Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir:

On the view that science will deliver, we do not see any silver bullets. I have said that previously. Carbon capture and storage, CCS, is not a silver bullet from our perspective. There have been arguments that we should delay things and that CCS will deliver. There have also been arguments that we should not rely on CCS at all and that we should do other things. What comes through in our analysis is that CCS is an important part of the solution but it is a small part of the solution. We need everything else as well.

I will ask Dr. Glynn to address the comment on enhanced oil recovery.

On the question about tidal and wave energy, one of our colleagues in the audience is from Maynooth University. We have teams throughout the country working on wave and tidal energy. We have done some analysis recently on what is required and by how much the costs would have to come down to make it competitive. We are trying to explore what kind of actions and polices we would need to put in place to deliver it. I will bring in Dr. Rogan on that point in a moment.

The Deputy is right to say that we are wealthy as a country in terms of our wave and tidal energy resources. It is a very difficult environment.

I did my PhD in wave energy. Some of the early prototypes put out in the ocean were ripped apart. It is a difficult and challenging environment. We do have some interesting developments, including a company called Ocean Energy building a device in Portland, Oregon. That is going to be shipped to Hawaii for testing. We have companies working with us in Ireland, such as GKinetic on tidal energy. Regarding policy, it is clear, as the Deputy noted, how that affects offshore wind energy. Turning to policy on wave and tidal energy, we put devices in the water to test then and that is where policy has an effect. We can put the test devices in our own tanks but we need permission from somebody to go to the open sea. Where is the process and planning for that? There is some leniency and we have been able to do some testing. Moving to the next level is where we need that planning policy.