Mr. James Cogan:

I will write to the Senator.

Where does E10 ethanol relate to the diesel and biodiesel?

In Ireland, the obligation on fuel suppliers is simply that a certain proportion of the fuel must be bio. It is up to them whether to pick biodiesel or ethanol. If they can do it more cheaply and more easily with biodiesel, they will, and that is what they are doing. The Government does not say they must have so much in petrol and so much in biodiesel; it is up to the fuel companies to decide. Because it is cheaper and easier to use used cooking oil in their diesel than any other form, that is what they do. It is based on cost.

The Senator Higgins is quite correct about apocalyptic scenarios. I take her point and apologise for using the word. It is true that very awful adverse side effects can arise with policy and legislation on such things as this. The mistake we have had in Europe for the past ten years is that we have used a system of legislation based on numbers, caps and multipliers without the intelligence behind them to say, "You cannot do this", or, "You cannot do that". We have allowed a series of unwanted effects to happen. I am not even referring to used cooking oil, but palm oil, for instance, is dominant in diesel in Europe, although not in Ireland, fortunately. If we look at this intelligently and if we were just to decide to use the maximum volume of ethanol we can use within the technical limitations of cars and infrastructure, as long as it comes from Europe, we would be rock-solid safe. There are no scenarios in which that could run away into an adverse side effect we do not want. I agree that the policy officers should grasp this and be comfortable with it. They should design the policy to do it. It is a question of doing it right, which is where the thrust should be. Whether it is electricity, biofuels or anything else, we have an awful lot of learning how to do things right over the next ten years if we are to reach our climate goals.

Regarding the proportion that can come from crop waste, crops themselves and plant culture, we have lots of crop waste and plant culture opportunity. We have an awful lot more opportunity from crops themselves because the whole system has been optimised to produce crops. Grain and beet are energy crops. There is no purer form of energy crop, and the energy is in a form that can be easily processed, whereas with waste and plants we do not have any of those processes yet. We are big into these things. We have little investment projects in them. We tried a couple of years ago to set up a €400 million waste-based project. It fell down because the economics did not stand up. We could not sell the fuel we were going to make. There was no way fuel companies would ever have bought ethanol from us at the cost it was going to take for us to produce it. We, therefore, need rather more compelling policy systems to be put in place to drive through much bigger waste-based and aqua-based solutions.