Discussion
Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing
amarcheschi: Alsohttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/slovakia-die...
mlinhares: Hope that gets Europe to invest in renewables and leave oil behind.
callamdelaney: Yeah as if Europe doesn't have Oil it isn't exploiting because of renewable legislation..
ajsnigrutin: The local farmers came with 1000l+ tanks for diesel, foreigners with multiple gas cans, etc., and the local logistics couldn't handle the pressure.
rwyinuse: I agree. Ironically ones complaining the loudest about fuel prices are be far-right populists, who tend to be against renewables.
margalabargala: Foreigners were coming to Slovenia just to buy gas? In such quantities that it strained infrastructure?That definitely sounds like something that happened.As if "multiple gas cans" wouldn't still be well under the 50 liter/day limit.
ajsnigrutin: Yes, mostly italians and austrianshttps://svet24.si/novice/slovenija/gorivo-dizel-bencinski-se...https://sobotainfo.com/novica/lokalno/foto-video-neverjetna-...https://sobotainfo.com/novica/globalno/video-avstrijci-k-nam...https://www.prlekija-on.net/lokalno/40253/ponekod-zmanjkalo-...And it's not the first time:https://vecer.com/slovenija/izredne-razmere-zaradi-navala-na...
drnick1: Electric cars aren't cheap, and electricity prices are very high in Europe.
toomuchtodo: BYD EVs are affordable. Electricity will get cheaper with more renewables, oil will not.
haunter: Define affordable. A €40k Seal is anything but affordable. Eastern Europe (and I don't put Slovenia in this case here, they are much closer to Western Europe in every sense) will not mass change to EVs suddenly when everyone is shopping for 10 years old diesels from Western Europe for maximum €10k
Detrytus: Well, Slovenia is a small country and has land borders with many others. Imagine that gas in New Jersey is $1 per gallon cheaper than in New York and Pennsylvania. I guess a lot of people would drive to NJ gas stations.
edgarvaldes: No numbers provided, but from TFA:>In Slovenia, this has resulted in so-called "fuel tourism", as drivers from neighbouring countries, particularly Austria, take advantage of the lower, regulated prices here.
selimthegrim: Did they not have rationing based on odd/even number plates in 1980s?
gpm: 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...
msteffen: Price increases tend to be regressive—the poor person who needs a little fuel to get to their job is hurt more than the large business that uses a lot more fuel but has much, much more money overall.There are things you can do to try and even things out. Etherium has been considering “quadratic voting” to solve a similar problem (in this case, that would look like tracking consumption and increasing the unit price of fuel as you consume more fuel, so that cost goes up quadratically with consumption). That seems hard to enforce, though, and doesn’t help with foreign opportunists.
kypro: Hasn't Germany and the UK been investing in renewables for years now? They must be feeling pretty happy about that decision right now unlike oil obsessed countries like the US.
zejn: Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.
brendoelfrendo: This BBC article does a really poor job of explaining the context of this situation or why fuel would be so much cheaper in Slovenia, so I had to look around. Slovenia apparently introduced fuel price regulations last year, as a means of reducing costs for consumers[0]. These price caps were, in fact, removed (or perhaps merely updated?) a week ago[1], and prices at some stations rose considerably in the aftermath, closer to the Austrian prices across the border.[2] I won't speak to the wisdom of the Slovenian government in trying to cap fuel prices, but however well-intentioned the policy was, it didn't last long in the face of a global energy crunch. [0] https://sloveniatimes.com/43824/fuel-price-regulation-expand... [1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/2037901/slovenia-imposes-fuel-... [2] https://sloveniatimes.com/47009/prices-at-the-pump-up-substa...
leonidasrup: Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974."As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. ""Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
perching_aix: 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.
b65e8bee43c2ed0: Europe has no (meaningful amounts of economically viable to extract) lithium either.
helsinkiandrew: Europe has massive lithium reserves in Germany, Serbia, Portugal and ukraine but perhaps more importantly it also has friendly relations with other countries with reserves
bhokbah: 50 liters per day...
