This is the most comprehensive public roundup I've seen of the second and third order effects now cascading from the Hormuz closure. Read it carefully, because what's described here is not a temporary price shock - it's the forward operating environment.

The sulfur-to-copper chain alone should be keeping boards awake at night. Gulf refineries produce the majority of the world's sulfur. China turns it into sulfuric acid. Chile uses that acid to leach copper ore. That copper feeds global electrification. One chokepoint closure, and the entire chain seizes. Fertiliser, LNG, helium for semiconductor fabs, bunker fuel for the ships that carry everything else - all running through the same strait.

I published a white paper earlier this year - The Limits to the Energy Transition: What Physics Means for New Zealand's Economy (energyandresilience.sub…) - arguing that New Zealand's energy transition narrative building and planning ignores the biophysical and geopolitical conditions required for that transition to actually happen.

That the construction phase of a tripled electricity system depends on global supply chains, fossil fuel inputs, and critical minerals flowing through contested maritime corridors. That planning for energy futures without modelling supply chain disruption is not planning at all.

This article is a real-time illustration of exactly that argument.

New Zealand closed its only refinery in 2022. We hold roughly 14 days of commercial diesel stock onshore, with no strategic reserve worth the name. We just committed to importing LNG through the very supply chains now in crisis. Our agricultural export economy runs on diesel from paddock to port. And our primary fuel supply route runs through Asian refinery hubs (South Korea, Singapore) that are themselves weeks away from rationing.

The Honest Sorcerer flags Australia as a dark horse in this crisis - 36 days of petrol, 32 of diesel, two-thirds of imports from Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia. New Zealand's position is arguably worse. We are smaller, further from alternative supply, and we have no domestic refining fallback.

What I'm arguing as Chair of the Wise Response Incorporated Society - and what I've been pressing with ministers, MBIE, and political parties over the past fortnight - is that the response cannot be limited to watching the oil price and hoping for diplomatic resolution. We need contingency planning for physical fuel rationing. We need demand management mechanisms like Tradable Energy Quotas (wiseresponse.substack.c…) ready for deployment. And we need to stop treating supply chain fragility as a low-probability tail risk, because it is now the central feature of the global energy landscape.

The physics was never negotiable. Now the geopolitics isn't either.