Forty-five days of oil is now an energy policy: how Manila re-sequenced its transition

The Philippines has been under a nationwide energy emergency since March 24, declared after the U.S.-Iran war that broke out in February closed the Strait of Hormuz and halted oil flows from the Gulf ^[1][2]. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the emergency would remain in effect for a year, in a country that imports 98% of its oil from the Gulf and that at one point during the crisis held 45 days of buffer supply ^[3][4][5].

Those two numbers sit badly together. A 45-day cushion covers roughly 12% of a 365-day emergency window ^[1], which is another way of saying the state has committed to a year of managed scarcity while holding six weeks of physical cover.

That is the context for what Guillaume Lucci, CEO of the Filipino infrastructure firm Prime Infra, told Fortune at the company's Pasay City headquarters: "What we need is more energy of all sorts, not only more renewable energy" ^[6]. He said he does not see reliability and affordability as decoupled from decarbonization, "but for now, we need a bit of everything" ^[7]. Treated as marketing, that is unremarkable. Treated as capital allocation, it is the standard emerging-market response to a supply shock: reliability first, everything else in parallel, and no more talk of an orderly sequence.

Lucci's own portfolio makes the argument better than the language does. Prime Infra holds the Malampaya gas field, the Wawa hydropower dam and a nascent waste-to-energy business ^[8]. Wawa was built between 2021 and 2025 and only began operating late last year ^[9] - roughly four years of construction, with first output arriving a matter of months before the emergency was declared ^[2]. Lucci says people underestimate how long green infrastructure takes and that stop-gap measures are needed while it is built and scaled ^[10]. The practical consequence is that nothing sanctioned during this emergency will supply energy during it, which is precisely why gas and thermal assets get the incremental peso.

Two caveats belong in the same paragraph. This is one interview with an interested party: an owner of gas and hydro assets has an obvious commercial interest in an all-of-the-above framing. And the capital is contested. According to Water.org, 59 million Filipinos, or 51% of the population, lack access to safe drinking water, and 37% cannot access clean toilets ^[11] - implying a population base near 116 million ^[3]. Prime Infra's other focus areas are water and waste management ^[8], so energy security is competing with basic sanitation on the same balance sheet.

The firm itself is young. Lucci founded it in 2017 with backing from billionaire Enrique Razon Jr., moving from president and COO to CEO in 2022 ^[12][13]. Prime Infra ranks No. 246 on Fortune's Southeast Asia 500 list; Razon's port operator ICTSI, which Lucci joined in 2014, ranks No. 113 ^[14][15]. Lucci also concedes the build environment is difficult, citing heavy bureaucracy, the social complications of tapping indigenous land, and exposure to natural disasters ^[16].

What to watch: whether the emergency is allowed to lapse a year after March 24 or gets extended ^[3]; whether the days-of-cover figure improves from 45, since that is the only metric that would justify the re-sequencing ^[5]; and whether the waste-to-energy line stops being described as nascent ^[8].