As motorists prepare to hit the road for the Lunar New Year holiday, the nation’s two oil refiners yesterday announced new price cuts for gasoline and diesel oil.
Having cut prices twice earlier this week amid complaints that they had overcharged consumers in air pollution fees and other types of taxes, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said they would lower gasoline prices by another NT$0.70 per liter and NT$0.60 per liter for diesel, effective today.
“Global oil prices have risen slowly in the past few days because of the EU’s pledge to help deal with Greece’s debt crisis and a weak US dollar. However, oil prices on average remained lower than the previous week’s,” Formosa Petrochemical said in a statement.
CPC meanwhile, said its new price cut reflected a 3.15 percent drop in the company’s average crude oil costs of US$70.69 per barrel last week, from US$72.99 the previous week.
The state-run company said the new prices, calculated based on the company’s floating price mechanism, have also factored in the new rates for air pollution fees and petroleum fund fees. They are NT$0.0923 per liter for gasoline and NT$0.1291 per liter for diesel for air pollution fees and NT$0.109 per liter for crude oil for petroleum fund fees.
CPC normally announces its weekly price adjustment for fuel on Sunday for the new rates to take effect the next day.
The company said yesterday it decided to bring the price adjustments forward in time for the Lunar New Year holiday, where CPC usually sees daily fuel sales rise as much as 20 percent above the average on regular days.
CPC said it might make another adjustment announcement on Feb. 21 if global oil prices continue to fall during this period, it said in a statement.
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