Guests of honor at the ceremony included representatives of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company and Qatar’s RasGas Company, CPC’s major suppliers of crude oil and liquefied natural gas, respectively.
“CPC will boost its oil exploration programs around the world to increase ownership of oil sources so Taiwan will be better prepared for the impact of price fluctuations,” said Paul Chen, president of the company. He added the firm intends to raise the percentage of crude oil from CPC-owned sources at its refineries from 4 to 10 percent within the next several years.
According to Chen, the state-owned enterprise is also working to expand Taiwan’s energy sources by facilitating greater access to LNG, which produces less carbon emissions than traditional fossil fuels. “The company is building facilities that will enable it to import larger quantities of LNG, which is in line with the government’s policy of reducing the use of nuclear power in Taiwan,” he said.
CPC currently operates two LNG receiving terminals, one in the southern city of Kaohsiung and another in the central city of Taichung, while a third such facility, slated to open in 2022, is under construction in northern Taiwan’s Taoyuan City. The proportion of electricity generated in Taiwan using LNG reached 31.4 percent in 2015, up from 4.3 in 1995.
Founded in Shanghai in 1946, CPC relocated to Taipei City in 1949. The company, overseen by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, imports and refines crude oil in addition to distributing refined petroleum products. With operations in the upstream, midstream and downstream sectors of the oil industry and a complete LNG supply chain, the firm was ranked 316th in the 2015 edition of Global 500, an annual ranking published by Fortune magazine of the top 500 corporations worldwide in terms of revenue.
CPC has played a major role in Taiwan’s economic development. In 1968, it constructed its first in a number of naphtha cracking plants, producing petrochemical products like ethylene crucial to the growth of major industries such as textiles. According to CPC, the petrochemical and related industries currently account for approximately one third of the total production value of Taiwan’s manufacturing sector. (OC-E)
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