Australia’s fuel crisis is on track to leave tens of thousands of households in the cold this winter, with new documentation obtained by Wood Central revealing the government cannot guarantee fuel supplies beyond mid-April — less than a fortnight after Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen publicly assured Australians that panic buying, not supply shortfalls, was behind empty bowsers.
As of late last week, close to 1,000 fuel stations across the country are reporting empty tanks and no confirmed delivery window. Last night, Wood Central spoke exclusively to Todd Gelletly, Managing Director of Gelletly Red Gum Firewood, one of the eastern seaboard’s largest wholesale firewood suppliers, who warned the crisis could sever the supply chains on which tens of thousands of households depend for the only form of heating they have this winter.
Across regional Victoria, inland NSW and the cooler reaches of South Australia, tens of thousands of households have no reticulated gas connection and no alternative heating source — wood-burning heaters installed as the primary system for winter warmth, with retail firewood the single supply chain keeping them running. Without deliveries, those households have nowhere else to turn.
Gelletly Red Gum Firewood operates year-round across state forests, private forestry holdings and plantation country, harvesting and processing residue logs — material assessed as unsuitable for the higher-value building and construction products the timber industry prioritises — into firewood and other renewable energy forms for household and commercial markets.
That last point carries particular weight given the ministerial context: firewood derived from forestry residue falls within the very definition of renewable energy that Bowen’s own portfolio is charged with expanding, and his fuel crisis is now threatening to sever the supply chain that delivers it. “We work 12 months of the year, harvesting and hauling and processing residue into firewood in readiness for winter sales,” Gelletly said.
The business is fully stocked, as every wholesale firewood supplier across the region will be at this point in the calendar — product accumulated over 12 months of processing, waiting for the transport network to move it.
Most of that product travels on B-doubles and semitrailers from regional processing sites to retail outlets across south-eastern Australia, and as Wood Central reported when fuel prices hit $3.39 a litre for NSW Mid North Coast logging operations (it’s now surging toward $4.00 at the time of writing), those supply chains were already absorbing costs that had no margin left to give.
“If we can’t get the firewood to the retail outlets, this will create a situation where households who are solely reliant on firewood for heating won’t be able to purchase
their firewood needs for winter,” Gelletly warned.
Gelletly Red Gum has held its prices at last year’s levels — a deliberate decision that’s getting harder to sustain as transport costs climb with every kilometre. The businesses in the chain between the forest and the hearthside are making the same calculation, and Gelletly puts the breaking point plainly.
“One thing the Government could do is drop the fuel excise to take some pressure off transport companies,” he said. “At some point, companies will just say that’s it — we can’t absorb the additional costs. Is that point $4 a litre? If so, we are getting very close to that now.”
The industry operated through Covid-19 as a declared essential service, with firewood operations continuing whilst much of the economy shut down — a status Gelletly says the sector will seek again if rationing becomes government policy. His more pressing concern, however, is that no such policy decision will ever be made in time. “The concern is that there won’t be any rationing — the major concern is it will run out before Minister Bowen has any idea,” Gelletly told Wood Central.
Please note: This story is part of a special Wood Central series covering the fuel crisis in regional and rural communities and its impact on Australia’s $23 billion forest products value chain. For more information, click here for Wood Central’s exclusive story with Anthony Dorney last week.
