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Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Mr. Mike Quinn: We look constantly at automation. In the context of peat, I was fortunate to attend a conference in Brussels with the European Peat Society, where Bord na Móna's peat harvesting process was recognised as leader of its class. We have made significant productivity improvements over the past number of years, but there are always opportunities to do better. On whether...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Mr. Mike Quinn: Potentially we will need more because we will not stop harvesting peat. The energy peat will run out in 2030 but we still have a significant stock of raw material for the growing media which I referred to earlier and for the briquette factories. This year we will harvest approximately 3.6 million tonnes of peat. That will drop post-2030 to approximately 1.5 million and,...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Mr. Gerry Ryan: I thank the Chair. The first point is all the peat extraction activities we operate in Bord na Móna are fully licensed under licences issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. We are the only licensed extractor of peat in the State and all our activities are supervised and are carried out in accordance with strict terms set out in the various licences. We have...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Michael Conaghan: ...most people are extremely proud of it. The company is an indigenous entity and has adapted to the winds of change. I wish to ask about the scale and sophistication of the operation used to extract peat from the ground. The process in question is extremely crude in comparison to the traditional methods used to extract peat in the past, which had a very slight impact on the Earth. How...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

.... We are all aware what has happened to oil. At the end of this year the Edenderry facility will have to be able to compete with those commodity fuel stocks on the open market. If we do not get the peat price down to compete with those, we do not get access to the grid, which means we do not generate power. That same scenario happens with the two ESB stations at the end of 2019. While...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...three quarters of the 80,000 ha, whatever that is, approximately 60,000 ha, are directly involved in the production process at the moment, either by way of actual production, namely, harvesting of peat off those acres, or by providing transport paths, headlands and so on. Quite extensive working areas for machines to turn and so on, which may not relate directly to harvesting the peat but...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...Edenderry Power Limited, EPL, our power station in Edenderry, that is currently up for a judicial review which has delayed us achieving planning permission. Historically, this station has been a 100% peat burning station but it is now a co-fired biomass-peat station. In the future, this station will co-fire 37% biomass and 63% peat. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity in...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Dara Calleary: ...Bord na Móna has good title of all the lands it has around the country? Many of the holdings were based on commonage and the land was given to Bord na Móna for the specific reason of harvesting peat back in the 1940s and 1950s. Does Bord na Móna receive EU payments under CAP?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

Mr. Mike Quinn: We have a project ongoing in Mr. Gerry Ryan's department on land and property at the moment to see what we can grow on our cutaway peat lands. We have run multiple trials and the problem is that we cannot get the same yield per acre as we get from good arable land. Willow needs to grow on good land.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...weather periods. We have significant numbers of seasonal workers, between 500 and 600 currently and this workforce will continue to grow. One of the challenges the company had in 2012 when the peat harvest was poor was that it had such a high fixed labour element in the company. Through retirements and other initiatives, we will continue to provide for a variable workforce, which will...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...main pieces of infrastructure development that we plan to do in briquette factories. The first is to invest in 7.8 MW combined heat and power plants to generate power to run the site and dry the peat. The CHP plants will run on biomass and allow us to export 5 MW of power, leading to an income stream from export of power to the grid. From a biomass perspective, each factory will need...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...On the use of the land, we are quite clear and we have strong legal advice that Bord na Móna is entitled to use the land for whatever purpose it desires. It is not restricted to turf cutting or peat harvesting.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...Consequently, even when the 216 people go, we will be obliged to hire somewhere between 20 and 50 people back into the business after retirement to get us to the right-sized number of employees for peat production in the future. As for people's terms and conditions, I really cannot say too much about that because it is one of the items that currently are under discussion at the Labour...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategic Plan: Bord na Móna (9 Jun 2015)

...we get almost €17 million or €18 million from sales. Some €8.7 million will come out of labour cost. The reason we need €8.7 million for labour costs is that 62% of the cost of producing peat is labour related, 38% is non-labour. As there is not enough in the 38% to achieve the €24.2 million, unfortunately we have to do something with the labour costs.