The closure of the BP refinery in Brisbane will have little impact on petrol prices, Queensland's peak motoring body says.
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Theoretically, prices at the bowser should fall - albeit by only a few cents - once the Bulwer Island refinery at Pinkenba closes mid-next year.
However, RACQ spokesman Michael Roth said that was unlikely.
Mr Roth said it should be business as usual at Brisbane petrol stations for the next 12 months.
"If they're importing the fuel instead, there's no reason it should be more expensive ... and if we're lucky they could even go down," he said.
"There's not much money in the refining game at the moment ... so [the closure] is unlikely to make any significant difference."
Mr Roth said retailers suspected of price gouging in the wake of the BP announcement would be reported to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
To meet demand, about 40 per cent of Australia's petrol is imported, with the majority coming from Singapore.
The closure of the Bulwer Island plant has therefore created concern over Australia's future fuel security.
Only four operating refineries will remain in Australia after Bulwer Island's closure – BP's Kwinana unit in WA, Shell's Geelong refinery which has just been sold to Vitol of Switzerland, Caltex's Lytton refinery in East Brisbane and Exxon-Mobil's Altona refinery in Melbourne.
"Those refineries will only be able to produce about half of our petrol and diesel consumption," Mr Roth said.
Australia has only three weeks' supply of fuel - petrol and diesel - in its domestic supply chain, and that includes fuel in cars and tankers on the road, at service stations and in storage at terminals and local refineries.
"That's a concern, because it means we're dependent on refined product from elsewhere," Mr Roth said. "The problem occurs when there's a disruption in the fuel supply chain, whether we cannot access overseas refineries, or the shipping lanes are blocked.
"The Australian government doesn't do enough in our view in ensuring against this potential problem. We need more fuel security, more fuel storage, we need to look at more options for domestic production of fuel - that could be from biofuels or gas or coal - we should look at exploring for oil and we should look at putting fuel efficiency standards on new cars."
The Bulwer Island refinery will be transformed from a processing unit to a jet fuel storage facility.
BP will take product from Caltex's Lytton refinery nearby, but will keep the storage units at Bulwer Island on "care and maintenance".
The refinery closure is more bad news for Brisbane, following by a matter of weeks the planned axing of about 300 jobs at the BG offices as it winds down work on its gas export project. It also follows the earlier loss of an unspecified number of jobs due to miner Xstrata Glencore consolidating the management of its Australian coal operations in Sydney.
- additional reporting by Brian Robins
