Oil giants fail environmental tests

The central government required CNPC and Sinopec to reduce their nitrogen oxide emissions by 8 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by the end of 2015. Instead, such emissions increased 8.27 percent for CNPC and 2.52 percent for Sinopec by the end of 2012, according to the ministry.

Sinopec spokesman Lyu Dapeng said that most of its affiliated companies have taken effective action as planned but a few of them, like Sinopec Luoyang Co, Shanghai Co and Anqing Co, did not perform well and affected the overall results.

He said it is Sinopec's social responsibility to reduce emissions and achieve their targets.

He emphasized it recently launched an environmental campaign and will invest 22.87 billion yuan ($3.74 billion) in three years on 803 environmental management projects.

CNPC said the company has earmarked 12.7 billion yuan for pollution reduction projects before 2015 and will implement tougher evaluation measures for affiliated companies, China National Radio reported on Thursday.

Poor facilities

The ministry says all kinds of detailed problems in the two petrochemical companies were found during the investigation process.

The first is the lack of desulfurization and denitrification facilities. One-third of CNPC's 115 coal-burning boilers are not equipped with desulfurization facilities and none are equipped with denitrification facilities.

The situation is no better for Sinopec. About 40 percent of its 174 boilers don't have desulfurization facilities, and only four of them have denitrification facilities.

Investigation also found that the two companies' pollution treatment techniques are ineffective.

Of CNPC's 77 boilers with desulfurization facilities, only 11 of them have a desulfurization efficiency higher than 90 percent, the rate for the others is below 70 percent.

Problems were also found at many of the two petrochemical giants' subsidiary companies, including discharging excessive sewage, affecting the storm-water drainage system with wastewater, and even providing fake online-monitoring data.

The environmental performance of their affiliated companies abroad are leading the world, but their emission reduction efforts within China are far from satisfactory, People's Daily commented on Thursday.

Almost half of the two oil giants' refining capability is located around the cities of Beijing and Tianjin, the provinces of Hebei and Shandong, and the Yangtze River and Pearl River deltas, where airborne pollution is most severe and complex. Yet their affiliated companies are still implementing an outdated atmospheric pollutant standard issued 17 years ago, People's Daily reported.