Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 玄史生/CC0
PLANS BY THE Taiwanese government to build a liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in Kaohsiung have led to pushback from local residents.
Groups such as the Taiwan Association of Healthy Parents have criticized the LNG terminal as potentially impacting air safety, while the Government Watch Alliance has criticized the potential impact on the ocean. Some local residents will need to be relocated for the project.
All this proves familiar, as with other LNG construction in Taiwan. The most famous case in point was with regards to an LNG terminal that the Tsai administration sought to build off of the coast of Datan, Taoyuan.
Local environmentalists criticized the LNG terminal as potentially destroying a thousands-year-old coral reef. In this way, the LNG terminal would have also threatened maritime biodiversity.
Such environmentalists called for a national referendum on the issue, putting a local political issue to a national vote. But they were not successful in their petition drive to obtain the necessary signatures to hold a referendum until the KMT embraced the cause as a means of attacking the DPP.
This proved an ironic reversal, seeing as it had originally been the KMT that had called for constructing the terminal during the Ma administration. The DPP, then the opposition, had opposed the LNG terminal. But now the KMT embraced pushback against the LNG terminal as a means of attacking the DPP, which now backed the terminal. As a result, even if local environmentalists had long been active in efforts protesting against the LNG terminal, regardless of which administration was in power, they faced accusations that they were merely acting on behalf of the KMT, and that their true political agenda was simply to back the pan-Blue camp.
Photo credit: Foxy Who \(^∀^)//WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
It is to be seen if the pan-Blue camp similarly comes to embrace pushback against the Kaohsiung LNG terminal. In past years, the KMT has been particularly hoping to make inroads into southern Taiwan, the traditional territory of the DPP, after the victory of Han Kuo-yu as Kaohsiung mayor in 2016. This catapulted Han to later become the KMT’s presidential candidate in the 2020 election cycle.
Nevertheless, the DPP’s motivations with regard to the LNG terminal in Kaohsiung are likely similar to those in Datan, Taoyuan. First, the LNG terminal is seen as part of Taiwan’s broader energy transition, even if it may not exactly be the long-term green energy solution that Taiwan hopes for.
Second, Taiwan hopes to increase its LNG reserve capacity from seven days to fourteen days. This is because shipments of LNG may be cut off in wartime if China launches a blockade.
Ironically, the KMT is likely to attack the LNG terminal as causing air pollution, suggesting that nuclear energy–long feared in Taiwan because of the potential for a Fukushima-style meltdown due to Taiwan’s frequent seismic activity–would be cleaner. The KMT has sought to frame the DPP as irrationally opposed to nuclear energy, seeing as the DPP has historically been cautious of nuclear energy because of such concerns.
But the DPP has also slowly shifted away from its traditional anti-nuclear stances because nuclear energy could potentially be used as an energy source if LNG supplies are cut off due to a Chinese blockade. Besides that the Lai administration has suggested that advanced nuclear energy today is safe, small-scale reactors are suggested as a possible solution.
But the intersection of Taiwan’s defense and energy security has rarely become discussed publicly in Taiwanese political discourse. More often, one hears such concerns framed in terms of maintaining a stable power supply to ensure that manufacturing continues uninterrupted–with fears that frequent power outages in Taiwan would encourage companies to shift production to China. While this, too, is an energy security concern linked to concerns about China, such discussion has not been linked to military threats.