Professor Mark Ferguson:

We co-fund with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. In fact, we are the major funder in some of the research activities. We co-fund with it and make sure the research is aligned with its policy and implementation. Clearly, it does not have anything to do with retrofitting but with future stuff. There will be new opportunities, not just in mitigation but also in the active removal of greenhouse gases. I hope the committee will look at new science in taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. There are major opportunities for Ireland in that area.

There are various technologies, from the rehydration of bogs and peatlands to the pumping of CO2 into the spaces vacated by gas extraction, which produces low-carbon gas - the Corrib field would be a good place for this - to the absorption of CO2 from crushed basalt, of which we have a lot, particularly in Donegal, to the new way of manufacturing concrete and then to very active CO2 capture. By way of showing the committee that some of this research is coming through, a company called Silicon Kingdom Holdings, which is all of two weeks old, is carrying out active CO2 capture in Ireland and will build a small pilot CO2 farm over the course of 2019-2020, with one or two clusters of CO2 collectors, each capable of capturing approximately 1 tonne of CO2 a day. Its plan envisages CO2 farms of 120,000 collectors, which would capture 3 megatonnes of CO2 per annum.

In managing climate change, we definitely must implement all the mitigation measures on which the committee is focused but we also must think of active ways of managing greenhouse gases by removing them from the atmosphere. We will never have a carbon-zero economy, and this acknowledgement must be part of the strategy. There is a lot science in this regard which is mostly at the research stage. However, some of it is filtering through to the commercial stage.