist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, besides taking away every last firearm in the country and locking up every living soul as she indulged her dictatorial COVID powers during the pandemic, also set the island on its merry way to net zero and disaster by declaring a 'global climate emergency.'

A DECLARATION BASED ON SCIENCE™

She's also a member of the Rahm Emanuel 'never let a crisis go to waste' school, because Ardern proceeded to lay waste to New Zealand's fossil fuel industry.

Besides targeting methane emissions from cows and New Zealand's famous sheep, Arden banned oil and gas exploration in 2018. Although she'd been warned that her climate cult fantasies of windmills, hydro, and solar panels might not be ready for prime time, Ardern plowed ahead. The results quickly proved the naysayers correct, as power shortages loomed and the dwindling gas reserves in the fields that were still producing shrank faster than predicted due to additional, unforeseen draws.

...New Zealand’s gas market has been moving from self-sufficient to structurally tight. Domestic output has almost halved in the last 7 years, falling from an average 415 million m³/month in 2017 to 215 million m³/month in 2025, stripping out the buffer that once covered seasonal swings and dry-year hydro shortfalls. The drought-driven winters of 2024–2025 exposed a new reality: as hydro weakened, the country’s power system leaned harder on thermal generation just as gas supply was tightening, triggering sharp spikes in electricity and gas prices and forcing repeated curtailments at large industrial users. The government has moved to revive upstream investment, but new supply will not arrive fast enough to prevent a tighter balance from 2027 onward – making LNG imports a plausible backstop for winter security.

New Zealand is an isolated gas system so far supplied entirely by domestic production, with infrastructure centred on the North Island. Supply is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Taranaki Basin on- and offshore the North Island’s west coast in the Tasman Sea. OMV (Austria), operator of the Maui and Pohokura offshore fields, has been the largest producer, alongside Todd Energy (New Zealand) and Beach Energy (Australia), with a few smaller domestic players. In such a system, a slowdown in exploration does not merely reduce longer-term optionality; it directly translates into declining deliverability as mature fields deplete.

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And no one liked what it was costing them to go green.

In July of last year, the new government reversed Arden's ban.

...It follows last weekend’s announcement that New Zealand’s government was lifting a ban on new oil and gas exploration.

The ban was announced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2018. “The world has moved on from fossil fuels,” Ardern proclaimed at the time.

...However, some in the party are now questioning the commitment after New Zealand resources minister Shane Jones last weekend denounced its own ban as a disaster – and revoked it.

It followed three years of rising energy prices that have left 110,000 households unable to warm their homes, 19pc of households struggling with bills and 40,000 of them having their power cut off due to unpaid bills, according to Consumer NZ.

Since April the situation has further deteriorated: Transpower, the equivalent of our National Grid, warned that the nation was at high risk of blackouts.

New Zealand’s shift to renewables meant it no longer had the generating power to keep the lights on during the cold spells that mark the Antipodean winter, said Transpower, as it begged consumers to cut their electricity consumption.

The threat to New Zealand’s energy security comes despite the fact that geologists have discovered billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the seabeds around the country.

Sean Rush, a leading New Zealand barrister specialising in petroleum licensing law and climate litigation, called the oil and gas ban “economic vandalism at its worst in exchange for virtue signalling at its finest”.

But opening new drilling areas and bringing them onshore for consumers, as well as opening new LNG import terminals when the industry has been locked down for years, doesn't happen overnight.

And so it hasn't, with the end of 2027 being the optimistic absolute earliest for a natgas import terminal.

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The New Zealand government has shortlisted proposals to build the nation’s first liquefied natural gas import facility, as it seeks to bolster energy security and curb reliance on dirtier fossil fuels.

The plant would come online as soon as 2027 or early 2028, Energy Minister Simon Watts said in a statement on Monday in Wellington. The government plans to sign a contract by mid-year for a plant located in the North Island region of Taranaki.

“New Zealand is experiencing a renewable electricity boom, but a rapidly declining gas supply has left our electricity sector exposed during dry years, when our hydro lakes run low,” Watts said. “The result is greater reliance on coal and diesel, and ultimately higher electricity prices, putting more financial pressure on families and making businesses less competitive.”

What has happened is that, thanks to the Arden and her cult toadies at the time, New Zealand is now staring down the possibility of running out of natural gas to keep the lights and heat on in three weeks' time.

Three weeks. Heading into winter.

Neat, huh?

Could be chilly. And they have no import facility to get that back-up LNG, even if they could get tankers there.

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Speaking of that 'buddy' Australia, they're having a time of their own, thanks again to the climate cult lunatics running the country.

Two weeks ago, there were reports of fishermen who'd been told there were abundant supplies of diesel to last them weeks of work, only to find nine days later they'd run dry.

By the 13th of this month, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, John Anderson, was shocked when an expert he interviewed informed him that the country only had 'days of domestic oil reserves' left.

...outline the imminent threat of a logistics freeze and urge immediate action to secure sovereign fuel capabilities before a global conflict paralyses the nation.

Pish posh, said the Anthony Albanese government from Canberra. There's plenty of fuel. Don't believe those wankers.

As people around the country began saying, 'That's really odd of you to say that, because there's NONE HERE.'

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Or here.

MUM'S THE WORD

The government minister answered questions that they had thirty-some-odd days' worth of petrol and diesel on hand...

...but with the shortages, panic buying, and now the crisis pricing, if you can find fuel, it's absolutely criminal considering what they have under their very feet.

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...Yet we export 80% of energy production, including 74% of domestic natural gas and 96% of crude oil production, while 79% of the refined petroleum Australians consume is imported. This a result of policy and market settings that export value and import dependence. Australia averages only 50 IEA days of oil stocks against a 90 day benchmark. We should be mining more, refining more, storing more and creating more wealth here than ever before. Australians MUST come first.

I might as well be talking about California, only they have the rest of the United States attached to them, however much we sometimes wish they didn't.

Australia's out there all by their loneselves, and they have willingly stripped the country of its ability to be energy independent in their delusional pursuit of Gaia's salvation.

A NET-ZERO VASSAL STATE

...Chris Uhlmann nails it. Australia has the resources to have extensive energy security. So why are giving that up for Net Zero?

Why, indeed.

Interestingly enough, the article below was posted last October, before Trump and Bibi hit Iran, before anything in the Middle East could be blamed for what Australia had done to itself. 

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Before the current gasoline, diesel, and natural gas shortages now plaguing Australasia.

It was dismissed repeatedly in the comments as 'alarmist bulls**t' by true believers.

It makes me think of that really great Toby Keith song.

You know the one -

HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW?

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