Diesel above gasoline: the fuel price run of March 2022

Philippine pump prices are adjusted every Tuesday to the previous week's Singapore quotations. In the week of 15 March 2022 the adjustment was about 13 pesos a litre on diesel, 7 on gasoline and 10 on kerosene, the largest in the history of the weekly system, and for the first time diesel was the dearer fuel. It had followed eleven consecutive weekly increases.

Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.

Why diesel led

Europe is the world's largest importer of diesel and had bought much of it from Russia. When that trade froze, middle distillates repriced faster than crude, and Asian refiners sold into the gap. Gasoline, a lighter product with a different customer, moved less. The Philippine pump follows the product price, not the crude price, so the spread appeared here within a fortnight.

What the government did

Fuel vouchers went to public transport operators and to farmers and fishermen, and the suspension of the fuel excise tax was debated and not done. The excise raised too much to give up, and the subsidy reached the people the price hurt most. For an industrial user there was nothing.

The boiler that burns diesel

Many smaller Philippine plants raise steam on diesel or bunker fuel because the boiler was cheap and the fuel was easy. Those sites saw their steam cost rise by roughly half between January and March, with no contract to shelter them and no stockpile beyond the tank. Food processors, laundries, hotels and hospitals were the typical cases.

The other side of the same number

The same weeks made a residue-fired boiler look different. A fuel the plant already owns does not have a Tuesday adjustment. The comparison that had been marginal at 60 dollars a barrel was not marginal at 110, and the sites that asked for a study that spring were the ones that had watched the pump.

If your site runs a fuel-fired boiler or produces an organic residue, an energy and waste audit puts your own numbers against this. Tell us about your site and an engineer replies with the data we need. The figures behind each quarter are in the quarterly market brief.