South Africa's fuel refining capacity has halved over the past decade, from more than 720,000 barrels a day to about 250,000, according to a South African Reserve Bank report. The country now imports more than half the petrol and diesel it uses, ending what the Bank calls near self-sufficiency in liquid fuels. Major plants including SAPREF, Enref and PetroSA's Mossel Bay facility have closed or been converted into import terminals.

The collapse was structural, not a run of bad luck. SARB says local refineries are old, relatively small and costly to run against the large integrated facilities that dominate global refining, and that prolonged uncertainty over the Clean Fuels II programme stopped owners committing the billions in upgrades those plants needed. The knock-on effects reach past the pumps.

Petroleum-related manufacturing output is down about 20% since 2019, an estimated 5,400 direct and indirect jobs have gone, and the country has shifted from exporting bitumen to importing all of it, which feeds straight into road construction costs.

The money is the sharpest part. Imported refined product runs about 12% more expensive than the crude oil it replaces, so swapping local processing for finished imports has added tens of billions of rand to the import bill. SARB estimates the oil import bill between 2021 and 2024 could have been R76-billion lower had refined-product imports been capped at 25%.

When global oil prices rise, the bill now climbs faster than it would have under domestic processing, worsening the current account and weakening the rand.

BusinessTech reported the SARB findings, including the shift from crude processing to finished-fuel imports and the resulting pressure on the trade balance. The Reserve Bank is the source of the capacity, jobs and import-bill figures. The report frames the decline as the end of near self-sufficiency in liquid fuels rather than a temporary import gap.

The strategic point sits underneath the numbers. South Africa used to make most of its own fuel and now buys most of it finished, which means the fuel price feeding into every business cost here is set offshore, in dollars, and lands 12% higher than crude before shipping. Currency weakness and oil-price spikes now hit the pump almost undiluted, because there is no domestic processing buffer between the global market and your delivery fleet.

That is the context for two things we have covered. It is part of why fuel drove the inflation swings earlier this year, and it strengthens the case for electrifying anything that moves, which is exactly the pitch behind the electric bakkie arriving at R611,900. A diesel fleet is now a permanent bet on imports and the rand. There is no refinery coming back to change that.

You might also like our piece on Eskom's falling sales and rising tariffs, the revised electricity pricing policy reshaping energy costs, and what the Big Mac Index rand figure says about the currency.

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