Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77m4zx6zvmo

75•measurablefunc•1h ago

Comments

mlinhares•56m ago

Hope that gets Europe to invest in renewables and leave oil behind.

rwyinuse•54m ago

I agree. Ironically ones complaining the loudest about fuel prices are be far-right populists, who tend to be against renewables.

callamdelaney•52m ago

Yeah as if Europe doesn't have Oil it isn't exploiting because of renewable legislation..

argsnd•49m ago

Europe simply does not have enough known oil reserves to put a dent in current prices even if it exploited them all.

There may still be good arguments to do so anyway, such as it being less carbon intensive than importing oil, but there is absolutely no magic lever we can pull that would fix this problem that we're just not pulling due to renewables legislation.

calvinmorrison•47m ago

Sure just send the continental german army straight for the oil fields, worked out great last time.

varispeed•49m ago

How do you put renewables into the petrol tank?

kypro•47m ago

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.

rwmj•34m ago

For electricity generation, the UK is currently generating 50% via renewables. It goes up and down each day of course, storage is not a solved problem yet.

Nice visualisations of the current status: https://grid.iamkate.com/

Electricity is only a part of the whole energy sector, but it's relevant to this thread about EVs.

zejn•31m ago

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.

drnick1•46m ago

Electric cars aren't cheap, and electricity prices are very high in Europe.

toomuchtodo•44m ago

BYD EVs are affordable. Electricity will get cheaper with more renewables, oil will not.

haunter•41m ago

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

toomuchtodo•40m ago

Cheaper than the total cost of ownership of a combustion vehicle at $150-$200/barrel for prolonged periods of time.

France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed - https://www.france24.com/en/france-confirms-oil-crisis-says-... - March 25th, 2026

7952•25m ago

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.

Lio•22m ago

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.

zejn•40m ago

Not true. No new car is cheap, and electricity is now cheaper than gas or diesel.

b65e8bee43c2ed0•46m ago

Europe has no (meaningful amounts of economically viable to extract) lithium either.

philipkglass•34m ago

"Construction on track for Q1 completion at Sibanye’s lithium project in Finland"

https://www.mining.com/construction-on-track-for-q1-completi...

"Lithium mining commences in Finland"

https://www.electrive.com/2026/02/12/lithium-mining-commence...

This week, the first spodumene vein was blasted from the rock at the open-pit mine in western Finland, marking the occasion with a ceremonial event attended by invited guests and media.

helsinkiandrew•33m ago

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

b65e8bee43c2ed0•27m ago

if those reserves were economically viable to extract, they would be already being extracted.

MattGaiser•34m ago

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•28m ago

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.

leonidasrup•33m ago

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...

mono442•25m ago

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.

ajsnigrutin•53m ago

The local farmers came with 1000l+ tanks for diesel, foreigners with multiple gas cans, etc., and the local logistics couldn't handle the pressure.

hirako2000•48m ago

Could also be that they didn't have sufficient reserve and would rather blame hijackers?

ajsnigrutin•38m ago

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 it

example: 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.

trinix912•29m ago

Yes. When people saw that some stations were out of it everyone and their mom brought out their old beaters and canisters and refilled those too, just in case.

hirako2000•4m ago

Rest assured the toilet papers fiasco didn't only affect this corner of the world.

margalabargala•46m ago

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.

edgarvaldes•44m ago

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.

margalabargala•4m ago

"Drivers" doing this isn't solved by a 50 liter limit.

Detrytus•43m ago

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.

ajsnigrutin•36m ago

Yep

And 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).

ajsnigrutin•41m ago

Yes, mostly italians and austrians

https://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...

iammjm•36m ago

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•3m ago

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.

selimthegrim•44m ago

Did they not have rationing based on odd/even number plates in 1980s?

amarcheschi•52m ago

Also

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/slovakia-die...

bhokbah•47m ago

50 liters per day...

TacticalCoder•33m ago

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.

kpil•3m ago

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.

reader9274•46m ago

Ah yes, shared fuel resources controlled by the government. Sociafluel

gpm•45m ago

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...

trinix912•37m ago

We can barely afford it at the current price. The solution would be charging foreign transit the non-regulated price but that would be considered discriminatory.

SirHumphrey•37m ago

There was an election recently and it’s possible there will soon be another… That’s why the fuel is so cheap.

zejn•35m ago

It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.

Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.

brendoelfrendo•32m ago

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 (for motorway service stations; off-motorway stations have been regulated for longer), as a means of reducing costs for consumers[0]. These price caps were, in fact, removed 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...

trinix912•15m ago

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•7m ago

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•4m ago

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.

tomp•9m ago

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).

msteffen•31m ago

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.

gpm•25m ago

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...

seydor•28m ago

its usually differences in taxation, they vary a lot across europe

ajsnigrutin•18m ago

Fuel prices are regulated here, and we had an election right now and a huge gas price hike would be bad for the current government (not decided yet if they stay or go). The government basically lowered the gas tax for a bit to keep prices stable (they also raised the gas taxes during covid to keep the prices "stable").

The prices will go up soon, that's why everyone is panicking and filling up canisters of gas.

SirensOfTitan•33m ago

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•23m ago

> 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•21m ago

You can't provide heating in winter using renewables.

brendoelfrendo•20m ago

...you can? Electric heaters exist?

0cf8612b2e1e•18m ago

Always worth mentioning we should be using heat pumps, not straight resistive heating.

brendoelfrendo•13m ago

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.

gpm•18m ago

You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.

People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).

mono442•17m ago

most of the countries don't have enough hydro to make it feasible

gpm•16m ago

Yeah, but now wind and solar have made it feasible just about everywhere.

lostlogin•9m ago

And geothermal, biogas and tidal.

lostlogin•11m ago

Wot?

Solar makes a fair bit where I am. Hydro works fine. Geothermal works fine. Wind works fine. Aircon is very efficient.

This is harder in plenty of regions but a blanket ‘can’t be done’ is way off the mark.

irishcoffee•15m ago

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.

ZeroGravitas•10m ago

Did you read the comment you replied to?

> 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.

MattGaiser•9m ago

You missed the point of my comment.

> 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.

All of this? About 30% of oil usage on the high end. You are listing the small uses for oil.

May some oil always be needed? Yes. But nowhere near as much as we produce today.

ViewTrick1002•2m ago

Ships are starting to become electrified. Currently for fixed routes.

OgsyedIE•11m ago

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.

baxtr•2m ago

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.

skybrian•16m ago

Before calling it "the worst", I'd like more detail on how to do the comparison with the oil crises of the 1970's. My guess is that modern economies might be somewhat less oil-dependent than they were then, because the alternatives are more developed.

jddj•11m ago

How many days' fuel does Taiwan keep in reserve outside of this type of situation?

thrownawaysz•9m ago

>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

01100011•6m ago

On the plus side, Trump is helping Europe and Asia meet their climate goals.

I hear diesel is running out in NSW and Queensland Australia. Good thing you don't need diesel to run mining operations. Oh wait..

perching_aix•33m ago

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.

marginalia_nu•26m ago

Well if you have regulated fuel prices, and free trade and travel with neighboring countries (the whole point of the EU), you're gonna see arbitrage if those countries aren't regulating fuel prices.

Options are to either un-regulate the prices, or ration the fuel sales.

jmclnx•15m ago

I do not understand this rationing scheme.

Say I live in Austria and it is a short ride to a Slovenia Station. Can buy as much gas as I want, but citizens in Slovenia are limited ? That does not seem right.

trinix912•10m ago

No, as of now, you can’t pump more than 50L. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a citizen or not.

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