Cabinet spokesperson and Minister without Portfolio Lo Ping-cheng says that northern Taiwan could suffer power shortages if a planned gas processing plant is forced to move to a different location.
Taiwan’s largest petrochemical producer, CPC Corporation, is planning to build a natural gas processing plant in northern Taiwan, but the plans have met with strong opposition from environmentalists. They say the plant will damage algal reefs, and they have launched a referendum to have the site of the plant moved.
On Thursday, however, Lo said that moving the plant will involve building an extra 40km of gas pipeline. A new location would also mean new environmental impact assessments and evaluations of how the plant’s new location will impact nearby residents. All of this could push the project back by 11 years.
In the meantime, he says, the north of Taiwan would become dependent of power generated in the south. Since the low-pollution natural gas the plant would provide will be unavailable, this would mean power from coal-fired plants.
Meanwhile, Lo said that plans to build the plant have been revised in response to activists’ concerns, with 90% of the originally planned site scrapped and the remainder moved further away from the reef.