Oil firms hike gasoline prices

OIL firms are set to increase gasoline pump prices this week.

Seaoil has announced it will increase the pump price of its gasoline by 35 centavos per liter at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, June 9. There will be no movement for diesel and kerosene, according to Seaoil’s advisory.

Phoenix Petroleum said it would implement a similar hike for gasoline at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

Petron, Shell, Chevron and other oil firms have not made formal advisories as of this writing but are expected to implement similar price adjustments as Seaoil and Phoenix Petroleum.

Eastern Petroleum will implement a different pricing adjustment: 10-centavo rollback in diesel and a 16-centavo increase in gasoline, from 12 a.m. Tuesday.

Excluding expected price changes for this week, there has been a net increase in fuel prices since the start of the year. Gasoline prices are up P4.29 per liter and diesel, P0.91 per liter since January.

Household fuel LPG stands at net decrease of P6.60 per kilogram.

Internationally, oil prices have intermittently gone up and down but the general trend seems to be upwards. Since having been halved from $110 per barrel (in January 2014) to around $50 per barrel in late 2014, prices have made a zigzag road to $60 a barrel.

This dampens short-selling traders who had been betting on a price crash to as low as $20 per barrel.

It appears that the recent 60 percent decline in oil rig count in the U.S. has not translated to high prices but stockpiles in storage tank farms and ships do not seem to be enough to push down prices either.

Analysts have noted that violence in oil-producing regions is being factored into trades all the time and it will take great production shocks to spark a price surge.

At the same time, overall Asian demand is increasing. Oil consumption from China is not letting up even though it is seen to grow 7 percent in 2015 compared to the 10 percent growth it was hitting in 2010.

Even Europe seems to have hit bottom in its demand slide, according to analysts.

More notably, the 167th Meeting of the Conference of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna on June 5 resolved to maintain output levels at a collective 30 million barrels per day.

In a statement, OPEC said the Conference noted that the global economic recovery had stabilized, although growth was moderate.

The Conference noted that world oil demand would increase in the second half of 2015 and in 2016, with growth driven by non-OECD countries. On the supply side, non-OPEC growth in 2015 is expected to be just below 700,000 barrels per day, which is only around one-third of the growth witnessed in 2014.

The Conference also observed the recent build in stocks and the surplus of oil in both OECD and non-OECD countries, which has resulted in stock levels that lie well above the five-year average in terms of absolute volumes, indicating that the market is comfortably supplied. SFM