Name: What's behind the Philippines' 'national energy emergency' | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T13:14:07.000Z
Duration: 5 min 51 s
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It's now to the Philippines, which has declared a year-long national energy emergency in response to Iran's blocking of the Strait of Hormuz.

Past perfect

announced that he'd signed an executive order to safeguard energy security amid severe disruptions to global supply chains.

He warned of the imminent threat posed by the U.S.-Israel war against Iran to his country's fuel supply.

The Philippines is dependent on fuel imports, making it particularly vulnerable to disruptions in production and shipping.

Well, journalist Ellen Maig in Manila told us more.

Just a few hours ago, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos has announced a state of national energy emergency, saying that the ongoing unrest in the Middle East has put an imminent danger upon the availability and stability of the country's energy supply.

This just comes a day after his administration claimed there's no oil crisis in the country.

This is because the Philippines only has about 45 days of oil reserves left and rely heavily on fossil fuel and petroleum products coming from the Middle East.

Thus, a chain of catastrophic events is seen to follow with transportation, farm-to-market logistics, even manufacturing will be severely affected.

And this crisis comes untimely as the country faces the hot summer in the coming weeks, thus will have high energy demands.

Well, let's explore this further with Yesar Al-Malaki, who's an energy economist and an analyst at the Middle Eastern Economic Survey.

Let's start with how bad the fuel situation in the Philippines is at the moment.

The decision by the government comes after a number of protests in the country because of increased diesel prices and also decisions by local airlines to suspend some flights all the way to October.

As you said at the beginning of your report, the Philippines imports nearly all of its fuel needs, making it quite vulnerable to a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

It typically imports crude oil and refined products from Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and

But also, this decision reflects a shift within the region.

Other suppliers in the Asia-Pacific region have restricted their exports, especially China, which more recently has extended this to fertilizers.

And many of these economies are trying to preserve energy and food reserves as they are trying to protect their economies.

So explain to us then how declaring a national energy emergency helps the Philippines address this problem.

What can Ferdinand Marcos Jr. do today that he couldn't do before?

Well, I mean, first of all, this is a perfect case of an Asian price-sensitive economy getting impacted by the current crisis.

In terms of the measures, those measures across boards in such a situation would include fuel rationing, restrictions on exports and preventing hoarding, stockpiling, issuing subsidies, while also refiners within the country would be cutting running rates at refineries to try to preserve whatever crude oil supplies they have.

The government is also trying to build a buffer, a diesel buffer.

They are trying to put together $500 million, almost half a billion, to build that buffer.

But it is going to be quite hard given the competition over diesel supplies in Asia and the higher prices.

Diesel, jet fuel, almost all the distillates are quite high in terms of price at the moment.

And we heard from the head of the International Energy Agency this week, Fatih Birol.

He said, "The world is facing an energy crisis worse than the 1970s oil shocks combined." So how long does the Strait of Hormuz need to be closed for local emergencies like those being deployed in the Philippines to be exhausted?

And when those are exhausted, what will we be looking at?

And all the measures that are being pursued at the moment are typical textbook.

Whether you cut consumption, rationalize the usage of stockpiles, or release reserves, by the end of the day, this is a temporary measure until the Strait of Hormuz is restarted.

The risk here is that if we see a prolonged closure for two months to go or maybe even more, three months, then what happens in the Philippines will happen almost everywhere else.

We already are seeing signs of this in other Asian economies that are price-sensitive, like Vietnam, India, which is facing severe LPG cooking gas shortages, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand.

They even started the fuel switching back to coal because of high LNG and gas prices.

Thanks for talking us through that, Yesar Al-Malaki from the Middle Eastern Economic Survey.