Trading house Sumitomo Corp and two other Japanese firms plan to earn greenhouse-gas emissions rights by reducing the level of global-warming gases in China, a press report said yesterday.
They will take advantage of an international arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol, a UN pact on global warming, that accords emissions rights to countries and firms in return for their help in reducing greenhouse gases in developing countries.
The three firms plan to collect methane gas generated at Chinese coal mines and use it to produce electricity, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
Sumitomo will work on the project with Chugoku Electric Power Co and Niigata Power Systems Co, the business daily said.
They are expected to become the first Japanese companies to launch a program in China under the arrangement, known as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the report said.
More Japanese firms are likely to follow in their footsteps and pursue similar projects in China, which produces the largest amount of global warming gases after the US, the report said.
The project is expected to begin after it wins approval from the UN and the governments of Japan and China.
Reductions that are achieved will count toward helping Japan meet its obligation to slash emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
The 1997 UN protocol requires industrialized countries -- with the exception of the US, which alone accounted for 36.1 percent of greenhouse emissions in 1990 -- to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases to below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
The US has refused to ratify the protocol. China is a Kyoto member but as a developing country does not have to meet specific targets for cutting emissions.
Japan must make a 6 percent reduction in such emissions, which accounted for some 8.5 percent of the global total in 1990.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the