Taiwan and Australia have signed a memorandum of understanding on energy and mining, including an agreement to study the cost of uranium imports, the Taiwanese government said.
The two sides will seek “reasonable” resolution to Taiwan’s “relatively high costs for uranium,” the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on its Web site yesterday. Nuclear power accounted for 18 percent of electricity output in July, according to state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電).
Australia, supplier of 41 percent of Taiwan’s power-station coal imports in the first half, is the country’s second-biggest provider of uranium, the ministry’s energy bureau said. Uranium from Australia has to be shipped to the US before arriving in Taiwan because of international nuclear security rules, increasing fuel-import costs, the statement said.
Under the memorandum of understanding, Australia and Taiwan also aim to expand cooperation in oil and gas exploration and in renewable-energy technology, the ministry said.
State-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) has a preliminary agreement with Australia’s Woodside Petroleum Ltd to buy liquefied natural gas.
In related news, a cooperation agreement between Taipower and the Taiwan Magnesium Association (TMA, 台灣鎂合金協會) in reducing emissions of the most potent greenhouse gas is expected to achieve a result equivalent to building more than 100 Da-an parks, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.
EPA Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏) said that sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) has a global warming potential 22,800 times that of carbon dioxide and that the joint efforts by Taipower and TMA in lowering SF6 emissions will reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 45,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
“That would be the equivalent of building 123 Da-an Forest Parks,” Shen said at a ceremony in which Taipower and TMA signed a memorandum of cooperation with the aim of jointly cutting emissions of SF6 — a colorless, odorless, non-toxic, non-flammable gas used as an electrical insulator.
Taipower president Lee Han-shen (李漢申) said the company had collected about 5,000kg of used SF6.
TMA director-general Hung Shui-shu (洪水樹) said recycled SF6, after proper purification, could be used by the local magnesium industry to protect molten magnesium from oxidation.
The agreement “will help lower magnesium producers’ purchase costs, as well as reduce the country’s SF6 emissions,” Hung said.
Meanwhile, CPC and the non-profit Metal Industries Research and Development Center (MIRDC, 金屬工業研究發展中心) signed a strategic alliance agreement yesterday on the development of renewable energy technologies in an effort to promote carbon dioxide reduction and energy conservation.
The agreement, which will take effect next year, involves joint development of biomass energy, hydrogen power and solar energy technologies over the next four years.
MIRDC will bring to the table its high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) equipment and technology, while CPC will contribute its techniques for the production of biomass fuel.
Their first joint project will be the adoption of the MIRDC’s high-performance, low-cost HPHT technology to extract oil from Jatropha curcas seeds for the production of biodiesel. CPC has 100,000 hectares of Jatropha curcas trees in Indonesia, CPC chairman Chu Shao-hua (朱少華) said.
The company has also authorized Taiwanese researchers to study ways of extracting glucose from rice straw for use in green energy production, he said.
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