Energy Secretary Sharon Garin did not mince words on March 21. Asked about the biggest threat facing the country amid the Middle East war, she did not say rising prices. She said running out.
“Worst case really is we won’t have enough, or we won’t have any,” Garin said in an interview on ANC. “If we don’t have any diesel or any oil, our public transportation won’t operate. Our sea and air transport will be affected.”
It was a rare moment of official candor about a scenario most people have not yet seriously considered — not price hikes, not belt-tightening, but actual, physical absence of fuel.
So what does that look like? Not in theory. In practice.
How the Philippines got here
The trigger was February 28, 2026, when US-Israeli airstrikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, setting off a wave of retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz — a 29-nautical-mile-wide chokepoint between Oman and Iran — effectively closed to normal shipping traffic. Vessel traffic through the strait collapsed from an average of 90 ships per day to as few as five. On March 13, zero shipments were recorded.
The Philippines was immediately exposed. The country sources 98 percent of its crude oil from the Middle East. Another 97 percent of its liquid petroleum products and 91 percent of its LPG come from Asian refineries — in China, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan — that are themselves dependent on Persian Gulf crude. As Energy Secretary Garin explained, “If they cannot get crude oil because the strait is closed, they cannot refine it, and they cannot sell the finished products to us.”
The result was swift. Crude oil soared from $72 per barrel before the war to nearly $115 by March 16. Diesel at some stations crossed P100 per liter. Analysts at De La Salle University warned that prices could reach $140 per barrel — a level that, in their words, “would drastically alter the inflation outlook and amplify the growth constraints.”
President Marcos announced in early March that the country’s remaining oil reserves would last 50 to 60 days. As of this writing, that clock is running.
Week one: Nothing moves
A fuel-out scenario begins not with darkness but with stillness.
Jeepneys stop. Buses stop. Trucks — which carry rice, vegetables, meat, and medicine from warehouses to markets — stop. Gasoline stations close their pumps. The Philippine ports, which handle inter-island trade across an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, go quiet.
This is not a small inconvenience. The Philippines has no national rail network to fall back on. There are no pipelines connecting Luzon to Visayas or Mindanao. Everything that moves between islands moves by sea, and sea vessels run on bunker fuel. Within days, provinces that depend on imported goods from Manila — which is most of them — begin to feel the absence.
Airports ground domestic flights. Cargo stops. The cold chain for perishable food — refrigerated trucks, cold storage facilities — shuts down without diesel to run it.
Week two: The food chain breaks
By the second week, the consequences reach inside people’s homes.
Wet markets thin out first. Then grocery stores. Then sari-sari stores, which depend on resupply by delivery trucks that are no longer moving. Rice is relatively insulated in areas with local production, but vegetables, fish, and meat are not. Fish caught off Bicol or Mindanao cannot reach Manila. Mangoes rot in Pampanga warehouses because no truck comes to collect them.
The LPG problem compounds everything. About 91 percent of the Philippines’ cooking gas passes through the same Strait of Hormuz routes that have been disrupted. Millions of households that cook on LPG stoves have no alternative. Charcoal becomes valuable overnight.
Hospitals are running on emergency generators. Those generators run on diesel. By week two, hospital administrators are rationing power — deciding which wards stay lit, which equipment stays on. Dialysis centers, which serve tens of thousands of patients across the country, face the sharpest crisis. Missing even one or two sessions can be fatal for a patient in kidney failure.
Week three: The lights start going out
The power grid holds longer than transport — geothermal plants in the Bicol region, hydroelectric dams, and large coal-fired facilities provide a buffer. But a significant portion of the country’s electricity, particularly on smaller islands and during peak demand periods, depends on diesel-fired generation. By the third week, brownouts stop being rolling and start being prolonged. In some provinces, blackouts last most of the day.
Cell towers run on backup batteries that last hours, not weeks, without diesel for their generators. As those fail, communication between provinces and with Manila becomes spotty, then unreliable. Local government officials lose the ability to coordinate relief. Families lose contact with relatives in other regions.
Months ahead: The deeper damage
The effects that take longest to arrive are the hardest to reverse.
Agriculture is one. The Philippines imports roughly 7 percent of its fertilizer directly from the Middle East, and its other major suppliers — China, Indonesia, and Malaysia — rely on Persian Gulf crude for their own production. A disruption to fertilizer supply does not hurt this week’s harvest. It hurts the next planting season, and the one after that. If farmers cannot plant because inputs are unavailable or unaffordable, food insecurity does not peak at month two. It peaks at month six or seven.
Remittances are another slow wound. OFW cash remittances from the Middle East account for around 18 percent of total remittances to the Philippines — money that millions of families use for daily expenses, school fees, and loan payments. The war has already disrupted those flows. A prolonged crisis compounds what is already a domestic income problem for households that built their finances around a Gulf salary.
For every $10 increase in the price of oil per barrel, MUFG Research estimates Philippine GDP growth is cut by around 0.2 percentage points and inflation rises by around 0.6 percentage points. At $115 per barrel — where prices already stand — those figures alone represent serious economic damage. At $140, the DLSU economists say the outlook changes fundamentally.
What the government is doing
A total fuel collapse is not inevitable. The government is trying to prevent it, with varying degrees of urgency.
Marcos has sought emergency powers from Congress to suspend fuel excise taxes. Government agencies are on a four-day work week and ordered to cut fuel and electricity use by 10 to 20 percent. The Department of Energy has temporarily allowed lower-grade Euro II fuel to stretch supply. The government is seeking contingency stocks of one to two million barrels and is in talks with India, China, Japan, Thailand, Brunei, and South Korea on alternative supply arrangements.
“For the country, the government is willing to pay whatever premium just to make sure that we keep on having the basic needs on fuel for our consumers,” Garin said.
The Philippine Information Agency confirmed that the country currently holds a 60-day fuel inventory — triple the legal minimum — which provides a buffer. The critical question is what happens when that buffer runs out if new shipments do not arrive.
The clock
The worst case has not happened. As of this writing, the Philippines has fuel — expensive fuel, with prices that have already pushed transport groups to announce a nationwide transport holiday, but fuel nonetheless. The Energy Secretary says there is enough for April.
What happens in May, and beyond, depends on whether the war ends, whether the Strait reopens, and whether alternative supply deals materialize in time.
For now, the government’s own energy chief has named the scenario out loud. The question of what happens if the Philippines runs out of fuel is no longer hypothetical. It is a contingency being managed in real time — with a deadline attached.
