Australia has modest oil reserves by global standards, and relies heavily on imports for its fuel needs.

How much oil does Australia have?

  • Geoscience Australia estimates that in 2023 Australia had about 17.1 billion barrels of total demonstrated liquid hydrocarbons (including crude oil, condensate, LPG and especially oil shale).
  • Of this, around 3.6 billion barrels are conventional oil (crude + condensate + LPG), split between proved/probable reserves and contingent resources.
  • Most of the remaining resources (about 13.4 billion barrels) are in unconventional oil shale , which is not currently being produced.

For a simpler “headline” figure, some international datasets list Australia with about 1.8 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, which is small compared with major exporters like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

What counts as “oil” here?

When people ask “how much oil does Australia have?”, they can mean different things:

  • Proved reserves only – oil that is commercially recoverable with today’s technology and prices.
  • Total demonstrated resources – proved + probable reserves plus contingent resources (discovered but not yet commercial).
  • Conventional vs unconventional – conventional fields vs oil shale and other harder‑to-produce liquids.

Australia’s proved crude oil reserves are a few hundred million barrels (the U.S. Energy Information Administration put crude reserves at about 251 million barrels in 2022), while proved plus probable and contingent liquids push the number into the low billions.

How does that compare globally?

  • Countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran each have over 200–300 billion barrels of proved reserves.
  • Australia, at around 1–2 billion barrels of proved reserves, sits far down the ranking, near countries such as Egypt or Argentina.

So in global oil terms, Australia is a minor reserve holder and is not in the same league as the big Middle Eastern or South American producers.

Does Australia have a lot of oil in storage?

Reserves in the ground are different from fuel stockpiles. Australia is supposed to maintain about 90 days of onshore fuel reserves to meet its energy security obligations, and this has been an ongoing political and policy issue. These are short‑term storage buffers, not geological reserves.

TL;DR: Australia has on the order of tens of billions of barrels of total liquid hydrocarbon resources if you include undeveloped oil shale, but only around 1–2 billion barrels of proved reserves and a few hundred million barrels of proved crude oil. It is a net oil importer and not a major global oil-reserve powerhouse.