Environmentalists and carbon-emitting companies clashed over the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) proposed regulations on a carbon capture and storage (CCS) site yesterday, as environmentalists criticized a proposal by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) to deregulate CCS developments that hold less than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The EPA yesterday held a public hearing after it announced a proposal to require all development of CCS sites to undergo an environmental review regardless of the scale of development, as leakage of stored carbon dioxide remains a risk to geological stability and underground water systems.
CCS is the process of capturing waste carbon dioxide and depositing it in a storage site, usually an underground geological formation, where stored gases cannot easily re-enter the atmosphere.
Taipower officials expressed opposition to the proposed compulsory environmental assessment, saying that the EPA should approve pilot CCS projects and projects that plan to inject less than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide without environmental review as per EU regulations.
Taipower said it is time consuming to conduct geological surveys and develop storage sites, while environmental reviews would further complicate the process and discourage developers.
China Steel Corp representatives said that small-scale CCS projects would not significantly affect the environment and should thereby be exempt from environmental review.
However, Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union director Jennifer Nien (粘麗玉) said that research is yet to be done to ascertain whether the nation’s geological features are ideal for long-term carbon dioxide storage.
The government and businesses should not bulldoze any legislation relating to CCS until proper assessments are made, Nien said.
Exempting smaller operations would prompt developers to circumvent environmental review by lowering the capacity of planned sites, Nien said, adding that the EPA should uphold its policy to ensure that all CCS projects undergo environmental review.
CCS simply buries carbon dioxide instead of actually reducing carbon emissions, she said, adding that CCS should not be included in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act (溫室氣體減量及管理法) as a carbon reduction option, which would only encourage energy intensive industries to continue using fossil fuels and evade their responsibility to reduce emissions.
Referencing an outgassing of naturally sequestered carbon dioxide in Lake Nyos in Cameroon, which killed about 1,700 people in 1986, Nien said that carbon dioxide stored artificially might cause similar disasters.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching