MOSCOW (MRC) -- China's environmental watchdog has suspended approvals for new oil-refining projects, after two of the country's largest refiners missed pollution targets last year, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.
China National Petroleum Corp. didn't meet its chemical oxygen demand target and China Petrochemical Corp. didn't meet its nitrogen oxide target, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a statement on its website. The targets refer to pollution from CNPC and Sinopec's refineries.
The ministry is temporarily suspending approvals for environmental impact assessments for new refining projects and the renovation and expansion of existing refineries, it said. The approvals are needed before a project can move forward.
However, projects that aim at reducing emissions and improving fuel standards would still be reviewed, the ministry said.
COD is an indicator of water pollution, while nitrogen oxide is a metric for air pollution. Both are key environmental targets in China's current 12th five-year plan.
The environmental ministry said CNPC and Sinopec's COD fell by 0.08% and 2.6% in 2012. CNPC and Sinopec's nitrogen oxide emissions, meanwhile, grew by 3.3% and 1.3% last year, it said. CNPC's target was to reduce COD by 0.6% last year, while Sinopec's target was to keep nitrogen oxide emissions flat.
Sinopec and CNPC didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
We remind that, as MRC wrote earlier, SINOPEC Wuhan Company’s ethylene project with a capacity of 800,000 tonnes per year produced first batch of qualified products, marking its successful commissioning and startup. The project is a pivotal project of SINOPEC in the 11th five-year-plan period and the most important project in Hubei province. The project, including 11 greenfield major production units with public utilities and supporting facilities, was built in three years with an total investment of 16.563 billion yuan. Filling in the gap of large-scale ethylene projects in central China, the project plays an important role in boosting central China's economy, achieving balanced development among different regions, upgrading SINOPEC' industrial structure and enahncing the overall capacity of petrochemical industry.
China Petrochemical Corp, which operates refineries through China Petroleum and Chemical Corp, is a fuel supplier in China.
Sinopec Corp. is one of the largest scale integrated energy and chemical companies with upstream, midstream and downstream operations. Its refining and ethylene capacity ranks No.2 and No.4 globally. The Company has 30,000 sales and distribution networks of oil products and chemical products, its service stations are now ranked third largest in the world.
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