The government on Monday hiked the price of furnace oil by Tk 24.59 a litre, which would put more pressure on consumers already in a plight due to persistent high inflation and long queues at filling stations amid a fuel oil supply shortage in the country for more than a month.
Mostly consumed by independent power producers and oil-based rental power plants, the price hike of furnace oil by about 35 per cent would raise power production costs and industrial goods prices.
The Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission made the hike by setting the new price at Tk 94.69 a litre from Tk 70.10 following a proposal from the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation.
In February, the BERC reduced the furnace oil price by Tk 15.90 a litre to Tk 70.10 a litre.
Out of 68.35 lakh tonnes fuel oil supplied by the BPC in the 2024-25 financial year, the amount of furnace oil was 14.34 per cent.
Consumers will have to pay the price if the industrialists pass the extra production costs on to consumers, already sandwiched between elevated inflation and the fuel oil crisis.
In the capital Dhaka, consumers crowded a few filling stations where petrol and octane were available. Some of them said that they were able to collect fuel oils after waiting in a queue for six hours amid the unofficial rationing of the items.
A large part of the working hours of many has been eaten up by the queues over the past one month in the wake of the war in the Gulf and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for the global fuel oil supply.
Motorcyclists said that the government’s move for checking panic buying by a section of consumers by collecting fuel oils from a number of pumps almost every day had failed.
The issuing of fuel oil passes for motorcyclists via an app-based online portal (FuelPass portal) remained halted as the portal has been down since Sunday for the scheduled maintenance within a day of the experimental operation at two filling stations in the capital.
On Sunday, there was no recovery of hoarded fuel oils by mobile courts, according to a press release issued by the Energy Division on Monday.
To check hoarding, the government has been operating mobile courts throughout the country since March 3. Until April 7, about 4,69,042 litres of illegally stored fuel oil were recovered.
Petrol pumps operators said that the situation would improve once the BPC supplied adequate amounts of fuel oils to the operators. But Energy Division officials insisted that the current arrangement would continue until the war situation in the Gulf region, the country’s main source of energy, improved.