TacticalCoder: Those limits also do exists somehow in other countries. In France for example it's been a very long time some petrol station say "150 EUR maximum". People are going to say it's not a "real" limit but I did hit it once or twice while going on vacation: 80 liters tank, near empty / car only taking 98 octane fuel (more expensive than 95) / ultra-pricey fuel at petrol stations on the highway (so pricey it's usually cheaper to just get off the highway, fill the tank in a village, and go back to the highway).At 2.2 EUR / liter, 75 liters is 165 EUR so I was blocked at 150 EUR.50 liters I definitely cannot fill my car entirely.
SirensOfTitan: 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 like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.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.
MattGaiser: > 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 like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.Renewable investment would solve/would have prevented this crisis.
mono442: You can't provide heating in winter using renewables.
Lio: If you think the Seal isn't affordable then don't buy one.You can buy a brand new Dacia Spring for only £12,240. Personally I don't think it's a great car but it's certainly doesn't cost 40K.If it were my money I'd spend a bit more on either a used Jag ePace or a Renault 5 but some people prefer new cars I guess.
gpm: I'm totally ignorant as to Slovenia, but as a general comment on taxation regressive price increases/externality taxes/sin taxes are easily made up for by simply giving everyone a fixed sum of money (that can either be gathered specifically through the regressive tax or just through the normal non-regressive tax pool).Ethereum has the weird issue where "votes" and "money" are different things and they only want to redistribute votes and not money, but that's not a problem here...
7952: New cars have questionable affordability for most people. Particularly when you factor in dubious design choices and expensive marketing. Cars and driving are expensive. If that was a barrier there wouldn't be many people on the road.Also, the Electric polo is supposed to be released at around 25k Euros. Given the lower running costs that seems like a good deal relative to legacy designs. For all those people will to spend 40k on a car you could put the money into solar panels instead.
baxtr: Hormuz might not matter that much in the future since Saudi and the other countries will build even more pipelines and ports which are on the other side. Short-term is dire though.
irishcoffee: You’re choosing willful ignorance if you think petrochemicals will be replaced by renewables in your lifetime.It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.Renewables are amazing and I’m all for them. Let’s keep that train rolling.Oil isn’t going away, pretending otherwise is willful ignorance.
ViewTrick1002: Ships are starting to become electrified. Currently for fixed routes.
kpil: The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.You can just restart if you need more.
iammjm: Slovenia is a small country with 2 million people, bordering countries with a total of over 82 million people. The neighbors are also relatively rich countries, such as Austria and Italy
margalabargala: Those are just statistics and don't have anything to do with gas.Canada is a country of 35 million bordering a rich country of 350 million.
hirako2000: Could also be that they didn't have sufficient reserve and would rather blame hijackers?
ajsnigrutin: They're blaming the lack of cisterns to transport gas from storage to individual gas stations, because everyone went to get gas, and some hoarded a lot of itexample: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/bralec-v-soku-mirne-vesti-...I mean... we also have a huge factory making toilet paper here, and we had the same toilet paper crisis during covid... everyone suddenly needed 10 packs of toilet paper for some reason.
hirako2000: Rest assured the toilet papers fiasco didn't only affect this corner of the world.
trinix912: One thing you have to keep in mind is that in Slovenia, your employer is required to cover your commuting expenses. If there’s no viable public transit option (which is the case for most of Slovenia outside of bigger cities), they have to pay you for gas per km.So if the regulations were to suddenly be lifted, this would have a domino effect on not only truckers but also regular commuters, which would then mean companies would have to compensate for the increased labour costs by raising the prices of their products/services even more.
tomp: I'm not sure about that. AFAIK it's just per km and not impacted by gas price.https://www.racunovodja.com/clanki.asp?clanek=232/kilometrin...
trinix912: Which is adjusted to compensate for inflation of fuel prices every few years, so they would eventually have to raise that to cover the increased prices.
margalabargala: "Drivers" doing this isn't solved by a 50 liter limit.
