Strategic oil reserve

 came across this press release... Make of it what you will..

ASEAN | PHILIPPINES

​ | Gulf Giants Offer 100% Foreign Funding for Massive Strategic Oil Hubs in the Philippines

​By ASEAN/News

​MANILA — The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have formally proposed to fully finance and construct massive strategic oil storage facilities in the Philippines, insulating the domestic market from international supply shocks.

Clarifying the structural framework of the agreement, Department of Energy officials confirmed that these initiatives are government-to-government proposals where the foreign states will cover 100 percent of the capital expenditure using their own budgets, avoiding any drain on the Philippine national treasury.

​The terms and current timeline emerged during recent hearings held by the Senate Committee on Energy led by Panel Chair Senator Erwin Tulfo.

Department of Energy Oil Industry Management Bureau Director Rino Abad confirmed Riyadh's commitment to establishing a major domestic storage hub, noting that Saudi Arabia has already requested and received an official concept note from Manila to map out the next operational steps.

Under this framework, the Saudi-backed facility targets a capacity of up to 50 million barrels.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has tabled a parallel proposal for a separate depot, which the Department of Energy will formally engage and process next.

​The agreements operate on a dual commercial and emergency model. While the infrastructure will remain under foreign state or corporate ownership and function commercially to trade fuel across Asian markets during peacetime, the negotiated framework mandates that the Philippines secures a legally binding "reserve right".

This guarantees Manila priority procurement and direct access to draw from the stockpiles the moment a global supply crisis manifests.

​This alignment directly addresses vulnerabilities in maritime trade corridors. Director Abad emphasized that both Gulf nations operate specialized export infrastructure capable of bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, providing a vital buffer against regional conflicts that routinely trigger domestic pump price spikes.

​Operational planning is advancing through structured diplomatic and technical channels.

​• 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺: Up to 50 million barrels designated for the Saudi-backed facility.

​• 𝘕𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘚𝘵𝘦𝘱𝘴: The newly institutionalized Philippine Strategic Petroleum Reserve Team is leading ongoing bilateral negotiations with Saudi counterparts to establish technical timelines, documentation, and regulatory compliance frameworks.

​• 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩: The Department of Energy will formally engage the United Arab Emirates administration to advance parallel documentation for their corresponding depot initiative.

​Complementing these foreign-backed projects, the state-run Philippine National Oil Company is independently advancing a localized reserve in Bataan targeting completion by 2027.

However, given that national consumption rests at approximately 450,000 to 460,000 barrels daily, the multi-million-barrel foreign investments remain critical to establishing a comprehensive economic safety buffer.

Rainy Saturday Monsoon and Chicken Butchery

The population of the chicken coop is being reduced. I retained one Rhode Island Red rooster, one Cornish Rock rooster, and one Cornish Rock hybrid rooster from the egg-laying flock. The two bantam roosters are being kept for breeding. The three surviving chicks from the last brood of bantams are not yet large enough to process. A bantam hen is sitting on ten eggs.

The Rhode Island Reds are not nearly as large as the white meat birds I raised previously.

Today’s harvest consists of six roosters. I will keep two, the sexytary will receive two, and one each will go to the two workers who came in on their day off.

After that, one worker will construct chicken cages from the plastic lumber on his own time. He will take one cage home and leave one for me. Sexytary and one of the other shop babes have come up with a idea to start a garden in the shop. They are using the reject and offcut plastic lumber to make grow boxes and using the carbonized ricehusk with red clay soil to fill them. It will also function as some nice demo projects for potential customers to see, and spruce the place up. Shop babe has some ideas to get some planters for herself.

As cash is tight, I can not really afford to pay bonus right now, I can at least give the higher performers some things to take home.

Oh this is rich

Getting the old shop cleaned out is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

The old man across the street—the one who worked for me and quit well over a year ago—has now threatened to file a lawsuit against my neighbor, the mechanic.

His complaint is that I did not give him my scrap metal. I never promised it to him. No one promised it to him. I gave the scrap to my next-door neighbor, my mechanic buddy.

He also claims ownership of various other items that were in the shop, items to which he has no title. The mechanic told him "good luck" The old man keeps trying to find out where I moved, spreading gossip and making himself a pest.

I am so glad to be out of that shop. The entire neighborhood is a den of squatters, drug addicts, and various two-legged predators.

Yesterday, while a truck was loading plastic, I saw one of the meth-head thieves I caught a few weeks ago in the back of the property, now walking past on the front street, eyeing the place and giving me the evil eye. The drama there will not end until I am finally far away from those people. Below one of the many truckloads of PET plastic I am shipping out. The shop is a disaster zone, with the shipping of everything out, and no one there to clean the constant mango leaves that fall every day.

meanwhile... the local driving situation...

Lessons learned from the ordeal

 Pic is facing south towards Manila.

The turnaround I used is just below the bottom where the pic is cut off.

Caught in the Luzon Floods

A business trip from Subic to Manila, interrupted by monsoon flooding and two days of expressway gridlock

Context: Weeks of Luzon flooding, landslides kill over 30 (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 30 August 2026)

In late August 2026, weeks of southwest monsoon rains, intensified by successive tropical cyclones, produced widespread flooding and landslides across Luzon. Official reports placed the death toll above thirty and the number of people affected in the millions. What follows is a first-hand account of attempting to return from a business trip in Subic to Manila during that period.

A soaked weekend in Subic

The weekend in Subic had already been waterlogged. Heavy rain squalls continued through the weekend. On Friday morning, multiple landslides closed sections of the expressway between Angeles and Subic. The road was cleared by evening, and I passed through without incident going to Subic.

Throughout the weekend, emergency alerts arrived on our mobile phones—warnings of heavy rainfall, landslides, and flooding, some of them in the middle of the night.

