Mary Henry (Independent)

I thank Senator Quinn for asking me to second the motion. This is an area which has sadly been neglected by the Government. Senator Quinn was tactful in the wording of his motion. I am only sorry that an amendment has been tabled.

As Senator Quinn was reading the article on oil in the National Geographic, I was reading a book which was colourfully called The Party's Over. This is about the fact that oil and gas are running out on this planet and that oil and gas reserves have probably been overestimated. It is interesting to see how cagey many countries have become about their oil reserves. We hear that places such as Saudi Arabia are re-estimating them. However, we do not hear what the re-estimated figures are, but there is little indication that they will make us feel jolly. There appears to be a dramatic change in the amount of reserves being held as well as a great increase in the use of oil, as Senator Quinn pointed out, not just by Europe, North and South America but by China and India as well, which were not major consumers until recently.

Senator Quinn has rightly pointed to our enormous dependence on oil and said that replacing it by any renewable means is extraordinarily important. I support his point that we ought to conserve whatever energy we acquire from the oil and gas we are using. Any gas we may have around our coasts is now even more valuable than it was a couple of years ago. We mostly use oil and gas to generate electricity. This is not a very efficient way to make electricity as an enormous amount of heat is lost. We need to make more of an effort as regards the conservation of this heat.

Heat energy converts chemical energy into work, but unfortunately most of it is thrown away in the form of heat. The figures for a typical spark ignition engine, running on natural gas, show that only 25% to 30% of the energy input is converted into electricity. I am grateful to my research assistant, Mr. Niall O'Brien, for these figures, because I am not a great expert on the spark ignition engine. Some 10% of the heat produced in fact goes up the flue. If we put forward combined heat and power systems, to deal with the remaining 50% to 60% of heat produced, it can be recovered and not wasted.

This technology has been in existence for decades and has been promoted since the early 1980s. It was not commonly used until then, but the last oil crisis in the 1970s probably encouraged people to modernise the technology. It is now being used on a relatively wide scale on buildings in many countries. I am delighted to say that some of these buildings in Ireland have proven that they can very successfully lower the amount of fuel they require, which of course means great savings. A good example of one of these units is the Jurys Doyle-owned Burlington Hotel. This hotel, which has 500 bedrooms and a large conference facility, has been running on a Limerick-supplied technology unit for many years. The installation takes advantage of the ESB's maximum demand tariff. That means that as well as saving the heat from its engines the hotel can reuse it in its grid when tariffs are high in the ESB system.

They have a large diesel engine which has been converted to burn gas, and it does two jobs. It heats the buildings and provides hot water for the guests and the cooling water is then fed into a heat exchanger which passes the heat into the boilers to warm the rooms. The savings are of the order of €100,000 a year, which is a substantial contribution to the group's profits. The group has the same technology in the Berkeley Court Hotel and I know there is a similar system in the Davenport. I hope that other hotels which have this technology will forgive me for not mentioning them.

Some of our hospitals have this technology, too, for example Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin and the Blackrock Clinic. One must ask why other hospitals are not using such technology. In both of these hospitals some of the fuel to run the system comes from the burning of clinical waste. We have to think more imaginatively and ask our institutions to examine the way they deal with fuel. In the educational sector, the King's Hospital is a school which uses this technology. As well as heating the rooms, hot water is provided and the swimming pool is heated in this way. This technology should be promoted. It is being much encouraged in the United Kingdom. It is interesting that Prime Minister Blair did not promote this initiative, rather than the nuclear one, last night. It would have been received far more favourably.

We have seen that this system can be used by councils. Local authority representatives from Ireland can go and look at schemes in Britain, for example in Woking where a local authority supplies customers with electricity on a private wire combined heat and power exchange and renewable energy network. As well as energy generation, there is an enormous environmental impact. Other councils are following suit. We are all well aware of global warning by now. Scorn was poured on this when it was first mooted in the 1970s, but now we know that any unnecessary escape of heat into the atmosphere must be halted. There are difficulties involved in calculating the carbon emission accuracy, as we have recently seen publicised within the EU. Anything that can be done to prevent further atmospheric pollution is important as well. If we bring forward this technology we can reduce our fuel costs and promote environmental issues at the same time.