How smarter infrastructure could ease Australia’s fuel crisis

Expert commentary by Dr Ahmed Farouk Kineber, Lecturer in Project Management, CQUniversity

Australians are feeling pressure at the bowser. Reports of service stations running low on fuel, rising prices and calls for emergency measures have become familiar in recent weeks. Global geopolitical tensions have placed renewed pressure on fuel supply chains, and Australia has felt that impact quickly.

What happens overseas is beyond our control. Yet there is something worth exploring closer to home, and this moment has given us a compelling reason to begin.

The question this crisis invites us to ask

Whenever fuel becomes scarce, the conversation turns almost immediately to supply. How do we get more? How do we store more? How do we protect our import routes?

These are the right questions to ask. But alongside them sits another question, one that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Are the systems that consume our fuel actually using it as efficiently as they could be?

Consider the freight corridors, transport networks and industrial facilities running on fuel every single day. Many were designed decades ago for a world that looks nothing like the one we operate in today. Demand patterns have shifted. Technologies have moved on. The operational context these systems were built for has changed considerably.

There has been limited systematic assessment of whether these systems are still performing at their optimal function. In my field, that gap has a name: function drift. It is a concept this crisis makes worth taking seriously.

What function drift means

Every infrastructure system exists to fulfil a function. Not simply a physical task, but a defined level of performance: moving a certain volume of freight at a certain efficiency, consuming a certain amount of fuel to do so.

Function drift occurs when that performance quietly changes over time. The system keeps running and keeps producing an output, but it may no longer be doing so at the level it was originally designed for. That gap can widen without anyone formally measuring it.

For the current crisis, this matters. A freight network performing below its optimal function may consume more fuel per tonne of goods moved than it should. A transport system that has drifted from its design intent may burn more fuel to accomplish the same task. There has been limited formal assessment of this issue at a system-wide level. That is precisely the point.

Value Management as the tool to explore it

This is where Value Management becomes directly relevant.

Value Management is a structured, evidence-based methodology that begins with a foundational question: what should this system actually be delivering today? Not what it was built to deliver a generation ago, but what optimal performance genuinely requires given current demand, current technology and current operating conditions.

Once that optimal function is defined, measuring drift becomes possible. Our research at CQUniversity is developing a Function Drift Index, a formal metric that quantifies how far a system has moved from what it should be delivering. Applied to fuel-consuming infrastructure, this tool can identify where performance gaps are largest and where targeted intervention would produce the most meaningful reduction in fuel consumption.

Adaptive Value Management extends this further, building the capacity to update functional requirements as conditions evolve and keeping that alignment under active monitoring rather than occasional review.

A measurable opportunity

The current disruption is real. The trigger is external. The immediate challenge is one of supply.

Supply-side responses, however, address only part of the equation. How efficiently our infrastructure systems are consuming the fuel available to them remains formally unexamined, and that gap is worth closing.

From a Value Management perspective, every infrastructure system carries a functional requirement: a defined level of performance it should be delivering under current conditions. When actual performance diverges from that requirement, a measurable gap emerges. A system operating below its optimal function requires more energy input to produce the same output.

The Value Management research and systems being developed at CQUniversity offer a formal way to quantify this gap. Applied systematically, they can identify which systems offer the greatest opportunity for realignment and where intervention would deliver the most meaningful reduction in fuel consumption

Adaptive Value Management then provides a decision framework to act on those findings, not as a one-off exercise, but as an ongoing process that updates requirements as conditions change and monitors performance over time.

In a period of fuel uncertainty, using infrastructure more intelligently may be one of the most practical ways to strengthen resilience.

Dr Ahmed Farouk Kineber leads the Sustainable Project and Asset Management Research Group at CQUniversity. He holds internationally recognised qualifications in Value Management, including Certified Value Specialist from the Society of American Value Engineers, and his research focuses on developing intelligent Value Management frameworks for infrastructure decision-making.