In response to the Cabinet’s announcement yesterday that all taxis countrywide should run on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), or autogas, within four years, the state-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said that deregulation measures will be necessary to achieve the goal.
Unless the government implements such measures, CPC said, the government’s plan will be difficult to carry out, as it normally takes up to 4.5 years to prepare, build and obtain a license to operate LPG stations.
In addition, CPC said between 80 percent and 90 percent of the nation’s taxis operate in Taipei, where gas stations are generally smaller, which poses a problem. Regulations for autogas stations stipulate safety distance requirements that would make it a challenge to provide LPG at existing gas stations in Taipei, it said.
“The Taipei City government has already said that there is no need to hold public discussions and that the government should push for deregulation to speed up the promotion of LPG stations,” CPC vice president and spokesman Chu Shao-hua (朱少華) said at a press conference yesterday.
Chu said the process of setting up adequate autogas stations would require at least two years of preparation — including public meetings and environmental evaluations — one year to build the facilities and another year and a half to secure licenses.
There are 23 autogas stations countrywide operated by CPC and its retailers, and CPC plans to add another 50 such stations in the next three to five years.
The Taipei Times’ sister newspaper, the Liberty Times, reported that based on the government’s floating oil price mechanism, domestic gasoline and diesel prices will likely go up NT$1.2 per liter and NT$1.3 per liter respectively next month.
In response to media speculation, Chu said CPC was only an executor and did not set fuel prices. Unless the government adopts a new policy, CPC will follow the floating oil price mechanism and raise its prices.
“The final decision as to whether to adjust CPC’s oil prices next month will be announced on the company’s Web site on Aug. 1 at 5pm,” Chu said, without elaborating.
Earlier yesterday, Minister of Economic Affairs Yiin Chii-ming (尹啟銘) said the government had not ruled out asking CPC to cut fuel prices next month if global oil prices continue to decline next week.
SPEED OF LIGHT: US lawmakers urged the commerce department to examine the national security threats from China’s development of silicon photonics technology US President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday said it is finalizing rules that would limit US investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology sectors in China that could threaten US national security. The rules, which were proposed in June by the US Department of the Treasury, were directed by an executive order signed by Biden in August last year covering three key sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain AI systems. The rules are to take effect on Jan. 2 next year and would be overseen by the Treasury’s newly created Office of Global Transactions. The Treasury said the “narrow
SPECULATION: The central bank cut the loan-to-value ratio for mortgages on second homes by 10 percent and denied grace periods to prevent a real-estate bubble The central bank’s board members in September agreed to tighten lending terms to induce a soft landing in the housing market, although some raised doubts that they would achieve the intended effect, the meeting’s minutes released yesterday showed. The central bank on Sept. 18 introduced harsher loan restrictions for mortgages across Taiwan in the hope of curbing housing speculation and hoarding that could create a bubble and threaten the financial system’s stability. Toward the aim, it cut the loan-to-value ratio by 10 percent for second and subsequent home mortgages and denied grace periods for first mortgages if applicants already owned other residential
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TECHNOLOGY EXIT: The selling of Apple stock might be related to the death of Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger last year, an analyst said Billionaire Warren Buffett is now sitting on more than US$325 billion in cash after continuing to unload billions of US dollars worth of Apple Inc and Bank of America Corp shares this year and continuing to collect a steady stream of profits from all of Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s assorted businesses without finding any major acquisitions. Berkshire on Saturday said it sold off about 100 million more Apple shares in the third quarter after halving its massive investment in the iPhone maker the previous quarter. The remaining stake of about 300 million shares was valued at US$69.9 billion at the end of
RSS