Aquino inks AO No. 6 designating IECC to handle oil crisis

The Interagency Energy Contingency Committee (IECC) was finally established yesterday as President Aquino signed Administrative Order (AO) No. 6 creating such body tasked to ensure the continuous adequate and stable supply of petroleum and other energy sources in the country.

This initiative by the government came in light of the relentless political unrest hounding Libya, one of the world’s largest oil suppliers affecting other oil-exporting Middle Eastern and North African countries which caused in the recent soaring of oil prices in the global market.

As explained by Energy Secretary Jose Rene Almendras the other day, AO-6 was geared toward accomplishing the President’s directive to come up with precautionary measures to ensure that necessary preparations are in place in the event the peace situation overseas deteriorates.

Almendras shall be heading the IECC and he will be assisted by his counterparts from the Department of Finance, Budget and Management, Justice, Trade and Industry, Agriculture, National Defense, Interior and Local Government, Transportation and Communications, Foreign Affairs, the National Economic and Development Authority and the National Security Council.

The IECC is mandated to undertake a comprehensive audit of the available resources of the respective participating agencies; validate the viability of the enhancements made to the existing plan; and assess the need to operationalize the proposed plans; and submit its recommendations to the Office of the President.

“There is already a contingency plan that has been carried through the years to be developed. We have been looking at it through the past few weeks now. We studied how best to implement and we found that there are some assumptions and some structures that were there in the past that are no longer applicable today,” Almendras told reporters in a chance interview after his meeting with the President last Thursday.

Almendras explained that the IECC was created precisely for the concerned agencies to come together and review and refine all of the existing contingency plans and look for a better way to deploy them, taking advantage of the latest technologies we have today.

“This [IECC] is not new to us. We’ve been into the same situation previously. This is about making sure that the people who need fuel get it. It’s basically that. You have to make sure that the supply is enough for everybody. Those are the things that you need to take care of,” Almendras added.

Almendras told reporters that so far the instruction of the President is to make sure that the DoE is exercising “prudence” in addressing the impact of the Libya crisis to the oil industry. He said they were told by the President to “be ready for whatever needs to be done.”

The DoE chief mentioned that they already advised both major and minor oil companies to make sure that they have enough inventory of crude supply which could last from 20 to 25 days for small players and 30 to 49 days for the bigger industries.

“As we speak now, we’re already trying to explore the options of trying to get more oil from other countries other than the Middle East. There are very few oil exporting countries in Asia. There are discussions and the oil companies have started also getting oil from Russia. So those are the options being considered. This is why we’ve been closely discussing and have been interacting very closely with the supply level inventory and information,” Almendras said when asked if the contingency measures include tapping markets that are not traditional oil suppliers. –Aytch S. de la Cruz, Daily Tribune