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Australia’s fuel crisis will endure long after the end of the Iran war, the head of the International Energy Agency says, in a stark warning that life won’t “get back to normal” for some time, as Anthony Albanese pleads with the mining industry to prioritise national security and be “constructive” with government.

In the wake of about key 40 energy assets around the world being badly damaged as a result of the ongoing conflict, IEA executive director Fatih Birol said the current crisis was worse than the 1970s oil shocks that resulted in a global recession.

The Prime Minister confirmed earlier on Monday that he had spoken to the Singaporean Prime Minister about the flow of diesel into Australia and his government’s commitment to ensuring its Southeast Asian partner continued receiving Australia’s liquefied natural gas exports.

It follows experts, including MST Marquee head of energy research Saul Kavonic, calling on Australia to deploy a tactic of “offensive diplomacy” amid risks exporters will prioritise their own fuel needs, urging the government to stress that it would only remain a reliable supplier of LNG as long as fuel exports continued.

The ongoing demand for fuel has seen 37 petrol stations run dry in NSW – out of 2444 stations across the state – along with 47 of Queensland’s 1800 stations reporting they were out of diesel and 32 having no supply of regular unleaded fuel.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen confirmed that at the end of last week, 109 outlets in Victoria had run dry of at least one grade of fuel, with 50 stations reporting they were out of diesel.

Dr Birol declared “the primary responsibility lies with the governments” in addressing the issues sparked by the crisis – including not only energy security but the serious impact on sectors such as agriculture that he said could lead to food price spikes – and urged Labor to “make the most of uranium reserves” going forward.

“Australia can win from the response (to the crisis) and … make a big move based on this lot of resources,” he told the National Press Club on Monday, ahead of meetings with the government.

“Australia can well be a rising star of the global energy economy because you have everything here.

“In my view, does Australia need today to build a nuclear power plant? I would say no, but make the most of the uranium reserves.”

The Coalition has long called for Labor to add uranium to the country’s critical minerals list and be given the same degree of government support for extraction and enrichment, given Australia holds a third of the world’s known uranium reserves but exports less than 10 per cent.

While the Albanese government has resisted calls to ramp up uranium exploration, the mining industry has begun taking up the opportunity, with Alligator Energy this week officially commencing extraction as part of its South Australian Samphire Uranium Project.

However, the Prime Minister used an address attended by Dr Birol, along with the nation’s top mining executives, to say his focus in considering “what comes next” once the nation recovered from the impact of the Iran war was squarely on critical minerals and rare earths.

“This is precisely the time when all of us need to be thinking about what comes next, positioning ourselves for a decarbonising global economy that will need more copper, more rare earths and more iron ore,” he said in Canberra at the Australian Minerals Industry parliamentary dinner on Monday night.

In the face of tension over fuel supplies and which industries would be prioritised as the government distributed stock from the national reserves, Mr Albanese urged for the mining sector to be collaborative with Labor.

“Over the years, I acknowledge that from time to time we’ve had our differences on policy, just as the companies in this room are not always on the same page as each other,” he said.

“We do not have to agree on every aspect of every issue to build a constructive relationship, in the national interest. That’s what matters – especially right now.

“In uncertain times, Australians expect all of us to put the national interest first, to put our country first.”

As Labor left businesses to make their own decisions on whether measures such as working-from-home arrangements were necessary, and hosed down the prospect of implementing further policies such as direct financial assistance or fuel rationing, Dr Birol urged the government to adopt a similar response to what it had during pandemic.

“You can all move together like … during the time of Covid,” he said, confirming he had spoken to Mr Bowen about the IEA’s proposals for WFH to be considered to reduce fuel demand, and speed limits to be reduced by 10km/h where possible.

Just 19.2 per cent of diesel use was consumed by passenger vehicles and the rest was for commercial purposes in 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ last survey on the issue found.

Passenger cars were the largest consumers of petrol instead.

As a result, WFH measures would affect just part of the broader fuel stock and fail to significantly affect diesel demand – Australia’s most important fuel – in the “perilous” moment the country faced, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis analyst Kevin Morrison said.

Mr Morrison noted that people who owned private diesel vehicles were often not the kind of people who could work from home or dramatically change their vehicle usage.

“The big SUVs, utes – they’re the tradies, they can’t really work from home,” he said.

“For diesel … we’ve only got like 30 days of stocks, That’s not a lot when it’s more than 50 per cent of our fuel consumption. Diesel is the most crucial fuel out of all of this. The biggest crisis will be in the diesel market, because there is no alternative.”

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable said that at a time of global instability, the prospect of drastically boosting economic growth through uranium exploration should be embraced.

“Australia can create an even bigger opportunity for our world-class uranium reserves, miners, jobs and economic prosperity by meeting more of the seemingly insatiable need for energy from data centres and the push for global decarbonisation,” she told The Australian.

“At a federal level, uranium mining is overseen by a well-developed and internationally regarded regulatory framework that has successfully managed uranium mining for almost five decades. South Australia has a 30-year history of safe uranium production with three operating uranium mines and a growing industry.”

The demand for uranium has been steadily growing in recent years, with 30 countries signing a pledge in 2023 to triple their civilian nuclear energy capacity by 2050 at COP28 in Dubai.

Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan said it made “perfect sense” for Australia to begin exploiting a zero-emissions resource that could provide permanent baseload power to the rest of the world.

Mr Tehan said while Dr Birol had disagreed there was a need for Australia to pursue nuclear energy itself “today”, the energy chief’s language signalled the nation should do so in the future.

“I saw it as code for him saying that as soon as the technology further develops, Australia should look at it,” Mr Tehan told The Australian.

Dr Birol confirmed after his NPC address that he expected to discuss COP31 with Mr Bowen on Monday afternoon, as the Energy Minister faces ongoing calls from the Liberals to quit as the COP31 chief negotiator and focus purely on the domestic fuel crisis.