PetroSA collapse highlights the urgent need to reform SA’s flawed fuel standards

In 2024, motorists on the Garden Route filled up at forecourts, drove home, and watched the paint lift off their cars and motorbikes. They paid to have them resprayed. Most of them still do not know why, because nobody ever told them.

Now amaBhungane has revealed what happened during an investigation into PetroSA. The petrol attacked the paintwork, and panelbeaters in Mossel Bay repainted the affected vehicles. The fuel came from a junior trader, Nako Energy, and contained N-methylaniline, an additive that increases the octane rating of cheap petrol. Sasol and Astron Energy analysed it and found more than 6% of the additive, compared with the Fuels Industry Association's recommended level of about 1.%. 

PetroSA and Nako met in May 2025, owing each other money. PetroSA owed R605-million for petrol it could not sell. Nako owed PetroSA R832-million for diesel it had never paid for. 

PetroSA was R227-million ahead. It left the room having agreed to buy another 11 cargoes of petrol, costing roughly R7.4-billion at current prices, on a margin that would recover that R227-million only once 505 million litres had been sold. Between April and August 2025, it sold 16 million litres. The deal needed 50 million a month. 

Nako then ceded its claim to a Sandton lender, Plane Tree Capital, which demanded R620,519,979 plus interest. On 11 September, Nako applied to the Western Cape High Court to place PetroSA under provisional liquidation. PetroSA says it will oppose the application and that it has a substantive defence. That is for a judge, and I am not going to argue it here.

What I argue here is what the judge will not decide on.

A fuel standard that’s not a standard

Patching potholes is not a maintenance programme. Likewise, a fuel standard that does not measure a substance is not a standard. It is a document. N-methylaniline is banned as a fuel additive in Europe, China and Russia. Here, it is legal, and because we do not test for it, petrol containing 6% of it passes the South African standard without difficulty.

I want to be precise about what that means, because this is not a story about somebody breaking a rule. Every litre was sold lawfully. The trader complied. The wholesaler complied.

The forecourt complied. And a man in Mossel Bay paid for a respray from his own pocket.

The AA has argued for two years that South Africans are sold cars built to a lower specification than those built by the same manufacturers for Europe. We are now also being sold fuel to a specification that three of the world’s largest markets would not accept. We cannot even quantify the gap, because the measurement is not included in the test.

The refinery that closed in 2020

Much of the commentary portrays liquidation as the end of South African refining. It is not: the risk lies elsewhere. The Mossel Bay gas-to-liquids plant stopped producing in 2020 when its offshore feedstock ran down. Liquidation would formalise a closure that occurred six years ago.

The live exposure is more complex: it concerns storage capacity, import terminals, port handling, and custody of the national fuel stock. If those assets go into liquidation and somebody buys them, then the country is entitled to know who, at what price, and under what obligation to continue supplying. If they instead pass into the new state petroleum company, the country is entitled to know what else is included.

Fleet operators should be asking this now, not when it becomes an intractable crisis. A logistics business that loses a bulk supplier has lost a key bargaining position. Fuel is your second-largest cost after people, and your exposure to landed cost, demurrage and terminal congestion has become less diversified than it was a month ago.

The bill arrives at the pump, not in the courtroom

AmaBhungane reports that SARS is owed R4-billion, that the trader Addax is owed more than R700-million, and that PetroSA closed the 2023 financial year with R3.5-billion in unpaid trade payables. Parliament is being asked to pass the South African National Petroleum Company Bill, which would merge PetroSA with three other state entities and assume its debts. Section 26 of the Bill provides for advances, grants and special levies.

Read the final phrase from a motorist’s perspective rather than a lawyer’s. A special fuel levy is not just an abstract concept; it’s part of the cost per litre you pay on your way to work, and it’s charged to someone who neither participated in nor knew about the deal that imposed it.

I am not asking Parliament to reject the Bill. I am asking it to withhold voting on a balance sheet that has not been disclosed. Officials appear before the portfolio committee on Tuesday 22 September. Requesting an audited schedule of liabilities to be tabled before, rather than after, the vote is not unreasonable.

Five things I would do, in order:

1. Add N-methylaniline to the national petrol specification, publish the test method, and set the date of the first test.

2. Publish the fuel quality testing regime in full: who samples, where, how often, and the quarterly results by depot.

3. Table an audited schedule of PetroSA’s liabilities before the Bill is voted on, not after it.

4. State a route to redress for motorists whose vehicles were damaged. Someone is liable. Say who and how to claim.

5. Publish national days of cover for petrol and diesel every month on a fixed date, using a consistent method.

If the Bill passes without a disclosure schedule, the first request for public money will arrive within 18 months, presented as an emergency. I am setting a date on that so it can be checked against me later.

I run an organisation most people think of as a tow truck. Roadside assistance is a member benefit, not the mission. The mission is whether a person can move, at what cost, and on what terms they were told about before they paid.

Here is the question I would put to the department, to Parliament and to every business buying fuel in bulk this week: If a substance is banned in Europe, China and Russia, and we have decided it is acceptable here solely because nobody measures it, what have we actually decided about the people filling up? DM