Consumers can expect a price rollback of as much as P0.50 per liter of pump prices this week due to the slump in demand from the United States, one of the world’s biggest consumers of oil products.
“Diesel should go down by P0.40 to P0.50 per liter and gasoline by P0.30 to P0.40 per liter,” Unioil Philippines said.
The Energy Information Administration said last week that gasoline demand fell to 8.786 million barrels per day on Aug. 28 from 9.161 million bpd on Aug. 21.
On Sept. 1, the oil firms also cut diesel prices by P0.05 to P0.10 per liter and kerosene by P0.10 per liter, but raised the price of gasoline by P0.10 per liter.
These resulted in the total year-to-date adjustments amounting to a net decrease of P3.92 per liter of gasoline, P8.99 per liter of diesel and P13.39 per liter of kerosene.
The government is now looking at establishing an interim oil stockpiling mechanism while waiting for the implementation of a national Strategic Petroleum Reserve program, which has been pushed back to next year due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Energy department has ordered Philippine National Oil Co., the government's oil and gas arm, to help it draft a circular that will address the establishment of the interim oil stockpiling mechanism, which is intended as a preliminary initiative relative to the wider and more comprehensive and capital-intensive National Strategic Petroleum Reserve Program.
"This mechanism will provide the government with an effective means of government intervention in response, should it be required, to the disruption in oil supply and price stability in times of price spikes, while also taking advantage of the low global oil prices due to a combined demand decrease and oil glut caused by the COVID-19 pandemic," PNOC said in its first half report.
The company said details of the project specification of the interim oil stockpiling program would be presented to the Budget department to justify the special provision for the intended budget for the program through the Energy department’s endorsement.
"The preparation of the in-house feasibility study and implementation plan of the program is ongoing," PNOC said.
The company said the target activities this year were supposed to entail the hiring of a project transaction adviser for the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which were large stockpiles of crude oil and/or petroleum products stored in facilities located around the country and possibly overseas.