TotalEnergies has moved to reassure the public that Fiji’s fuel supply remains on schedule despite a recent surge in demand that has seen pumps run dry at times. Managing director and chief executive Bhavana Samel said there has been no disruption to imports and outlined the company’s shipping cadence that underpins supply resilience.
“We receive our supplies from Singapore and Korea and we have every month, two, three vessels that come and deliver fuel to us,” Samel said, noting that shipments have been arriving as planned. She acknowledged that minor operational delays can occur because of weather or port congestion, but said these are expected and so far have not affected the deliveries TotalEnergies has received in recent weeks.
Samel provided an updated vessel timetable, saying a tanker is currently discharging at Vuda and that further tankers are scheduled to call in the coming weeks. “As we speak, we have a tanker discharging in Vuda… then we have a second tanker… a third tanker in April and a fourth coming in the second or third week of April,” she said. That steady cadence of two to three vessels a month, she said, is the backbone of Fiji’s fuel imports from Singapore and Korea.
The immediate pressure on pumps, Samel said, has been driven by panic buying rather than supply interruption. TotalEnergies’ daily allocated sales have been exhausted within roughly six hours on some days, she said, creating what she described as an “artificial shortage” as individual service stations temporarily run out of fuel ahead of the next delivery. Stations that deplete their daily allocations may be dry until the next tanker offloads and product is distributed to depots and retail sites.
Samel’s comments follow public reports and social media activity over the past days that raised concerns about scarcity at service stations across the main islands. Her confirmation of incoming tankers and the established import schedule aims to calm those fears by underscoring that imports are continuing and that shortfalls have been localized and temporary.
TotalEnergies’ clarification is significant for businesses and consumers reliant on consistent fuel access, particularly freight, tourism and logistics sectors where even brief outages can disrupt operations. The company’s reliance on multiple monthly shipments from established suppliers in Singapore and Korea provides an operational buffer, but Samel’s warning about potential short-term dry pumps highlights how consumer behaviour can strain distribution even when national imports remain steady.
Consumers and operators should therefore expect intermittent service disruptions at individual stations until the scheduled deliveries are fully distributed, Samel said, while broader fuel availability for the country remains uninterrupted.
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