One strait, one tank, one drought

Every Tuesday morning, a rider I will call Jun fills his tank before the sun is up. He does it on Tuesday because that is the day the new pump price takes effect, and he has learned to read Monday’s news the way a farmer reads the sky. This week the news says gasoline goes up again by two to three pesos a liter. Three pesos a liter, ten liters a day, 30 pesos gone before his first passenger. Multiply that by every jeepney, tricycle and fishing boat in the country, and you see how a war in the Middle East ends up in a lunchbox in Caloocan.

This has been the hardest year for fuel in living memory. In March, when the Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz, diesel climbed past P130 a liter and gasoline past P110. The President declared a national energy emergency. Since January, gasoline has risen by a net of about P68 a liter and diesel by about P65. Jeepney drivers have gone on strike at least four times. Government helped with a fuel discount for jeepneys and a tax cut on LPG and kerosene, but the minimum jeepney fare has gone up by only one peso twice. Fuel rose by 60 and fares rose by two. That gap is why drivers are angry, and they are right to be.

Here is the part that should bother all of us. The Philippines imports nearly all of its oil, and most of it passes through that one strait. In the nearly 30 years since we deregulated the oil industry, the government has never owned a single storage tank for a bad day. Our fuel inventory, about 53 days today, sits in private facilities and mostly belongs to private companies. In a real emergency, the state has very little of its own to release.

That is finally changing, and it deserves more credit than it is getting.

Energy Secretary Sharon Garin has been doing the unglamorous work. Last week she told Reuters the Philippines is negotiating with Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, Japan and others to store oil here, and that the government will start building its first state-owned tank in Bataan next year, beginning with one million barrels and growing toward a 60-day reserve.

In the House, lawmakers have filed a bill to create a Philippine Strategic Petroleum Reserve so the stockpile is written into law and does not depend on who sits in the department. For once, the executive and Congress are pulling in the same direction.

It is late, but it is right, and the secretary should be given room to finish the job rather than be asked at every hearing why it was not done 20 years ago.

But a tank is only half the story. The other half is water.

Next year is an El Niño year, which means less rain, lower rivers and hazier skies. Secretary Garin has said our hydropower output could fall by as much as 60 percent in the first half of 2027 and solar by 20 percent. When the dams run low and the panels dim, the grid turns to diesel and bunker fuel to keep the lights on. So the same drought that empties our reservoirs will send us back to the oil market at exactly the moment it is most dangerous.

We saw a preview in 2024, when El Niño gave the Luzon grid 11 red alerts and 31 yellow alerts in one summer. In 2027 we may get the drought and the war at the same time.

A country that plans for one crisis at a time keeps getting surprised. A serious plan has four parts, and none of them requires a miracle.

First, pass the reserve law before the Bataan tank is filled. A stockpile that exists only in an executive program can be sold, borrowed against or quietly forgotten by the next administration. Put it in statute. Say how many days it must hold, who can release it and when.

Second, treat water like fuel. El Niño is a water crisis before it is an energy crisis. A dam that holds water through the dry months is a strategic reserve too, and deserves the same urgency we are finally giving to oil.

Third, buy from more than one place. Every barrel that does not have to pass through Hormuz is insurance.

Fourth, reduce how much we need. Filipino households have quietly become some of the world’s biggest buyers of solar panels because they are tired of paying some of the highest power rates in Asia.

I say this as someone whose company lives and dies by the price of gasoline. Every household that makes its own power is one less that waits on Monday’s news with dread.

None of this is cheap. A full reserve has been estimated at more than P150 billion, and critics will fairly ask whether that money should go to grids and renewables instead. I would fund both.

Every price spike is already a tax, collected by foreign producers and paid by Filipino commuters, with nothing left behind. A reserve, a dam, a charging network. These are taxes we pay to ourselves, and they stay.

Jun does not care whether the tank is in Bataan or Singapore. He cares whether, on a bad week in 2027, the pump price moves by one peso instead of 10. That is what a reserve buys. Not cheap fuel forever, but a buffer between a missile strike and a man’s dinner table.

We are finally building the reserve. Let us write it into law, and build the water reserve beside it, before the dry season reminds us why.

The best time to dig the well was before the drought. The second best time is now.