Taiwan’s petrochemical Industry has been responsible for many pollution incidents over the years. The main reason for this is the Big Brother mentality of company bosses, who pay scant attention to investing in safety and environmental protection equipment or keeping it in good working order. They also pay little more than lip service to such matters as repaying their debts to society or creating opportunities for employment.
Their disappointing behavior goes a long way to explaining why the petrochemical industry has in recent months become the business everyone loves to hate. In the long term, however, environmental protection and economic development are both important. If air pollution is to be brought under control, it will be necessary to implement a system of emission caps.
Let us make a comparison between two projects currently at the center of controvery — Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology Corp and Formosa Plastics Corp’s (FPC) sixth naptha cracker. If the Kuokuang project were completed, emissions of carbon dioxide — the gas that preoccupies environmentalists these days — would be 11.87 million tonnes per year, while FPC’s sixth naptha cracker emits 67.57 million tonnes per year.
If the proposed fifth stage of FPC’s sixth naptha cracker is built and goes into operation, that figure will increase to 78.15 million tonnes — five to six times the amount to be emitted by Kuokuang. If one looks at the quantity of carbon dioxide emission per unit of production, an initial estimate is that the production of each tonne of ethene by Kuokuang would release 4.94 tonnes of carbon dioxide, while the figure for FPC’s sixth naptha cracker is about four times that at 21.65 tonnes.
If carbon dioxide emissions alone are considered, FPC should be instructed to take immediate measures to improve its sixth naptha cracker by investing in a new production process to raise its energy efficiency or by changing the composition of the fuel it uses, ie burning less coal.
Kuokuang plans to fuel its plant with 60 percent natural gas and 40 percent low-sulfur fuel oil. Natural gas contains hardly any sulfur at all, while low-sulfur fuel oil contains at most 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent by weight — much lower than the 1 percent to 5 percent of the coal used to fuel FPC’s sixth naptha cracker. Kuokuang’s sulfur dioxide and trioxide emissions would be 6,577 tonnes per year, compared with 16,000 tonnes for FPC’s sixth naptha cracker — and the latter will rise to 19,788 tonnes — between two and three times Kuokuang’s figure — if the FPC plant’s fifth stage is built.
Would it not be better to allow the relatively less polluting Kuokuang to go ahead and build its plant rather than let the higher polluting FPC sixth naptha cracker expand further?
The nub of this question ought to be whether there is a corresponding balance between increased emissions from the Kuokuang plant and any reductions in the production volume of FPC’s sixth naptha cracker or the pollution it generates. In other words, the question is: If operations at the Kuokuang plant were to replace production at the FPC’s sixth naptha cracker, would this result in an overall drop in pollution emissions?
Although the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has been monitoring stationary pollution sources — factory chimneys and their peripheral boundaries — for many years and with considerable success, the problem is that local-level environmental protection bureaus’ only standard for monitoring emissions is the concentration of exhaust pollutants.
If the density of pollutants emitted from the stacks does not exceed the legal limit, local bureaus cannot even impose a fine, much less order a factory to suspend or close down its operations. This way of monitoring air pollution emission concentrations misses the point of pollution control in the first place — it doesn’t control the overall situation.
The most urgent task right now is to set up an emission cap mechanism in each air quality zone.
First, one has to assess the total amount of air pollution each air quality zone can bear. Emissions from all sources in each zone then cannot be allowed to exceed this total load. Only this way of doing things is sustainable in the long term.
Second, transboundary transport of pollutants must be taken into account. Air movements are not restricted to the boundaries of each air quality zone.
In sparsely populated countries where industrial zones are located tens or even hundreds of kilometers away from residential areas, such a task may be postponed for a while, but in densely populated Taiwan, where industrial and residential areas are all jumbled up together, it is a matter of great urgency.
It is all very well to complain that environmental impact assessors are no more than rubber stamps, or that local environmental protection bureaus do not effectively enforce the law, but what is really needed is to correct the system. If this is not done, the government, businesses and the public will continue to pay a heavy price.
The EPA must speed up the process of instituting emission caps, the need for which is clearly stipulated in the Air Pollution Control Act (空氣污染防制法). If such a system can be implemented quickly, it will be a cornerstone of sustainable development for Taiwan. Instituting total mass control is not such a daunting task as some may imagine. The EPA needs to redouble its efforts in this respect and not overlook its importance. If we don’t do it today, we will regret it tomorrow.
Cheng Wan-li is director of the Taiwan Development Institute’s Institute for Environmental Management and former officer-in-charge of the UN Environment Program’s Environment Statistics and State of the Environment Unit.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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