INDONESIAUNMASKED
Tell us what happened
Shameless

There is no fuel shortage. Please stop queuing for it.

A small petrol station with every pump marked HABIS. An official at a podium under a banner reading STOCK: SAFE. DON'T PANIC points at an empty pump, while a queue of scooters stretches past rice fields and a fuel tanker sits stuck in traffic behind the station.
Satire · AI Artist's impression. Stock: safe.Satirical photomontage, AI-assisted. An invented scene and an invented figure — not a real event, not a real person, not a claim of fact.
What happened

On Saturday 10 October Pertamina said fuel deliveries to Bali were running normally and asked people not to stockpile. On Monday 12 October petrol stations across Denpasar, Badung and Tabanan ran out of Pertalite, and several — SPBU Sesetan in South Denpasar among them — closed after running out of Pertamax as well. Residents reported queues of several hundred metres, in places about a kilometre, still standing at 22:00 WITA.

The same day Governor Wayan Koster summoned Pertamina Patra Niaga to his official residence and told it to fix supply and distribution quickly. A member of the provincial parliament asked Pertamina to check the stations itself and to explain honestly how much fuel there is. The head of the provincial energy agency pointed to global geopolitics, asked people to use fuel wisely and noted that the province is promoting electric vehicles. In Tabanan, the police chief threatened action against anyone hoarding fuel.

On Tuesday 13 October Pertalite was still out in Klungkung. The governor said supply was available at the Manggis and Pesanggaran depots, blamed the queues on panic buying and on fuel trucks stuck in traffic, said supply would be normal in one or two days, denied that Bali's reserves had been diverted to the MotoGP race in Mandalika, and invited residents to inspect the storage facilities themselves. Pertamina announced tankers on 12, 14 and 16 October carrying 26,200 kilolitres in total; Bali uses about 2,200 kilolitres of Pertalite a day. No official cause for the shortage has been given.

Sources Bali DiscoverydetikBaliBali PostNusaBaliMonitor IndonesiadetikNewsCNN IndonesiaANTARA

Our comment

The facts above are reported by the sources listed. What follows is our opinion.

If you ask me, this is the most Bali sentence ever spoken: "There is no shortage. Please don't panic." Said next to an empty pump.

On Saturday we were told deliveries were normal. On Monday the pumps were empty. On Tuesday they were still empty — and the explanation was us. We panicked. We bought petrol. At a petrol station.

The fuel, we are told, is in the depot. The trucks are in the traffic. The people are in the queue. Everything is exactly where it should be, except the petrol.

Then the solutions. The energy agency: use fuel wisely, and have you considered an electric vehicle? Wonderful. I'll pick one up at the end of this one-kilometre queue.

The police: we will arrest the hoarders. Of the fuel that isn't short.

The governor: come and look at the tanks yourself. You can visit the petrol. You just can't put it in your scooter.

What nobody has said, not once, is why it ran out. We got tanker dates, kilolitres, geopolitics, a MotoGP denial and a lecture about panic. We did not get the one sentence that matters: what went wrong, and who is responsible.

A man in the queue in Penatih put it better than any press release: don't deceive the people.

Bali sells itself as a world-class destination. A world-class destination that runs out of petrol on a Monday and spends Tuesday explaining that it hasn't.

There is no shortage. There is only a queue.

— Editorial team