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Asia Minute: China’s Energy Giant Settles Oil Spill Lawsuit

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons

A corporate giant has agreed to settle charges in China’s largest public interest lawsuit. The case involves China’s biggest energy company and the country’s worst oil spill. HPR’s Bill Dorman has more in today’s Asia Minute.

The China National Petroleum Corporation is the country’s largest producer and supplier of oil and natural gas.

Five years ago, two of the company’s pipelines exploded—spilling an estimated 15-hundred tons of crude oil into waters around the northeastern port of Dalian.

That’s the equivalent of about 11 thousand barrels of oil…the worst oil spill in China’s history.

Now, the company has agreed to pay $32 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a local group called the “Dalian Environmental Protection Volunteers Association.”

While lawsuits like these may be familiar to Americans, this is still a relatively new concept in China.

Earlier this year, China tightened its Environmental Protection Law. Raising penalties for corporate polluters, and expanding the ability of public interest groups to file lawsuits on behalf of private citizens.

The penalties in this case are still relatively small in the world of global energy companies.

Last year, the African nation of Chad fined the same Chinese company more than a billion dollars for environmental damages.

Three years ago, Conoco Phillips agreed to pay nearly $300 million in fines to China’s government. Following a spill of roughly 700 barrels of oil or about 6% of the volume of the spill in Dalian.

Bill Dorman has been the news director at Hawaiʻi Public Radio since 2011.
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