Mr. James Cogan:

The Senator spoke about northern European countries that are experimenting with different blends of biofuels and different levels of support for electric fleets. I will come out: I am a complete electric car enthusiast. If Ireland could get to 1 million, I would be the first to sign on the dotted line for doing that. I have difficulty imagining how we can get there or even to half that number given the cost it takes to incentivise them, the requirements for extra power, infrastructure and so on. However, even if we reached 1 million electric vehicles by 2030, we would still need the extra vehicles running on biofuels because that number of electric vehicles would constitute one third of the fleet. At least half of them will be hybrid between diesel or petrol and electric. Therefore, people will continue to put diesel or petrol into them. At least half of the electricity they use will still be fossil based. We will need other measures as well as the electric vehicles even if we get to 1 million. Those other measures are clearly modal shift, more efficient use of traffic and less use of people sitting in cars on their own - I am all for that. However, we will still need to improve the performance of the fuels we are putting into the engines that burn diesel and petrol, including electric vehicles that partially burn diesel and petrol. That is where we get to the E5, E10 and the diesel blends.

France is putting 85% ethanol into its normal petrol cars now and is not waiting for new technologies or some special car to come out. People install a tuner device that costs €110. It makes the electronics of the engine recognise that there is a slightly different blend of petrol in it and it is able to run fine on it. It is pretty easy to go to higher than E10 ethanol for countries that want to do it. The cost of E10 is not even a tiny bit more than that of petrol. It is the same or less than regular petrol because the overall blend of the petrol stays the same or less when it is put in.

The Senator asked where it is made. It can be made all over Europe. There are two big plants in the UK. There are many plants in France, the Netherlands and Germany. There is a certain threshold of demand, above which if we had it, then it would make economic sense to build a plant in Ireland. If we could have a sugar industry, the two things go hand in hand.

They would reinforce each other and that would be a positive thing.