Environmental groups yesterday said they would file an administrative lawsuit after their appeal to revoke the approval of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Keelung was rejected.
Led by the Protect Waimushan Action Group, the groups had sought to overturn an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the fourth LNG receiving terminal at Hsieh-ho Power Plant, but the Administrative Court in January dismissed the appeal.
The groups said the assessment, approved last year, contained multiple inaccuracies and was hastily approved.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The Hsieh-ho Power Plant is Taiwan’s only heavy-oil-fired power plant. The terminal is part of an upgrade and reconstruction plan proposed by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower), which involves dismantling four oil-fired units and replacing them with two gas-fired ones, with a combined capacity of less than 2.6 gigawatts.
The plan also calls for approximately 14.5 hectares of land reclamation to construct LNG storage tanks and unloading terminals for a fourth natural gas receiving station, intended to stabilize power supply to northern and eastern Taiwan.
Environmental groups have raised concerns about the project’s potential impacts on marine ecology, port operations and navigation safety.
Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之), convener of the Protect Waimushan Action Group and chairman of the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association, said that Taiwan’s energy transition has become an excuse for aggressive development, with the EIA process effectively turned into a “development accelerator” and a “pollution cover-up.”
The Hsieh-ho plant has long caused severe soil contamination, with heavy metals and total petroleum hydrocarbons exceeding legal limits by multiple times, sometimes even dozens of times, Wang said.
Whistle-blowers exposed the issues before the EIA meeting, yet the committee ignored errors and misrepresentations in Taipower’s data, he said.
The groups’ administrative lawsuit to revoke the EIA states that portions of Taipower’s assessment report were released one day before the EIA meeting, contravening rules requiring publication seven days in advance.
Soil contamination information was inaccurate, coral identification data contained errors, illegal landfilling occurred in protected areas and the scope of review was not properly redone, the groups said.
The lawsuit further states that the project threatens the Port of Keelung and that claims regarding reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions in the EIA were inaccurate, while the assessment ignored the impacts of climate change.
The issues justify revoking the EIA, the group said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS