A proposal to expand the Formosa Group’s naphtha cracker in Yunlin County’s Mailiao (麥寮) was rejected at an ad hoc Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) specialist meeting yesterday because the number of storage tanks listed in the plan was unverified.
The group was told to clarify the number within a month and resubmit the plan.
Before the meeting at the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) in Taipei began, environmentalists rallied in front of the building to call for the plant to cease operations over what they said were falsified reports on the number of storage tanks it has and the air pollution it causes.
According to Taiwan Water Conservation Alliance spokesperson Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華), the EPA said it had discovered that the plant had more than 3,000 storage tanks while using unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor the environment. The Yulin County Government later confirmed that having hundreds of tanks at such a facility is illegal.
However, the company’s EIA report said that there were only 1,875 tanks at the cracker as of May last year, with the figure reduced to 1,126 in the report it submitted in October, Chen added.
Since it has been alleged that Formosa Group presented fake data in its environmental reports, the government and EIA committee members should confirm the number of storage tanks before reviewing the expansion proposal, Chen said, adding that the firm’s owners should be punished if found to have provided misleading information.
Company representatives said the lower number of storage tanks in the October report resulted from the exclusion of wastewater or rainwater storage facilities.
They added that the figure derived from the EPA’s reconnaissance was erroneous because it had likely counted all round structures as storage tanks, which was inaccurate as some of them are underground.
That prompted Chen to ask if the actual number may be even higher if some are underground.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS