Exposed: America’s “Fuel Security” Gift to PNG Is a Sovereignty Grab in Disguise

By Paul L Kebaija

Port Moresby’s front pages today trumpet a “long-term fuel and security strategy”: the PNG Government wants to acquire the Napa Napa refinery from Puma Energy, while US contractor DGCI Corporation negotiates directly with Trafigura for the same asset. The story is sold as win-win. PNG escapes chronic shortages; America builds “infrastructure that serves the needs of today and the promise of tomorrow.” The reality is darker. This is not development aid. It is the latest chapter in Washington’s Pacific militarisation, dressed up as charity.
The giveaway sits in the small print everyone is ignoring. DGCI is not an ordinary energy company. It is a Virginia-based defence and logistics contractor that already holds a $498 million US Department of Defense contract to build a 1.6-million-barrel fuel storage tank farm right next door at Papa, Central Province. That project was explicitly awarded under the controversial 2023 US-PNG Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA). The same agreement that sparked street protests and warnings from PNG academics and opposition MPs that Port Moresby was surrendering strategic sovereignty for vague promises of “partnership.”

Now the refinery itself PNG’s only refining capacity is sliding into the same hands. Minister Joseph Lelang calls it protection against “external fuel-related problems.” Yet the US Embassy briefing to The National makes clear the real driver: improved fuel storage for Port Moresby that conveniently serves American logistics needs. This is the post-Red Hill playbook. After the disastrous Hawaii fuel leak forced the US Navy to rethink its Pacific supply chain, Washington has been quietly securing forward operating fuel hubs across the islands. PNG’s refinery-plus-storage complex would give US forces reliable, sovereign-friendly access without the optics of new bases.

PNG’s fuel crisis is genuine and painful. Decades of foreign monopoly (first Puma, now potentially DGCI) have left the country exporting its own crude while importing finished petrol at world prices plus margins. Shortages have crippled transport, agriculture and hospitals. But handing the refinery to a US defence contractor does not fix the structural problem. It deepens it. Once operational control rests with DGCI, military priorities resupplying joint exercises, surveillance flights, or contingency operations against Chinese influence will inevitably shape output and pricing. PNG motorists and farmers will queue behind US warships.

Transparency is another casualty. The government and US Embassy speak only of “due diligence” and “collaboration.” There has been no open tender, no parliamentary debate, no independent economic impact study released to the public. Ordinary Papua New Guineans whose oil revenues already fund elite lifestyles more than national development are once again told to trust foreign saviours.
Critics of the 2023 DCA were dismissed as alarmist. Today those warnings look prophetic. A defence contractor is on the cusp of controlling the nation’s strategic energy choke-point, funded by American taxpayers but operated on PNG soil. This is not partnership. It is leasing sovereignty for storage tanks.
If PNG truly wants energy security, it should nationalise the refinery under transparent local ownership, invest in domestic refining upgrades, and diversify suppliers not become the next link in America’s Pacific fuel pipeline. Anything less is not a strategy. It is a surrender with better PR.