Mr. Charles Shier:

It is not just a simple question of sustainability, biomass must clear several other hurdles. First, there is the EU timber regulation where one must be certain that if something is coming from somewhere else, that it has been harvested legally. Second, we have very tough and vital sanitary requirements. One may not bring what one likes into this country, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will seek to inspect it and, with certain species, ensure that it has been heat treated in order to prevent the importation of pathogens. The climate and energy package that has been going through Brussels has a whole new set of sustainability criteria that are past of Recast, the renewable energy directive, that biomass will have to meet into the future.

We have been working with an organisation called NEPcon, international experts in land use and sustainability, and have developed a suite of criteria with them which we will apply. We are quite happy that most things grown in Ireland under our own forestry regulations and so on will meet all these criteria. However, when trying to establish supply chains overseas, we must ensure that they meet these criteria, mainly because under the new regulations coming in the future, all the biomass that we use will have to be verified by a third party. That is part of what will happen under the renewable energy directive.

On the carbon footprint, the rules and regulations relating to this are laid down in the renewable directive in the context of emissions along the supply chain. We have quantified those. The directive sets out thresholds where once it is below a certain threshold, biomass is deemed to be carbon-neutral. Obviously, it has emissions but if they are low enough they are deemed to be carbon-neutral. Those are the rules that we will work with.

On indigenous biomass, a great deal of forestry was planted in the 1980s and 1990s and is now coming on stream. The volume available from Irish forests will increase over the next decade particularly from the mid-2020s. Unfortunately, planting rates have dropped back considerably in the past decade or so. We are not planting anywhere near what would be the target set by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the forest service. That is a problem. We had worked with the Department over several years to try to promote an energy crop scheme because we see them as being a shorter-term solution. Forests take a long time to grow up to first thinning whereas energy crops are quicker. However, it is very difficult to persuade Irish farmers or landowners to change land use. We have found significant barriers to changing land use. This will have to be relaunched and promoted into the future if we want to grow more indigenous biomass from the agricultural sector in addition to forestry.

On emissions and air quality, it is true that burning biomass is like a solid fuel which leads to air emissions. All three stations operate under integrated pollution control licences. There are strict requirements on sulphur and nitrogen emissions and also particulates. They all have different types of filtration systems on the back end of the flue gasses, resulting in very low levels of air emissions, either on the chemical side or particulates. Burning biomass will not be any different to burning peat, the plants have to meet the same type of emission limits.