On Friday, Jan. 13, I joined San Miguel Corp. president and vice chairman Ramon S. Ang on a whirlwind helicopter tour of Petron Refinery’s 400-hectare industrial complex in Limay, Bataan. He was furious. Petron or more specifically, a brand-new SMC coal power plant was accused, in an ABS-CBN prime time newscast, of spewing dangerous ash fall onto a barrio, Sitio Pexsite, some five kilometers away from the refinery complex.
The Channel 2 newscast even interviewed a man who had galis aso (scabies) and another person, a certain Mang Danny, who apparently was going blind because of alleged pollution. Danny said he was holding a tree trunk and suddenly a gust of strong wind and dust penetrated his eyes.
In the first place, scabies is caused not by pollution but by tiny mites that reside on the outer layer of the skin. They are living things, not an inanimate matter like ash or industrial dust.
In the second place, if it is true the SMC coal plant emits pollution, the first to be adversely affected should be Petron’s some 1,400 employees and residents in Limay. I talked to Petron’s resident doctor of the past three years, Homer Paras. He said there had been no single case of scabies or eye infection at the Petron premises. So if Ground Zero has no pollution, why would a barrio five kilometers away have it?
In the third place, the source of the alleged pollution, SMC’s coal plant, could not have caused the ash fall because it is not yet operational. It will be operational only in May 2017, four months from today.
And even when it becomes operational, the coal plant has what RSA calls an electrostatic resuscitator that will spray or capture any ash and convert it into liquid, not flying dust travelling in the air several kms away. The coal plant will produce two kinds of ash as a by-product—the top ash the one captured by the resuscitator and the bottom ash which is also captured by another device because it is a very good raw material when mixed with cement. The bottom ash is called calcine, a 90-percent calcine limestone powder with sulfur. It is cooked at 900 degrees centigrade and then fed into a kiln at 1600 degrees. It then becomes chemical gypsum. Since it is a very good material for making quality cement (it makes the cement adhere properly or cure itself well), San Miguel obviously has no reason to let such kind of ash go to waste as an ash fall. RSA calls their power plant clean coal because of its technology called CFB – circulating fluidized bed. CFB converts solids into liquid thru high combustion, resulting in a greatly minimized emission of pollutants. Any pollutants produced are recycled back into the system for further processing.
The ABS-CBN report, however, triggered a cease and desist order against the San Miguel coal plant. “We’re issuing a cease and desist order to the plant… They have to stop operations. I’m gonna insist that they take care of all the medical bills,” Environment Secretary Gina Lopez was quoted by ABS-CBN as barking. “Heads will roll. I’m not going to take this sitting down we’re gonna clean up the organization,” Lopez added.
Lopez’s CDO had the effect of putting in peril a refinery and power plant complex where San Miguel has invested at least $10 billion. It is the largest such oil refinery in the Philippines and the most modern in Asia, gloats RSA.
As it turns out thus, Secretary Lopez (no relation) was barking up the wrong tree. RSA traced the source of the pollution to be an old government-owned power plant that is in the process of being decommissioned or phased out. As for scabies, well, the residents were in a squatter area where people live cheek-by-jowl with all kinds of animals, including dogs, a principal source of mites for scabies (that is why the disease is called galis aso).
Although it is not the culprit, San Miguel sent doctors to the area and took care of the alleged victims.
But why is Gina Lopez going hammer and tongs against San Miguel in Limay? Well, it is what I call the Goliath effect. The San Miguel Petron complex is the largest of its kind in the Philippines. SMC has poured $10 billion into it for the ultramodern refinery and two adjacent new coal power plants.
SMC has recently invested $3 billion to make the Petron refinery super-efficient (it won’t have waste that will be wasted; the byproducts from refining crude will be converted into plastic through a petrochemical complex; into asphalt for construction, and into energy that will save the plant plenty of electricity bill). “We are 100-percent efficient,” says RSA.
It is easy for an eager-beaver do-gooder like Gina Lopez to literally hold such a $10-billion facility to ransom.
Gina, as you probably know, is undergoing vetting by the powerful Commission on Appointments. Not all its 24 members (including 12 from the House of Representatives) are warm to her. In the first round, the CA refused to confirm her as DENR chief. She has singlehandedly frozen mining in the Philippines thru the power of the permit system.
Whenever a bureaucrat has the power to issue permits, he or she wields tremendous power whose use or misuse could mean life or death for a huge company like San Miguel (which generates P700 billion in revenues and P50 billion in profits annually, the largest in the Philippines).
It so happens that the chairman-CEO of SMC an industrialist named Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., the titular head of the political party Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC). With more than 33 NPC congressmen, it is the second largest political party in the House.
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