Oil Overpricing

You will find in the DOE (Department of Energy) website the archives of the petroleum price from 2005 to present. The time starts on when the price of crude oil (sold per barrel) began to rise based on the New York Mercantile Exchange. You can also check on the peso exchange rate on the Manila Bulletin's archive.

I based my data only on the "Big 3" oil players and only included the lowest petroleum price available from the three. Below is the graph of the international crude oil price, petroleum price (gas and diesel), and the exchange rate starting from October last year until the last week of August of the current year.



As you can see in the graph, the last crude oil price was sold at $115 where the price of the petroleum products is around P53 and the exchange rate was around P46 against the dollar. Based on the history of the graph, when the price of the crude oil was last leveled at $115, the price of unleaded gas and diesel was only sold around P45 and P37 respectively. This happened when it was around P42 to the dollar on the middle of April.

Is the last petroleum price reasonable? Well, definitely not. If we will compute this, the price of gasoline last April was around $1.09 and $0.89 for the diesel. Based on the last exchange rate, price of gasoline should be around P49.9 and diesel should only be at P41.1. This is how these companies return favor to their loving consumers.

We can still do something about it. As consumers, we may push the price down from these Big 3 by buying petroleum products from the small oil players (as what should be the purpose of Oil Deregulation Law). Lowering the demand will eventually force them to lower their price just like what is happening now in the international market.

As for the goverment, considering that this is a country who is lead by someone who will do anything to be in power, protects her corrupt practices through executive priviledges (wonder what is she hiding?), sends the witness to other countries and file for an asylum to deny investigation, gave away taxes as a gift for loyalty, and still many more..... nahh, nevermind! But this is our reality and the major reason why this country is still one of the poorest. This is also the reason many of us choose to migrate to other countries because they don't see their child having a good future here.

Right now, what we can do is help each other even on its simplest ways. Let us be vigilant, act upon it and let others know it. Learn to love this country by learning to love (or help) the people who still believe in it. And I hope someday we will have a leader who really has a true heart for this country.


Duty to God and country,
Duty to other people, and
Duty to self


By the way, this is only in the Philippines. Believe it or not.