Hoping the Ship Arrives Isn’t a Strategy
Most people don’t understand what we’ve actually lost. That’s the real problem.
Nathan Surendran, 12 April 2026
Two weeks ago I wrote about what the government’s fuel press conference got wrong and what it didn’t mention at all. That article is here. The short version: 18 days of diesel actually onshore, a National Fuel Plan plan without numbers, Phase 2 triggers crossed weeks before Phase 2 was considered, and a ground invasion force assembling in the Gulf that nobody in Wellington seemed to be discussing.
The situation hasn’t improved. Phase 2 is now active, which is progress of sorts, but Errata: Clearly wishful thinking on my part: The government is still in Phase 1 - voluntary conservation messaging, and the allocation framework still has no volumetric quotas. The US military continues to mass forces in the region in support of a fragile ceasefire and fraught negotiations. France’s finance minister put the timeline for restoring destroyed Gulf infrastructure at up to three years. NZ Inc. is still largely treating this as a logistics problem that will sort itself out.
This piece is about why it won’t sort itself out, and why most people - including most decision-makers - don’t have the conceptual framework to understand why. The problem isn’t just political. It’s an education gap. We have collectively been energy blind for so long that we don’t know what we’re looking at when it disappears.
Start here: three videos worth your time
Nate Hagens runs The Great Simplification, the best long-form media project working at the intersection of energy, ecology, and economics. In response to the Hormuz crisis, he produced a three-part video series in the past week - Oil 101, Oil 201, and Oil 301. These are the most useful 40 minutes of ‘primer’ video currently available for understanding why what is happening should be of concern to us all.
Watch them. I mean it. You need to understand this material!
Oil 101: What You Actually Need to Know About Oil (Frankly #135)
Also on Substack:
Oil 201: What Happens When the Oil Stops Flowing (Frankly #136)
Also on Substack:
Oil 301: The World After Cheap Energy (Frankly #137)
Also on Substack:
Five numbers you should know
These are from the Hagens trilogy, sourced to peer-reviewed research. They are the things that should be taught in school but aren’t.
1. One barrel of oil replaces five years of human labour, at around $100.
Not metaphorically. In pure work-output terms, a barrel contains roughly 1,700 kilowatt-hours of energy. A healthy person doing sustained physical work generates maybe 0.6 kilowatt-hours a day. The maths runs from one to twenty years of human labour per barrel depending on the machine it’s paired with. Five years is a reasonable average. We have been paying $100 for five years of labour equivalent, and treating this as a normal feature of the world rather than the most extraordinary subsidy in the history of civilisation.
2. There are roughly 100 fossil-powered ghost workers for every living one.
Scale the above up. Globally we burn around 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent in fossil hydrocarbons per year. At five years of labour per barrel, that’s 500 billion human labour equivalents running alongside around 5 billion actual workers. Every product, every service, every kilo of food - all of it produced with the help of an invisible workforce we never see, never pay benefits to, and until now have never had to think about.
3. Roughly ten calories of fossil energy go into every one calorie of food on your plate.
The tractors run on diesel. The fertiliser comes from natural gas. The pesticides come from petrochemicals. The food is packed, shipped, refrigerated, and distributed on diesel trucks. This is not an incidental inefficiency - it is the design of the modern food system. It exists because fossil energy was cheap enough to make it viable. When it isn’t, it stops being viable.
4. Roughly half the nitrogen in your body today carries a chemical signature from the Haber-Bosch industrial process.
Haber-Bosch makes synthetic nitrogen fertiliser from natural gas. That single industrial process is what allows the planet to feed roughly four billion of its eight billion people. The natural gas feedstock for Haber-Bosch comes substantially from the Persian Gulf. Some of it transits the strait that is currently closed.
5. Only 40% of a barrel of oil becomes petrol. The rest is everything else.
Diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, bunker fuel for shipping, asphalt, and feedstock for roughly 6,000 other products - medicines, plastics, surgical devices, synthetic clothing, electronics, contact lenses, and the interior of your car.
The widespread assumption that electric vehicles solve our oil dependency misses the overwhelming majority of what oil actually does. We don’t have an oil problem. We have a civilisation-built-on-a-depleting-energy-resource problem. We’re not the first…
There is no next economy
The second thing most people believe, including many who understand the first thing, is that the green energy transition will step in as oil steps back. It won’t, and for reasons that are now being made concrete in real time.
Industrial Engineer Balázs Matics, writing as “The Honest Sorcerer”, is one of the sharpest analysts working in this space, and published a piece this week called “There Is No Next Economy.”
The core argument is not complicated: the green economy depends on the same material supply chains as the fossil fuel economy. No oil means no transition either.
