Taiwan to invest $3.3b in petrochemical industry: official

The Ministry of Economic Affairs is planning 20 investment projects in Taiwan’s petrochemical industry this year as part of the government’s efforts to upgrade the value of the sector, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The total value of the investments will be around NT$100 billion, (US$3.3 billion), according to the spokesman for the ministry’s High-Value Petrochemical Industry Promotion Office (PIPO).

Apart from the major investment, the PIPO also plans to establish at least three centers in Taiwan for research and development in the petrochemical field, the spokesman said.

The PIPO was founded December 31, 2011 to manage the transformation of the country’s petrochemical industry into a high-value manufacturing sector.

The industry, one of the pillars of the Taiwan’s industrial sector, generated a production value of NT$1.9 trillion in 2011, recording annual growth of 4.7 percent, according to statistics from the IEK ITIS project operated by the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

The sector’s development, however, hit a snag when President Ma Ying-jeou announced in April 2011 that the government would not support a controversial project to build a new petrochemical complex in Changhua County, central Taiwan.

At the time, Ma advised that the sector be upgraded to achieve high-value production.

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Category: Taiwan