It will be a distressing drive to petroleum pumps this week as the price of diesel products will rise by P1.40 per liter; while gasoline prices will have relatively marginal increase of P0.35 per liter, as announced by the oil companies. Additionally, the industry players sent notices that the price of kerosene products, which is a base fuel for the aviation sector, will go up by P1.20 per liter. As of this writing, the oil firms that already advised on their upward price adjustments had been Shell Pilipinas Corporation, Seaoil, Cleanfuel, Chevron, Jetti and PTT Philippines effective Tuesday (May 16); while their competitor-firms are all anticipated to follow. This new round of uptrend in pump prices followed at least three consecutive weeks of rollbacks, hence, Filipino motorists can still lean on that financial leverage they gained when prices have been tracking lower in the world market. Primarily for the drivers of public utility vehicles (PUVs), they tend to be problematic when prices are at their escalation phase, because that will redound to less daily take-home earnings that they can bring to their families. The adjustments at the domestic pumps will be hinged on the swing of trading prices as monitored through the Mean of Platts Singapore (MOPS) index, a barometer of price fluctuations of fuel commodities in the Asian regional markets. The seesaw of prices in the global market last week had been mainly instigated by contrasting factors manifesting in the industry – as there had been clashing forecasts as to how oil supply and demand would shape in the coming weeks and months. For one, there have been nagging fears of global economic slowdown and one measure to that had been recent trends on lower consumption of China; while there are also projections recently laid down by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) that demand will likely tracked uptick by early part of next year. In the case of the United States, which is the world’s biggest oil consumer, there are also recent news that it will already be replenishing its strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) and when that happens, demand pressure could precipitate fresh round of price escalations. As of Monday (May 15) trading, the futures spot price for international benchmark Brent crude plunged anew to the level of $73 per barrel – that was after its climb to the $75 per barrel level in last week’s trading – although there are no clear indications yet if the price downswing will continue until the end of this week.