The drive of consumers to petroleum pumps this week will take a little pinch on their pockets, as the price of gasoline products will rise by P0.80 per liter and diesel will go up by P0.60 per liter. For vital industries as well as households that have been leaning on kerosene products, they will experience marginal relief as the price of this commodity will be down by P0.10 per liter, based on price adjustment notices sent by the industry players. As advised to the Department of Energy (DOE), the oil companies that already announced price adjustments effective Tuesday (May 23) have been Shell Pilipinas Corporatiom, Seaoil, Cleanfuel, Chevron, Jetti Petroleum, PetroGazz, Total and Phoenix Petroleum while competitor-firms are expected to follow their price trends. Following this round of price movements, the DOE-Oil Industry Management Bureau (DOE-OIMB) indicated that calculated prices of gasoline products will already be in a range of P53.80 to P75.17 per liter, while the monitored common price had been at P63 per liter level. For diesel, price ranges had been tracked at P47.55 to P62.58 per liter and the estimated common price had been at P53.55 per liter; while for kerosene products, prices are within the scale of P64.71 to P77.15 per liter and the average was logged at P66.08 per liter. As has always been the routine, this new wave of price adjustments will still be anchored on the Mean of Platts Singapore (MOPS), the adopted pricing benchmark of the deregulated downstream oil industry of the Philippines. Uptick in prices at the pumps are typically received by consumers as distressing bad news; but if the cost seesaw will also turn to rollbacks in other weeks, end-users could still gain leverage on how to manage their budgets. Geopolitical events that affected price swings on last week’s trading days include reports on Russia’s compliance to production cuts; the debt ceiling plan enforcement of the United States as well as the lingering uncertainty on global economic growths. In the days and weeks ahead, one key market development closely monitored by industry experts would be the core of discussion of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their partner-producers (OPEC+) on their scheduled June 4 meeting. Throughout the end of this year, it’s still a guessing game how supply and demand will shape in the weeks and months ahead, hence, wild speculations still reign on the markets also when it comes to overall price swings.