01100011: On the plus side, Trump is helping Europe and Asia meet their climate goals.<ducks for cover>I hear diesel is running out in NSW and Queensland Australia. Good thing you don't need diesel to run mining operations. Oh wait..
tialaramex: Oil isn't magic, you can just make it, and the reason we don't is merely that it's expensive to do that, whereas it's just there under the ground - as a fossil fuel.But because you can just make it from ingredients everybody already has, this puts a ceiling on its actual price if you have energy independence. If you need to burn oil, you can't make oil because that's a vicious circle which would need even more oil. But so long as the only you want oil is for its other properties that's fine.Hydrocarbons are incredibly simple, the clue is in their name, a bunch of Hydrogen (literally the most common element in the whole universe) and Carbon (also extremely common). The only reason not to make any particular hydrocarbons you need (e.g. to make JetA for a airliner) is it'd be very energy intensive and instead you can just distil some crude oil to get the hydrocarbons you want...
baxtr: If the price of the blockade is as high as you outline, the price to secure the straight military might look comparatively lower.And, looking at the scenario you’re describing, it could be the most sane thing to do at this point.
0cf8612b2e1e: It is asymmetrical warfare. A hundred plus ships went through the straight daily. Attackers only need to occasionally damage a ship to make the crossing look deeply unappealing. No military intervention can promise 100% defense to passing vessels.
ajsnigrutin: YepAnd i'm saying that as a guy who drives to italy to buy pasta, booze and parmesan cheese. Two bottles of jack daniels and the cost of gas is covered by the price difference (well... not anymore).
lostlogin: A European buying American booze? I thought that had stopped?
mono442: The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
leonidasrup: Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor, had capacity factor 70% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...Mochovce-3 had capacity factor 74% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/M...In the U.S. they really try to get maximum from nuclear reactors. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/W...
lostlogin: Driving over a border in Europe happens without you necessarily noticing.That isn’t true of US borders.
codethief: > Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.The "10 days left" thing seems to be a hoax(?)https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/m...https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2026/03/26/is-taiwan-ru...
SirensOfTitan: Oh I'm sorry, that was actually my mistake, I should have been much more specific, and I will update the comment if I still can. My intention was to emphasize that Taiwan may have to start limiting electricity to its industrial sector based on its current runway. Per the article you listed:> 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 periodEDIT: updated comment to be more specific.
MattGaiser: Eh, the war in Ukraine has kind of proven that the Europeans are not all that capable of action. There has been an enormous incentive to have been getting rid of oil dependency for 4 years now.
zejn: The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.
lostlogin: Raising the price of fuel will do wonders for solving that.
leonidasrup: Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad: “Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/12/german-says-nuclear...
dismalaf: I bet everyone around the world is glad that Canada decided virtue signalling is more important than exporting LNG and oil.
lostlogin: > the war in Ukraine has kind of proven that the Europeans are not all that capable of action.It’s revealed a fair bit about America too. And this oil crisis is a fairly incredible screw up too. What did the US think would happen?
strken: The US is a net exporter of crude oil and is positioned to meet an oil crisis better than nearly anyone else. What do you think the US government expected from this?
SirensOfTitan: The problem is that Iran can defend the strait against the world's most advanced military with drones built with commercial hardware for 30-50K per drone. And that doesn't even take into account escalation, as if the US escalates then Iran will likely start targeting critical infrastructure in the region, making the crisis worse.The US and Israel are rapidly running out of munitions, while Iran is being resupplied by Russia (https://www.ft.com/content/d5d7291b-8a53-42cd-b10a-4e02fbcf9...) which is much more tooled out for munition production compared to NATO. The US also relies on both rare earths and Chinese supply chain for a lot of its munitions (which it is running low on).IMO the best option is for Trump to TACO, take the major L, and cede Iran its demands, but this would partially mean an alignment shift from Israel which still feels unthinkable based on the US political realities.
ZeroGravitas: Partly, though both have had periods of right wing governments trying to make this problem worse to benefit their oil and gas industry backers.And now the same people are saying that the answer is more oil and gas.
tomp: In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).
zejn: They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
ZeroGravitas: Sounds like a good plan unless we've invented 2 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity.
leonidasrup: You probably mean 3 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity. In Germany, Poland, Balkans it's solar, wind, coal.
