By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff reporter
In future decades, if Koreans are able to see otters, cranes and eoreumchi, a freshwater fish, flourish in the country, they will have to thank S-Oil, one of the major oil refineries here.
The Seoul-based outfit announced its plans late last week to spend a total of 150 million won ($125,000) to preserve eoreumchi, one of the country's natural creature treasures, threatened with extinction.
To protect eoreumchi, which is academically known as hemibarbus mylodon, from disappearing entirely, S-Oil has signed an agreement with the Korean Association for Conservation of Freshwater Fish.
As part of efforts geared toward increasing the number of the rare species, S-Oil will support the scheme of releasing its fries into rivers.
``The protection of natural treasures is a very important activity because it means we actively participate to pass on an undamaged, cleaner natural environment to our children,'' said Jeong Baik-joe, the head of S-Oil Public Service Corps in Seoul.
``We'll continue to support efforts to restore river ecosystems, such as an ecological survey on freshwater fish in the Ulsan Taehwa River, in addition to environmental protection agencies' projects to preserve eoreumchi and its habitat and release its fry into rivers.''
On the sideline of the campaign, S-Oil holds an eco-class eight times from late May to September to educate children on the significance of environmental conservation. The firm expects some 300 elementary school students will take part in the initiative.
This is not the first time that S-Oil, whose largest shareholder is Saudi Aramco, has made efforts to save endangered species on the Korean peninsula.
Since the entity minted a partnership with the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2008 to safeguard natural treasures, it has spearheaded a variety of programs to conserve such animals as otters and cranes as well as eoreumchi.
Back in 2008, S-Oil donated a substantial amount of money to an otter protection research fund while its volunteers at Public Service Corps commissioned activities on their own to shield the habitat of the animals.
The animal of 2009 was the crane, which is a globally rare species. S-Oil CEO Ahmed Subaey himself stepped up to visit cranes' habitats situated inside the heavily-fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) where he fed them and cleaned their territory.
Eoreumchi is a species of freshwater fish native to Korea famous for their unique characteristics of gathering pebbles to make a spawning tower after laying eggs. But its numbers have plunged over the past decades because of water pollution.
The Korean government designated the fish, which lives in the upper and middle stream of the Han and Geum rivers, as a natural treasure in 1978 and its now under legal protection.