Let’s walk through a bit of the cascade:
Aluminium is a prime structural material in electric vehicles and solar panels. The Bayer process used to refine it requires caustic soda and heat. The electrolysis needed to produce pure aluminium requires enormous amounts of stable dispatchable electricity - not intermittent renewables. The bauxite ore it starts from: Australia produces 26% of the world’s supply. Australia is currently managing a severe diesel crisis of its own, because the fuel it needs to run its mines transits the same strait that is now closed. When governments in Canberra face choices between fuelling food transport and fuelling bauxite mining, the question answers itself.
Graphite is in every lithium-ion battery. 66 kilograms of it in every electric car. 86% of ultra-high-purity graphite is manufactured synthetically. The raw material is needle coke - a byproduct of oil refining. Graphite is, literally, baked oil. Reduced oil refining means reduced needle coke supply means reduced graphite production means fewer batteries.
Lithium - 49% of global mine supply comes from Australia. Hard-rock lithium mining runs on diesel for haulage, drilling, and remote-site logistics. Argus Media confirmed in March that battery metals mining in Australia is already facing diesel disruption pressure.
Sulfur - 50-70% of the world’s supply previously came from refining high-sulfur crude oil from the Persian Gulf. Sulfuric acid made from that sulfur is what copper mining in Chile uses to leach ore. Copper mining has been approaching peak production for years. If sulfuric acid supply collapses, we hit peak copper this year rather than next decade. Copper is in everything electrical.
This is not a chain of unlikely events. It is the logical, currently transpiring consequence of having built the global materials economy on top of fossil energy in the first place. The Honest Sorcerer’s conclusion is stark: there is just one economy, this one. It does not have a like for like green upgrade waiting in the wings. When it falters, even renewables roll out will falter, and that is just the reality...
We have weeks to months before widespread outright shortages of physical goods and food start to manifest in our supply chains.
What is actually within solution space
Nicole Foss spent years living and working in New Zealand - she chose to be based in the South Island specifically, having concluded that the geographic, agricultural, and social conditions here were better than most of the world for navigating what was coming. Her 2015 essay “The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space” - available here - is the most rigorous thinking I have found on what is actually viable when physical and financial systems contract simultaneously.
Her method: carve away what is ruled out by non-negotiable constraints, and focus resources on what remains.
Three constraints eliminate most of what NZ Inc. is currently proposing:
Capital-intensive solutions fail when capital markets are under stress and purchasing power is falling. Every proposal that requires large-scale infrastructure investment to save us is at risk of this.
Large-scale top-down solutions fail when trust horizons contract. National governments lose legitimacy first. Supranational institutions follow. The organisations that retain the ability to function are the ones still operating within the trust horizon of the communities they serve - which, under stress, means local.
High-complexity solutions fail when the energy and material basis for maintaining that complexity shrinks. Proposals that require our current level of socioeconomic complexity to implement cannot be delivered in a world of lower socioeconomic complexity. They are not solutions for the world we are entering.
What survives these constraints? Foss is direct: actions that are inexpensive, small-scale, simple, low-energy, and community-based. Food production. Water storage. Skills. Trusted networks. Local economic exchange. These are not consolation prizes. They are the actual solution space.
I have spent the last week developing a detailed framework for what this means practically for Southland - food and water security, livestock management, greenhouse production, seed supply, household water storage, water treatment resilience, and alternative economic arrangements including the question of whether councils can issue demurrage scrip to maintain local exchange if national financial systems come under severe stress.
Where to from here?
The Hagens trilogy frames all of this in a single concept: the carbon pulse. A bell curve stretched over roughly 300 years. We are somewhere near the peak. The Hormuz crisis may be a marker of that peak, or an accelerant past it.
Nate Hagens closes the trilogy with a question that is the right one to sit with: we have a brief window to figure out what comes next. Not a window to fix everything - to figure out what comes next. The questions are not really about whether the carbon pulse will end. They are about who we want to be on the way down.
The answer to that question does not require an election, a ministerial press conference, or a four-phase plan with no allocation numbers. It requires decision and action at the scale of people and communities. That scale is available to us right now. Tomorrow I will publish a White Paper “No Fuel, Still Fed: A Regional Food and Water Security Framework for the 2026 Energy Crisis” [edit - now published at this link] and article accompanying letters to my local councils Invercargill City Council [edit - now published at this link], and Southland District Council, recommending action and requesting a speaking slot to discuss the matter. I strongly commend you take similar action in your area.
Nathan Surendran is Principal Consultant at Schema Consulting Ltd and Chairperson of the Wise Response Society. His white paper “The Limits to the Energy Transition: What Physics Means for New Zealand’s Economy” is available here.
As you might imagine, all of this takes time that I would otherwise be spending on earning an income and spending time with family and community on implementing this stuff! If you find this valuable, consider making a donation, or setting up a regular donation to these efforts here:
Here's the link to my new White Paper - No Fuel, Still Fed: bit.ly/NSNFSF
Excellent. This is the future we face. All we have to do now is to get a clear majority of voters to understand this. Unless we achieve that, parliament will be in denial and society may fragment.