State-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan, failed to seek environmental approval for modifications at a facility in Kaohsiung due to emissions issues and the company’s emission figures are unverifiable, environmentalists said.
The company proposed to upgrade a refinery in Siaogang District’s (小港) Dalinpu (大林埔) area and use a new process to manufacture reformates — substances that are converted from naphtha to make gasoline — and the proposal was reviewed by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA).
The CPC said the planned update and manufacturing process modification could reduce the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from 305 tonnes to 290 tonnes per year.
However, environmentalists said the estimated reduction was unverifiable and asked the company to present concrete data to support the estimation.
CPC used VOCs reduction as a pretext to apply for a facility expansion at the Dalinpu refinery in 2007, Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union spokeswoman Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) said, adding that the application was approved even though the reduction figures could not be verified.
“The VOCs reduction plan in 2007 was a fraud. Thanks to the approval of the reduction plan, the Dalinpu refinery was expanded, and it now processes tens of thousands of extra barrels of crude oil every day,” Chen said.
“In the 2007 VOCs reduction plan, the company said VOCs emissions could be reduced by about 388 tonnes per year. However, CPC has never presented any data to reveal actual emission reduction results,” she said. “The new reduction plan is also unverifiable and it cannot be taken as an excuse for further expansion.”
Fight for Health Women’s Group Kaohsiung Chapter director Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀菊) said the CPC did not conduct a health impacts assessment at Dalinpu — a requirement it had been asked to meet following the 2007 expansion.
“An elementary school is just 300 meters away from the Dalinpu refinery and local residents are exposed to the pollution produced by the plant. Lung cancer has become a major cause of death in the area. CPC officials should come to live in Dalinpu and experience the pollution first hand,” Kaohsiung Healthy Air Alliance director Huang Yi-ying (黃義英) said.
The EPA’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Committee concluded that another meeting should be convened to determine the proposal’s validity and asked CPC to explain how it calculated emission reductions.
“The mechanism for follow-up on the execution of EIA requirements is not effective, which leads to the loss of confidence among environmental groups and committee members in CPC’s reduction plan, because we are kept in the dark about actual emission figures at the Daplinpu refinery,” committee member Lee Kung-che (李公哲) said.
Committee member Liu Shi-ping (劉希平) said data provided by the company were a rough estimate, but it required precise figures for the committee to review the proposed modifications.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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