One of Ireland's most successful businessmen, Eddie O'Connor, of Airtricity, has asked the agricultural science community to join a study of how timber used to generate electricity could be transported to power stations on narrow-gauge railways driven by electric power.
The Airtricity chief executive told the Agricultural Science Association annual conference in Sligo at the weekend that one of the biggest problems with quick-rotation forestry or other biomass crops was transport costs.
"If part of one's motivation is to help ameliorate global warming, it makes little sense to use great quantities of diesel to haul the wood to the generating station," he said.
"It would be interesting to study how biomass could be grown, transported and turned into electricity in environmentally-friendly ways. Could narrow-gauge railways be used? Could the rolling stock be driven by electricity? What area would need to be planted to allow for non-depletion of soil as well as supplying electricity in sufficient quantities to allow for efficient conversion and to achieve scale economics?"
Prof Jimmy Burke, of Teagasc, said that with current levels of support farmers could expect to lose €200 a hectare in the first six years of growing elephant grass or willow. It would take 15 years to generate a profit of just €40 per hectare. He called for establishment grants for energy crops, saying that half of the 1.3 million tonnes of peat burned in midlands electricity could be substituted by miscanthus or forestry thinning or willow.
This, he said, would create new uses for 70,000 hectares of land and could lead to a reduction of one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
Irish Farmers' Association president Pádraig Walshe said that farmers were keen to grow dedicated energy crops, as land for this was available as a result of the ending of the sugar beet industry and low margins on cereals. However, all would depend on the profit margins from this and the Government's commitment to the sector would only become evident in the December Budget. He called for pilot-project status for Irish biofuels industries up to 2010.
Job Landbroek, a senior resource analyst with Davy Stockbrokers, predicted that the price of oil would drop back to about $50 a barrel in the future. He said that the oil age was definitely not over, but the era of cheap oil had come to an end.