Surging fuel prices in regional Australia are not only choking the operators who harvest, haul and mill hardwood timber — they are threatening to starve Australia’s cities of the structural timbers, flooring and decking that go into new homes, as well as the mining timbers that keep workers safe, the agricultural stakes support the country’s wine regions, and in time, the residues feeding Australia’s first green steel facility along with Sydney’s landscaping market..
That supply chain, supported by an extensive transport network, runs from the forests of the Mid North Coast to building sites in Sydney, the Central Coast, into Canberra and even up to Brisbane. And right now, fuel prices are breaking it.
Today, Wood Central spoke to Anthony Dorney after he fuelled one of the family’s logging trucks at a local service station. “It cost me $2.90 per litre, which is obscene,” he said. Dorney is one of three brothers managing the fifth-generation Dorney family operation — two hardwood sawmills, SA Relf and Newells Creek, in the Mid North Coast town of Bulahdelah, 235 kilometres north-northeast of Sydney.
The two operations employ more than 10 per cent of the local town’s population, and the region around them produces a significant hardwood supply in New South Wales. Every tonne of Tallowwood, Ironbark and Blackbutt that leaves Bulahdelah does so on the back of a fuel-powered truck. “In a single week, our daily fuel costs have climbed more than $7,800,” Dorney said. “It’s not a case of panic buying — it’s all due to a critical shortage at the bowser and growing rationing between customers.”
In late 2024, the Dorney family and the Bulahdelah community presented a video to the NSW State Government, making the case for why hardwood timber is the lifeblood of regional New South Wales. “We must have sawdust in our veins, the way that we love the smell of sawdust and work with the timber,” said Glenn Dorney, a fourth-generation member of the family who has worked at Newells Creek Sawmill for almost 45 years. “We take the good log to the last piece of firewood. We take everything we can to feed the country.”
The crisis reached Federal Parliament on Wednesday.
Alison Penfold — a National and the local federal member for Lyne — put the question directly to Chris Bowen, Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy. “Minister, under your watch, why are Australians like the Dorney family, and their business, running out of fuel?”
Bowen acknowledged regional supply chains are under severe pressure and confirmed he and the Treasurer have directed the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to impose hard penalties against profiteering. “We recognise fully that, in regional areas in particular, there are shortages and that the supply chain is under huge pressure,” he said. “The ACCC will deal with it.”
Bowen also cited onshore fuel reserve reforms introduced since 2023 — strategic holdings now stored in Geelong and Brisbane rather than offshore. But for a family whose trucks burn fuel before a single plank is cut, those reserves are a long way from the bowser.
The exposure cuts deep at SA Relf. Attached to the mill is a Commonwealth-backed biofuels facility developed by BioCarbon — the first of its kind in Australia — which, once fully operational, will convert sawmill residues and native-forest by-products into GreenChar, a renewable carbon engineered to displace fossil coke in steelmaking.
Last month, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency committed $4.8 million to the project. Fuel-driven disruption to log supply does not just threaten the homes being built in Sydney and Melbourne. It starves the one facility in the country purpose-built to remove coal from the steel industry.
The Dorney family will fill their trucks again tomorrow, carting vital supplies to the construction industry. At $2.90 a litre, that gets harder to justify every single day.
