Earnings from petroleum exports reach $972.5 M in 2017, up 48.6%

Petro-dollars earned from the Philippine exports of petroleum products last year surged 48.6 percent to US$972.5 million (or approximately R48.6 billion), primarily due to higher demand of fuel oil and petrochemicals in the international market.

As culled from Department of Energy (DOE) data, there had been an increase from US$654.4 million (roughly R32 billion) worth of petroleum export earnings in 2016.

The higher petroleum export revenues, according to the energy department, softened the overall import bill of the country from US$9.892 billion gross to net amount of US$8.919 billion.

The DOE noted that the global brisk demand of fuel oil and petrochemicals compensated well enough for the marked decline in the country’s exports of oil production from the Galoc field as well as downtrend on condensate sale to the international market.

Fuel oil exports, in particular, soared by a record 80.7-percent last year, the DOE has emphasized, while overseas sale of petrochemical products such as propylene, mixed xylene and benzene had also been higher.

For oil extracted from the Galoc field, which is called the “Palawan Light”, exports were noted to have been down by 21.9-percent to 1.409 million barrels last year from a heftier level of 1.804 million barrels in 2016.

In terms of products, the DOE reported aggregate increase of 6.2percent in petroleum exports to 14.631 million barrels last year from 13.772 million barrels in 2016.

The department highlighted that the country’s previous top export, condensate, had declined 9.4-percent last year; the same with naphtha export which decelerated 17.2-percent.

The product mix of Philippine petroleum exports had been: condensate with 24.6-percent share; fuel oil with 19.6-percent; pygas for 12.5-percent; propylene at 11.9-percent; naphtha with 9.2-percent; mixed C4 at 7.7-percent; and mixed xylene with 5.1-percent.

The other export products were gasoline with 4.1-percent; toluene with 2.7-percent; benzene at 1.3-percent; reformate with 0.9-percent; and liquefied petroleum gas with 0.5-percent.