The Application of The Essential Facilities Doctrine on the Liberalized Petroleum Industry: A Competition Law Perspective
Abstract
The liberalization of the monopolistic industries is one of the major economic
policies in Chinese Taipei starting from the late 90's. The liberalization of
petroleum market has been realized in September 2000, when Formosa Petroleum
Co. entered the market long been monopolized by Chinese Petroleum Company.
In this project, we intended to study
two layers of competition issues raised after liberalization. The first is the
possible applications of the so-called "Essential Facilities Doctrine,
EFD" to the liberalized petroleum market. The second issue we study is
the joint-sale agreement and merger between upstream oil suppliers and downstream
retailers (gas stations). In the first tier of questions, we have adopted the
method of comparative study. We selected EU, United States and Australia as
the region for comparison. We compared the legal background and rulings of the
court, which constitute the EFD in these jurisdictions. We concluded that there
are indeed some "bottleneck facilities" in the petroleum market, airport
depot and underground pipelines is a good example. However, we also content
that there should be a clear line between competition law and industry-specified
regulation laws. Competition law and EFD are not the proper tool to fulfill
the liberalization policy.