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Thursday / 6 February 2025
HomeFeatures2014 to 2024 – The best time for petrol prices in South Africa in almost 40 years

2014 to 2024 – The best time for petrol prices in South Africa in almost 40 years

If trends are anything to go by, South African petrol prices could have hit R28 per litre in 2020 and be well on their way to R56 per litre by 2027.

This is according to a 2015 analysis by Solidarity senior researcher Paul Joubert, who calculated that in the 38 years between 1976 and 2014, South Africa’s petrol prices doubled every six and half years on average.

However, the trend was broken when petrol prices failed to eclipse R28 per litre in 2020.

It took until 2022 for the liquid gold to reach the latest record highs of R26.31 per litre, and they have come down by a welcome margin since then.

In 2024, four years later than when they were predicted to have doubled, South African petrol prices have still not reached the R28 per litre mark. The highest mark of the year was in May when a litre of petrol 95 swapped hands for R25.49.

As a result, the decade-long period since prices reached R14.16 per litre in 2014 has been the best decade for South African petrol prices since 1976.

The table below shows the historical data and predictions for South Africa’s petrol prices:

Year Doubled petrol price (closest actual price that year) Time taken for price to double
April 1976 R0.22 (R0.24)
June 1979 R0.44 (R0.54) 3 years, 2 months
September 1988 R0.89 (R0.95) 9 years, 3 months
November 1994 R1.77 (R1.76) 6 years, 2 months
March 2001 R3.54 (R3.59) 6 years, 4 months
November 2007 R7.08 (R6.90) 6 years, 8 months
April 2014 R14.16 (R14.16) 6 years, 5 months
October 2020 R28.32 6 years, 6 months
April 2027 R56.64 6 years, 6 months

More relief on the way

In June 2022, the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources repealed the Demand Side Management Levy on Petrol 95, which has been in place since 2006, and in 2023, it removed a 15% premium on freight rates.

Each of these steps slashed 10c per litre from the price of Petrol 95.

Petrol rates have also been on a downward trend throughout most of 2024, largely due to a recovering rand/US dollar exchange rate and falling international oil prices.

Another big contributor is that the General Fuel Levy (GFL) and Road Accident Fund (RAF) levy have been frozen since 2021 as a direct result of skyrocketing fuel costs in the country.

These levies currently add R6.14 to every litre of petrol South Africans purchase at the pumps – comprising R3.96 for the GFL and R2.18 for the RAF levy.

Government also recently announced that it is investigating these two surcharges to determine how it can provide citizens with additional relief.

This will be done through an initiative called the Fuel Price Intervention Plan.

It has been suggested that this could include a wide variety of measures, such as a revision of industry margins, the introduction of a price cap on Petrol 93, and the deregulation of petrol prices.

Sapref Refinery in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal

Finally, government is in the process of reviving two out-of-operation fuel refineries in South Africa that will reduce the nation’s dependability on imported propellants.

In 2019, approximately 30% of the fuels in the domestic market were imported while the rest came from six fully operational refineries which together produced approximately 713,000 barrels of petroleum per day.

Five years later, the country now purchases around 70% of all its petrol, diesel, and jet fuels from international suppliers and produces a daily total of fewer than 370,000 barrels.

The refineries in question are the Sapref and PetroSA facilities in KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape, respectively, which are capable of producing a combined 225,000 barrels every 24 hours.

Also in the plans are to upgrade these refineries to produce cleaner fuels with lower Benzene content by 2027.

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