Sunday departure

We left Subic at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. I had sufficient fuel to reach Manila, yet an instinct prompted me to fill the tank. That decision later proved essential. Social media offered little reliable information about road closures. Google Maps showed no meaningful alerts.

After seeing standing water and hitting several large potholes opening in the pavement, I decided to stop overnight in Angeles and attempt the journey the following morning. I was not going to hit another pothole driving at night or standing water.

Monday: a thirty-minute delay that was not

On Monday, Google Maps indicated a thirty-minute delay after we left Angeles. When we reached the congestion, the estimate remained thirty minutes after we had already waited thirty minutes. We had no accurate picture of what lay ahead. Social media remained of little use.

Hours passed. Vehicles overheated, stalled, and ran out of fuel. In the adjacent lane, a livestock truck carried live hogs; several animals collapsed and died screaming. People walked along the expressway carrying bundles of clothing; women carried children. Pedestrians are prohibited on the expressway, and at first we assumed they were simply ignoring the rules. Only later did it become clear that they were fleeing flooded communities.

At an overpass, crowds emerged from below. What I had taken for a river was a submerged highway. Floodwater reached the power lines. Houses stood flooded to their roofs.

I passed a gap in the median barrier and should have used it to turn around. I continued, still hoping to push through the delay. Around the third hour, cellular service failed almost completely. A brief voice call connected; SMS and data did not. Signal later returned to a single bar, but nothing functioned.

By the sixth hour we had reached the exit where the flooding began—just beyond the ramp, beneath the overpass. Heavy cranes arrived on the opposite carriageway, travelling against traffic under police escort. 

Police and military vehicles started arriving on the opposite lane with boats and personnel.

Some ambulances passed thru the jam, and they were trailed by motorcycle riders and some cars using the ambulance as a battering ram to get thru the traffic.  I also saw multiple motorcycles with private license plates using sirens, and flasing lights pretending to be government vehicles to get thru the traffic. In the Philippines while illegal, one does see persons impersonate police with official looking vehicles and pseudo police uniforms.  Usually saying something like (insert name here) Motorcycle club.

Further delay came from motorists who had left their vehicles, standing in the roadway and smoking, blocking the turnaround. After persistent use of the horn I was able to pass and complete the U-turn. Nearby, a van driver argued with a police officer directing traffic to reverse course, despite deep water visible perhaps seventy-five yards ahead. People waded out of the flood, soaked from the waist down, and walked up the road.

We returned to Angeles and took another hotel room.

Tuesday: around the flood, not through it

The tank was already below half from idling and the short drive from Subic. I filled it again. Google Maps remained unhelpful. Local television provided little operational detail. I planned a route north, then east, around the flooded zone. Motorists who attempted a more direct cut from the flood area to the next major highway south became trapped in further jams.

The worst congestion on the second day occurred in two towns where local officials were directing traffic. Whenever a vehicle sought to cut through the line, the entire mass of traffic halted to allow it, after which restarting the flow took a long time.

Lessons

Under these conditions, ordinary traffic rules and courtesy largely disappear. Breakdowns were even more frequent on the second day. Many petrol stations had run out of fuel.

Using the shoulder to pass stalled trucks and clusters of vehicles is, in practice, necessary. Remaining in the slow lane and waiting one’s turn can convert an eight-hour journey into twelve hours or more. In the Philippines the slang is using the VIP lane for driving against traffic or running the shoulder.

I was fortunate to have topped up the tank when the opportunity existed. We carried water and emergency food. An inverter supplied 220-volt power for charging telephones.

Electric vehicles fared poorly. Many exhausted their charge on the highway; others were flooded and abandoned blocking the road.  I saw many semi trucks broke down in the middle of the road.  I also saw people carrying diesel in 5 gallon round water bottles to their vehicles that ran out of fuel.

What I would pack again

Fuel topped off at every safe opportunity. Drinking water and a small store of emergency food. A vehicle inverter or power bank sufficient to keep phones charged when the network flickers back to life. A willingness to abandon the “official” route the moment the information on the dashboard no longer matches what is visible through the windscreen.

The floods were a public calamity. The gridlock was a second, quieter one: hours of idling engines, dying livestock, people walking out of their homes onto a road that is not meant for them, and a communications blackout that left drivers guessing. The maps did not know. The alerts arrived too late or not at all. The only reliable information was what we could see.

home finally

 8.5 hhours for what should have been a 2.5 hour drive.

Left out 6am and iron man drive, 8.5 hours home. Sexytary was with me  She lost her shit somewhere around hour 3 this morning.  She was on the phone squawking in Talalagog like a angry hen to the shop and then started in on me. 

I spent the rest of the drive with a frown so hard i got cramps in my cheeks ..

Knees killing me from rowing the clutch 

home now.  consuming cocktails to reduce tbe knee pain.

I am stranded

 Spent a 2 days 3 nights in Subic for work.

Left out Sunday afternoon, with heavy rains, and reports of flooding and landslides.  

Lots of new potholes opened on the expressway, so i overnighted in Angeles, next door to Clark. I hit a couple and it certainly wasnt any good for the car.

Hit the road in the morning and there was zero alert on google maps until I got near San Simone.  First it said 30 min delay, and 30 min later it said 30 min delay. 

Stuck in traffic jam for 6 hours.  I got to a break between the expressway divider, and got turned bsck to Angeles.  There was idiots arguing with the traffic cop over that, and i could see water covering the highway a couple hundred meters ahead.

Got another hotel room, will try tomorrow.

Flooding is pretty bad, it was waist deep on the road.  Passed over one road, thought it was a bridge for a river. Then saw  It was a road and water up to the top of a power line.

Knees are killing me, rowing the clutch and gearbox for that long.