WastedCucumber: I was just talking to a kiwi yesterday about diesel. The price has more than doubled already there. So there goes large chunk of the US beef supply.
cucumber3732842: As the value of the oil goes up it becomes worth it to risk the ship. Even if you're paying to insure it there's an equilibrium point between odds and value.Obviously 50-50 doesn't pencil out at $100 or even $200 a barrel. But 1:50 might at $2xx. IDK I'm not a shipping expert.
OgsyedIE: You could visit an alternate timeline where you have as much renewable investment into energy as you'd like going back decades and while it would help with the fertiliser situation massively it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
WastedCucumber: I think the point is that a world with renewable electricity wouldn't need as much oil, thereby making smaller sources of carbon sufficient.
toomuchtodo: Pakistan saves $6B/year with their recent surge in solar, for example.Surprise Solar Uptake in Pakistan Cushions Mideast Energy Shock - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-17/surprise-... | https://archive.today/QdgdQ - March 17th, 2026> Millions of factories, farmers, and households have switched to cheap solar panels from China, driving a 40% drop in Pakistan’s fossil fuel imports between 2022 and 2024, the researchers found. Additionally, the country is estimated to have saved $12 billion through reduced LNG imports in the past five years as cumulative imports of Chinese photovoltaics soared past 50 gigawatts, the report said.
toomuchtodo: Whatever Iran wants is the cheapest course to resolution.
brendoelfrendo: ...you can? Electric heaters exist?
0cf8612b2e1e: Always worth mentioning we should be using heat pumps, not straight resistive heating.
brendoelfrendo: For sure. Heat pumps aren't the best option everywhere (though modern heat pumps probably function acceptably at lower temperatures than most people realize), but if you need to do electric heating, they are the best option most places.
fc417fc802: For "human" temperatures don't they just degrade back to the efficiency of resistive heating? Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?
wafflemaker: That would require some super effective anti air. Otherwise such a pipeline is an easy target.And even the most anti air protected place on earth - Negev plant near Dimona city got hit with a warning shot. And they have 3 or 4 layers of anti air, most of them doubled (both US and Isreaeli). It's impossible to protect multiple pipelines to that extent.And Isreal just said that they will keep attacking Iran no matter any peace deals or armistice.The only logical course of action for Iran is to go down swinging, taking the rest of the world with them.
UncleOxidant: > 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 periodSo he's saying they've got an 11 day supply and that they won't face any shortages during that 11 days... but what about after 11 days? I guess I'm not sure how that's different, how it's a hoax?
Ekaros: 11 days of supply in the system. If they can afford it they can add to that with new shipments. It is not like Taiwan is blockaded. Just that global supply from single region is limited.This might be lot bigger issue if China managed blockaded Taiwan during an invasion. Or destroy port facilities sufficiently.
bombcar: You need metrics to compare it over time; I only have a weeks worth of food in the house but I shop weekly kind of thing.
spwa4: Can I just state the horrible reality: Only as long as we accept that Iranians get to attack civilians directly and other armies don't. If we fight with the same rules, this stops being a problem.There comes a point where there is only one decision left.
thrownawaysz: >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.Daily anxiety attack thanks. As a european I think we are way too vulnerable. Countries divided, rich getting richer, more and more poor people who can barely afford food, and that's in Europe let alone talk about what happens with the poor in Africa and Asia.Sooner or later we will need a global reset but that sounds worse than everything else
kpil: We don't "need a global reset"It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
mikelitoris: Buckle down and sort it = wars around the world and mass (and I mean mass) migration
crubier: > If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.100% this. People need to understand this.
bombcar: The other thing is that it is WAY too easy to distract yourself from your solvable problems by focusing on the big ones - you have to fight that with ferocity.Why get out of debt? The country is a brazillian trillion in debt we’re doomed.Why invest for retirement or save? The market is fraud anyway.Why exercise and lose weight? The planet is doomed anyway.
throwawaytea: I have 30 days of food in my house and I have maintained that since probably 2021. It doesn't mean I will run out in 30 days, since I can still buy food although at higher prices lately. I personally never let it dip below 20 probably.
