The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is working with state-run CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC) to develop “environmental forensics” techniques to identify oil pollution sources, agency officials said yesterday.
Diesel fuel leaks from gasoline stations are a frequent occurrence, but the EPA has had difficulty tracking pollution sources, Soil and Groundwater Remediation Fund Management Board executive secretary Chen Shih-wei (陳世偉) said.
There have been 162 pollution incidents caused by oil leaks from gasoline station tanks since 2001 and it often takes years, and even decades, to restore the land, board section chief Chen Yi-hsin (陳以新) said.
The board began working in 2013 with CPC’s Exploration and Development Research Institute on a diesel fuel “fingerprint” database, Chen Shih-wei said.
Their database now has about 500 samples that can be distinguished by their biomarkers and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons using gas chromatography-mass spectrophotometer techniques, he said.
CPC produces about 720,000 barrels of crude oil per day at its three refineries in Taoyuan and Kaohsiung, while Formosa Petrochemical Corp produces about 540,000 barrels per day at its refinery at its sixth naphtha cracker complex in Mailiao Township (麥寮), Yunlin County.
Authorities can now easily identify which company produced a given oil pollution sample and when it was produced, he said.
The board and the institute have begun working on a gasoline sample database, he added.
Gasoline does not have obvious biomarkers like those of diesel fuel, so gasoline samples are harder to identify, institute senior researcher Wu Su-huei (吳素慧) said, adding that they are still looking for elements in gasoline that are less susceptible to natural weathering.
Although the EPA and the CPC are often at odds in environmental issues, the institute is the nation’s forerunner in fuel research and began helping the Environmental Analysis Laboratory conduct surveys on marine pollution in the late 1990s, she said.
However, Taiwan does not have many people working on fuel chromatography as geochemistry is not a popular major at the nation’s universities, she added.
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