Scott Wyatt

It's been made by

large-scale refineries overseas that are typically 10 times the size of refineries in Australia and often in quite lower cost jurisdiction.

So it's been a challenged business and that reflects the arrangements that the government put in place back in 2021 to provide support for the refineries in Australia, to allow them to continue to make enough cash to continue to run the business, both in an operating sense and in a maintenance sense,

within that environment.

And it's been a really important program that's been put in place that has lasted obviously through that time.

And the current government has reviewed and refined and improved that mechanism to reflect the higher costs of doing business today.

And without that, you know, we'd probably have no refineries left in Australia.

So that's been critical to keeping the two refineries running.

We're just at a moment in time where the refineries, because of the shortage of fuel, are actually playing an incredibly important role and are able to actually return a profit through this period of time as a result of the huge demand for refined products, as well as play an important role in continuing to supply fuel to the country.

So when you look at how much money the refineries are making at the moment, you need to look at it in context of the

multi-year program of operation that has had some very difficult times and and right now is obviously enjoying from a refining sense some good times but it's a relatively small period of time in reality

Yeah, I mean the majority of the cost of fuel is represented by the 80% of fuel that's being imported.

I think we all want

refineries to continue to be part of the Australian energy security mix and to do that the refineries need to be profitable and they need to make money to obviously continue to run sustainably and make the investments that we need both in running a safe and efficient operation but also continue to invest for the future and we've just come out of a program late last year of upgrading the refinery to produce low sulphur fuel so much cleaner fuel for

For the environment in Australia, all those investments are not possible without, obviously, a profitable business and also the support that we get from government from time to time through the fuel security services payment.

It was absolutely on the, that was the challenge we faced during the pandemic.

I mean, running...

Running refineries during the pandemic was an incredibly difficult thing to do because people were not traveling, so no one was buying petrol.

We were still selling diesel, but of course no one was flying either, so we weren't selling jet fuel.

And the reality of refining is that when you are processing a barrel of oil, no matter what, you can't just process a barrel of oil and make diesel.