Qualla: Eromanga Refinery https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:28 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Eromanga Refinery https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery Eromanga Refinery: Introduction https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery/ Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Of all the unlikely places to refine oil, few beat Eromanga. This tiny town of fewer than a hundred residents sits roughly a thousand kilometres west of Brisbane, about as far from the sea as it is possible to get on the Australian continent. Geoscience Australia recognises it as the furthest gazetted town from the coast in the country. And yet, on its dusty outskirts, a cluster of tanks and pipework forms Australia's smallest oil refinery, quietly pulling crude from the ground and turning it into diesel for the trucks, mines and aircraft of the vast interior.

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/r5mb-eromanga-refinery-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Eromanga Refinery: Crude From a Vanished Ocean https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery/ Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. The irony writes itself. Eromanga is the place furthest from any modern ocean, yet the oil beneath it was laid down by a sea. More than a hundred million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous, a shallow inland ocean known as the Eromanga Sea covered much of what is now central a...

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/r5mb-eromanga-refinery-crude-from-a-vanished-ocean.mp3 0:06 2 full Eromanga Refinery: Small, Specialist, and Stubbornly Useful https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery/ Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. The refinery has been owned and run since 1986 by IOR, a name derived from the original company, Inland Oil Refiners. It is small by any measure, designed to process around 1,250 barrels of crude a day, a rounding error beside the coastal megarefineries. But its scale is the poin...

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/r5mb-eromanga-refinery-small-specialist-and-stubbornly-useful.mp3 0:06 3 full Eromanga Refinery: Fuel Security at the Far End of the Map https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery/ Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a strategic argument for keeping crude in the outback rather than shipping it to the coast and back. Australia refines very little of its own fuel; most arrives by tanker from overseas, leaving the country exposed whenever those long sea lanes are disrupted. In that cont...

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/r5mb-eromanga-refinery-fuel-security-at-the-far-end-of-the-map.mp3 0:06 4 full Eromanga Refinery: Where Giants Walked https://qualla.com/eromanga-refinery/ Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eromanga's other claim to fame shares the same deep-time geology that gave it oil. In 2005, in the Cretaceous rock of the surrounding country, fossils were unearthed of a colossal long-necked sauropod later named Australotitan cooperensis and nicknamed "Cooper." Estimated at 25 t...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/m/b/eromanga-refinery-wp/r5mb-eromanga-refinery-where-giants-walked.mp3 0:06 5 full