The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is working with state-run CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC) to develop “environmental forensics” techniques to identify oil pollution sources, agency officials said yesterday.
Diesel fuel leaks from gasoline stations are a frequent occurrence, but the EPA has had difficulty tracking pollution sources, Soil and Groundwater Remediation Fund Management Board executive secretary Chen Shih-wei (陳世偉) said.
There have been 162 pollution incidents caused by oil leaks from gasoline station tanks since 2001 and it often takes years, and even decades, to restore the land, board section chief Chen Yi-hsin (陳以新) said.
The board began working in 2013 with CPC’s Exploration and Development Research Institute on a diesel fuel “fingerprint” database, Chen Shih-wei said.
Their database now has about 500 samples that can be distinguished by their biomarkers and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons using gas chromatography-mass spectrophotometer techniques, he said.
CPC produces about 720,000 barrels of crude oil per day at its three refineries in Taoyuan and Kaohsiung, while Formosa Petrochemical Corp produces about 540,000 barrels per day at its refinery at its sixth naphtha cracker complex in Mailiao Township (麥寮), Yunlin County.
Authorities can now easily identify which company produced a given oil pollution sample and when it was produced, he said.
The board and the institute have begun working on a gasoline sample database, he added.
Gasoline does not have obvious biomarkers like those of diesel fuel, so gasoline samples are harder to identify, institute senior researcher Wu Su-huei (吳素慧) said, adding that they are still looking for elements in gasoline that are less susceptible to natural weathering.
Although the EPA and the CPC are often at odds in environmental issues, the institute is the nation’s forerunner in fuel research and began helping the Environmental Analysis Laboratory conduct surveys on marine pollution in the late 1990s, she said.
However, Taiwan does not have many people working on fuel chromatography as geochemistry is not a popular major at the nation’s universities, she added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods