The International Energy Agency (IEA) dictates that countries should have at least 90 days worth of domestic supplies.

There’s some dispute over how countries calculate that. A strict interpretation of the rule is that it only includes fuel physically kept in a country’s refineries.

Some, including Australia, want that to be expanded to be any fuel that a nation owns – for example, if there’s fuel onboard a ship heading down under, it should be counted as part of domestic stockpiles.

Regardless, Australia is sitting below the 90 day benchmark. Depending on which interpretation you follow, Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor says Australia has between 50 and 80 days worth of supply.

Mr Taylor has told ABC Radio Brisbane the dramatic drop in oil prices is a good opportunity to look at how Australia can meet that 90 day benchmark.

“ We have run out of storage locally, and we've been talking to the refiners about access to storage," he said.

“But, of course, they have seen their demand drop off and we've seen all the storage being used locally.”

A few months back, Australia announced a deal with the United States to access its “strategic reserve". And Mr Taylor believes the US could be the place where any cheap fuel snapped up now could be kept, before local refineries have more capacity.

“So, the short term opportunity is to store it in the US, where there is some spare capacity owned by the US Government," he said.

“Over time, though, we'd like to see that domestic reserve being held domestically, and that's exactly where we'd like to go.

“But as I say, right now it's great in theory to be able to want to buy oil — the challenge is to store it.”