Non-oil refiners and foreign oil companies are expected to begin domestic sales of gasoline and diesel fuel, breaking decades-old regulations, should the Petroleum Management Law (石油管理法) pass in the Legislative Yuan in the coming months, Chinese-language media reported yesterday.
The report said the bill, which passed its first reading in the legislature, is expected to get through its second reading this week.
If the long-awaited petroleum regulatory and management bill is passed, it will further open up the nation's oil market ahead of Taiwan's imminent membership of the WTO.
Major breakthroughs in the bill include lowering the entry barrier for non-oil refiners in the domestic oil market, ending import taxes on all oil products, and amending the current 15,000 daily kiloliters of refining capacity required of local oil suppliers to 2,000.
At present, the two local oil refiners, state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp (
"The new rules will open the market for more competition as rules on oil suppliers will be more flexible. For instance, suppliers will no longer be required to own large refining facilities in order to produce gasoline. They could process or mix semi-refined products and still be able to play a part in the market," an official at the Energy Commission under the Ministry of Economic Affairs said.
The report also said the new rules will open the market to foreign oil companies as suppliers aren't restricted to refiners, and therefore foreign firms could supply the domestic market by importing oil from abroad.
The Energy Commission official said negotiations on the bill, which are currently at the discussion stage in the legislature's Energy and Economics Committee, are very likely to conclude in the coming weeks.
A legislative official in charge of arranging the agenda said that the bill will likely not be reviewed by the legislature until May. Nonetheless, a market source still expressed optimism that the bill will be approved by the end of June.
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