Fuel prices unchanged for seventh straight week

State-owned oil supplier CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) on Saturday announced that it would leave its domestic gasoline and diesel prices unchanged this week despite rising international crude oil prices.

Rival Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s (台塑石化) Web site yesterday showed that the company would also keep its fuel prices steady this week.

It would be the seventh consecutive week that CPC and Formosa have maintained their domestic fuel prices at the same levels to reduce inflationary pressure.

Taiwan’s consumer price index rose 2.73 percent year-on-year last month, marking the fifth straight month that the index stayed above a 2 percent alert set by the central bank.

Front-month Brent crude oil futures — a global benchmark — on Friday rose 2.4 percent to hit a high since the end of April amid concerns over potential attacks on Iran after the US’ midterm elections tomorrow. For the week, Brent rose 0.79 percent to settle at US$117.64 per barrel on the Intercontinental Exchange in London.

Under CPC’s floating fuel price mechanism, which tracks a weighted average of 70 percent Dubai crude and 30 percent Brent crude, the average international crude oil price rose to US$117.01 per barrel last week from US$114.83 per barrel the previous week, the company said.

The silver lining was that a stronger New Taiwan dollar, which averaged NT$32.460 against the US dollar last week, compared with NT$32.515 the previous week, reduced CPC’s overseas oil purchasing costs to some extent.

This week, retail gasoline prices are to remain at NT$31.2, NT$32.7 and NT$34.7 per liter for 92, 95 and 98-octane unleaded gasoline respectively at CPC and Formosa stations, while prices of premium diesel would stay at NT$29.9 per liter at CPC stations and NT$29.7 per liter at Formosa pumps, the companies said.