Mr. Charles Shier:

There are three criteria for biomass. First, its must be ensured the biomass has been legally harvested or harvested in compliance with national legislation or whatever.

Second, one must make sure that wherever the biomass comes from, it is accounted for in the carbon balance for that region. The new rules stipulate that one must take it from a country that is a signatory of the Paris Agreement. Not only that, the country must have rules and programmes in place where they report their carbon balance on the land side back to the UN. If a country does not have that, then one must carry out an assessment in terms of the fact that the carbon in the forest area, for example, is not being depleted by what one takes out of that land.

As I said earlier, the accounting rule for deeming biomass to be carbon neutral is very precise.

It is quite a long, detailed equation which can be seen in annex 6 of the renewable energy directive. We have to account for every bit of the harvesting procedure, including the energy use for transport and shipping if the biomass is being shipped, and landing it in port and so on. The shipping end is the easy end. People ship stuff all around the world, including oil, coal, gas, grain, and wood. Wood is not necessarily shipped for energy but the pulp and paper industry ships it. We are talking about very big vessels of 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes. There are probably only three ports in Ireland where we could land that, and only two in practice. In Dublin we could land it but there is not the storage; 40,000 tonnes of biomass is a pretty big pile on the dockside. In reality we are looking at Greenore or Foynes as the two ports where we could bring in that size of ship. With such big vessels, the carbon footprint of moving stuff across the sea is very low. The carbon footprint of moving it from port to plant is probably higher than for shipping it across the ocean. At any rate, all of that has to be accounted for in the supply chain.