alt Hacker NewsSlovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing
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Scanning some of the early comments here, and acting as-if the oil and LNG disruptions is just a question of renewable investment is naive.
This is the worst energy crisis in modern history, and little of the western world has really started feeling the effects yet:
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-energy/iran-war-...
Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils, lubricants, cosmetics. Dow chemical just doubled the cost of polyethylene as of April 1st. Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has 11 days of LNG storage--meaning it may have to consider limiting industrial electricity use if things persist. I will clarify based on a reply, this doesn't mean they'll run out in that time, but that they have limited runway that will have deleterious effects as time goes on:
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period.
Even if the Strait saw normal traffic today (and Iran is incentivized and well-positioned to keep it closed for a while), it would take quite a while to recover lost supply. Iran continues to employ a tit-for-tat strategy and Israel just targeted steel industry in the country -- I'm not even taking into account more deliberate damage to energy infrastructure in the Mid east.
This is a scary crisis wherein the most movable actor (the US) is not going to accept Iran's terms. It could collapse the global economy, and that crucially includes the AI industry this forum loves to focus on almost exclusively. The US and the majority of the west has essentially no fiscal room compared to the comparably lesser 1970s crises either. This could easily spiral out of control and cause a level of suffering across the world (esp the global south) most of us on this forum have not lived to see.
So... why is fuel 25% cheaper in Slovenia than in the neighbouring country while Solvenia is simultaneously having issues with running out of fuel?
Seems like the obvious solution is to raise prices so people stop driving to your country (wasting fuel, ironically) to take your cheap fuel instead of just paying for the fuel in their own country. More than that it's a solution the free market would actually find on its own...
50L/day - with no other limits - sounds like a lot. Are there really fuel tourists coming in en masse and taking more than this? With zero tracking of enforcement whatsoever, people will just hit up a few different nearby gas stations instead of one anyways and that's it.
Hope that gets Europe to invest in renewables and leave oil behind.
Slovenia is 165km wide and 265km long so with 50lit gas tank your are out of the country. It's only the same day back and forth that is limited by this measure. It probably has nothing to do with energy saving or renewable push.
If you want to see the end state of lack of oil, look no further than Cuba's current state of affairs. It's dire.
Also for the naive people in the comments who say "invest in renewables" it's not that simple. You can buy electric cars but the car's whole manufacturing process had multiple steps that required oil. The same applies to everything, it's not a single layer issues, it's a multi-layer issue that needs addressing from the ground and takes years and years with full investment. The boats, the planes require fuel. The industrial machinery requires fuel. We need to address it from the ground up and it's not an easy feat.
We should 100% invest and diversify energy production, but the reality is that even if we had a surplus of renewable energy on the grid, that wouldn't save a country because there are too many cogs that need oil right now that need replacing.
Bulgaria.. today.. 95 gasoline , on nearest OMV station = ~~ 1.42E/liter (more prices at [0] : 1.26-2.15E)
https://fuelo.net/cheap/where?lang=bg&order=cheap&fuel_type=...
come here, the water is fine :)
Well if you have regulated fuel prices, and free trade and travel with neighboring countries (the whole point of the EU), you're gonna see arbitrage if those countries aren't regulating fuel prices.
Options are to either un-regulate the prices, or ration the fuel sales.
This is just like COVID where countries watch other countries react and just go "huh would you look at that" and go back to their lunch.
In the UK there is currently a feels like temperature of -8C (early morning) and yesterday reached a dizzying high of 4c. Spring is stubbornly in hiding still.
The inflationary crisis will be immense as it's building off the previous one which didn't really go away
Note that this looks to have been a few days ago:
> 23 March 2026
The local farmers came with 1000l+ tanks for diesel, foreigners with multiple gas cans, etc., and the local logistics couldn't handle the pressure.
I do not understand this rationing scheme.
Say I live in Austria and it is a short ride to a Slovenia Station. Can buy as much gas as I want, but citizens in Slovenia are limited ? That does not seem right.
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I bet everyone around the world is glad that Canada decided virtue signalling is more important than exporting LNG and oil.
Ah yes, shared fuel resources controlled by the government. Sociafluel
Meanwhile in India, people are queuing up to get LPG cylinders (cooking gas) and the government is making similar statements as quoted in this article that there are no shortages.
Pump prices of petrol and diesel in India are being kept the same by reducing taxes since there are some key state elections next month and the ruling party of the union government doesn’t want to hurt its chances.
Expect fuel prices in India to go up in May and the following months, even though procurement from Russia is increasing.
With a fertilizer shortage, the consequences of this war are making things tougher and tougher for common people everywhere.