Protesters yesterday again petitioned the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to revoke the 18-year-old environmental impact assessment (EIA) approval for CPC Corp, Taiwan’s development project in Taoyuan’s Guantang Industrial Park.
The company plans to build its third liquefied natural gas terminal on yet-to-be reclaimed land off Datan Borough (大潭) in Guanyin District (觀音).
However, environmental groups say the project could damage a wide stretch of algal reef that could be 7,500 years old, as well as the first-level endangered coral Polycyathus chaishanensis, which is found on Datan’s coast.
Photo: CNA
“The third terminal should be ready to supply natural gas from July 2022,” the company said in its report of environmental difference analysis to the EPA in June, citing the government’s policy of generating 50 percent of electricity from natural gas by 2025.
“Guantang Industrial Park is not a biodiversity hotspot,” the report said.
At an ad hoc committee review in June, the company was asked to submit more response strategies to reduce the project’s environmental consequences by the end of this month.
Following the discovery in late June of the endangered coral by Academia Sinica biologist Allen Chen (陳昭倫), environmental groups last month submitted a petition to the agency, asking it to nullify the company’s EIA approval.
However, the agency on Thursday said that nullifying the project’s EIA is “not necessary,” adding that it would take reef protection and the coral discovery into account in its next committee review.
A group of protesters demonstrated in front of the agency’s offices as they handed in a second petition to an EPA representative.
If the EPA would not revoke the company’s EIA based on the discovery of endangered coral, the protesters would file an administrative lawsuit against the EPA, Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association lawyer Tsai Ya-ying (蔡雅瀅) said.
“The company could build the terminal at the Port of Taipei [in New Taipei City’s Bali (八里) District], where land reclamation is already finished,” Taoyuan Local Union director-general Pan Chong-cheng (潘忠政) said, rejecting the company’s claim that there is no alternative venue.
Although conservation groups have attempted to produce evidence of the area’s rich biology, both the Forestry Bureau and local government have not designated the coast as a conservation area.
“The designation procedure should be started by the local government,” Forestry Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Hong-chi (楊宏志) said.
Taoyuan Department of Agriculture Forestry Division chief Liu Hsiu-ching (劉秀卿) yesterday said that “to designate it as a conservation area” would “bear on the nation’s energy policy.”
CPC has filed an application for a second committee review and EPA officials are to conduct a field examination of the algal reef on Tuesday.
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