Mr. James Cogan:

I agree ethanol is a pretty dull subject. I often say that if I worked for Tesla, I would get more invites to speak at committee meetings, not just here but everywhere else. I am an advocate and an evangeliser for electric cars, first and foremost, but I work for the ethanol industry and I believe passionately that, with such a large fleet of vehicles running around the world that are still burning liquid, we need to do something about that. We have a phenomenon called peak ICE, with ICE being the internal combustion engine, which is the name for a conventional vehicle. The question is when we reach peak ICE. It is similar to the question of reaching peak oil given, years ago, we thought we were going to reach peak oil but we still have not. We thought we were going to reach peak ICE but we still have not. I believe Ireland is going to reach peak ICE sooner than many countries but, globally, we are not going to reach it until 2040 on current trends, and there are certainly no indications to show we are going to reach peak ICE earlier than 2040. I would love to have this incredible hockey stick effect where, suddenly, everybody switched to electric vehicles but there are no indicators that will happen, unfortunately.

We. therefore, have this fleet. It may well be that we will reach the peak size of the diesel and petrol fleet in Ireland in three to six years. Last year, we added 45,000 units to the fleet and 4,000 were electric and plug-in hybrid. This year, we will probably add that number again to fleet and more - perhaps 10,000 - will be plug-in hybrid and electric. We are then looking at what stage we get to the point where we have used up all of our early adopters or all the kind of people who are prepared to buy electric and plug-in. I am optimistic that will be a good number. However, people in climate policy have a tendency to imagine electric vehicles have done a lot more than they have, whereas, for the most part, the impact of electric vehicles has been essentially minimal.