U.S. oil giant ConocoPhillips has agreed to fight greenhouse gases, a move that will boost California's campaign against global warming, Californian Attorney General Jerry Brown said on Tuesday.
Under a settlement between the company and the state of California, ConocoPhillips will spend 10 million U.S. dollars on mitigation measures to offset emissions from a proposed expansion of its East Bay refinery in California, Brown said when announcing the settlement in San Francisco.
It was the first time that an oil refinery in the country had agreed to mitigate increased carbon emissions from an expansion project, Brown said.
He called the agreement "pathbreaking" but acknowledged that "relative to the problem (of global warming) we have a long way to go."
To compensate for an initial emissions increase of 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually at its Rodeo facility, the company agreed to fund a seven-million-dollar offset program under the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a 200,000-dollar restoration of the San Pablo wetlands and a 2.8-million-dollar reforestation effort that is projected to sequester 1.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.
In addition, ConocoPhillips agreed to identify all greenhouse gas emission sources and reduction opportunities at its California refineries, identify energy saving measures for its Rodeo refinery and surrender a permit for a petroleum coke purification plant at its Santa Maria facility, which emitted 70,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually until it was shut down earlier this year.
Brown said that the offsets are projected to be roughly equivalent to the increased emissions from the plant.
The agreement came after the attorney general's office challenged the project that their environmental impact study failed to adequately evaluate and mitigate the impacts of global warming.
More than a dozen jurisdictions in California have received letters from Brown and former Attorney General Bill Lockyer warning them to address effects of global warming from development and transportation plans, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Source: Xinhua
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