Gasoline, kerosene prices on another round of hefty rollbacks next week (Sabong News)

Motorists filling up gasoline products in their vehicles will be in a better luck next week, as the price of this commodity along with kerosene, will be on another round of hefty rollbacks, based on the calculation of the oil companies. As culled from the outcome of five-day oil trading in the regional market, the price of gasoline will be cut by P1.15 to P1.35 per liter next week, and kerosene will be down by P2.70 to P2.90 per liter by Tuesday, April 12. Conversely, diesel products will be on a lean reduction of P0.25 to P0.35 per liter. The oil price scenario is reckoned from last week’s cost swings of the Mean of Platts Singapore (MOPS), the pricing reference adopted by the deregulated downstream oil industry. So far, this is already the third wave of rollback at domestic pump prices this year, and next week’s price softening had been mainly due to price cushion stimulated by withdrawals from the strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs) of the United States and the member-countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA). International benchmark Brent crude had just been hovering at $100 to $102 per barrel last week while Dubai crude, which is the pricing reference for Asian markets, plunged to $98 per barrel. Beyond the release of inventories from oil stockpiles, global experts also partly attributed the downtrend in world oil prices to the extension of Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, China because that restricted mobility of people in that super-power Asian country. Despite the two-time price rollbacks implemented by the oil companies recently, a monitoring report of the Department of Energy (DOE) showed that Philippine oil prices still incurred net increases, on a year-to-date basis, of P16.00 per liter for gasoline; P26.00 per liter for diesel; and P24.10 per liter for kerosene. Given the financial torment that many public utility vehicle (PUV) drivers had suffered in the previous price hikes, Senate Committee on Energy Chairman Sherwin T. Gatchalian has been prodding relevant government agencies to fast-track the distribution of the P5.0-billion worth of fuel subsidies allocated by the executive branch. The re-electionist lawmaker flagged the concerned agencies on their very slow pace of financial aid release to the drivers, stressing that “the lack of an existing database has been the cause of delay in the distribution of the government’s fuel subsidy program.” With that predicament, Gatchalian proposed the establishment of a centralized database “which should be prepared by different government agencies and other stakeholders for proper coordination and implementation of the program.” He noted that “the database should be updated yearly to serve as a guidepost for implementing agencies and ensure that there will be no wastage or misappropriation of government resources.”