FOUR BIODIESEL plants which could be processing 60 million litres of renewable fuel for the Irish economy have been “mothballed” because of cheap imports of biofuels from outside the EU, the National Bioenergy Conference was told yesterday.
Teagasc bioenergy specialist Barry Caslin said another four pure plant-oil production plants which had been built without any grant aid from the State had also been squeezed out of production for the same reason.
Director of Teagasc Prof Gerry Boyle said it was disappointing to see the demise of an industry at a time when it was most needed.
“The introduction of the Biofuel Obligation Scheme has seen most of Ireland’s indigenous liquid biofuel plants being mothballed as the majority of the biofuels required by the fuel majors to achieve a 4 per cent renewable volume of sales is being imported,” he said.
Ireland was well behind in achieving the EU target of having 20 per cent energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020 and the need to guarantee energy security should drive us to diversify our sources of supply and our energy mix, he added.
He said it would be a boost to the industry if it were mandatory for local authorities to use renewable systems. If the State were to heat its buildings by renewables it would save €200 million a year.
Prof Boyle said Teagasc had recently commissioned a biomass combined heat and power plant at Oak Park research centre which is generating renewable electricity and heat for the campus there.
Work has just started on the construction of a miscanthus-fired boiler at the Teagasc centre in Johnstown Castle, while there were also plans to build an anaerobic digester at the centre in Grange, Co Meath.
Environmentalist Duncan Stewart said €6 billion in energy was imported annually and if this was spent on renewable energy, 120,000 jobs could be created.
Minister of State for Agriculture Shane Mc Entee said the Government will, subject to clearance from the EU, be introducing a new Refit to include supports for renewable energy from biomass and waste.
“I know that concern has been expressed about the delay in implementing the new Refit . . . and I am pursuing this with . . . the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources,” he said.
The Refit is a scheme designed to stimulate growth in the renewable energy industry by providing price certainty to renewable electricity generators.
Many of the delegates at the conference had complained about the delay in introducing the revised tariff and complained it was delaying projects and stunting growth in the sector.
Paul Dillon, of the agricultural bioenergy section in the Department of Agriculture, said the existing Refit was one of the perceived barriers to the development of the sector.
He said the culture and perception of producing energy crops had to change and there was a reluctance by farmers to grow them on good land. High cereal prices in recent years was also another barrier as was the difficulty in access to finance.
He said planting 10,000 hectares of trees annually from 2011 to 2016 would meet only 50 per cent of the expected shortfall in the 2020 targets.
There was disappointment at the conference that there was no representative from the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. The Minister, Pat Rabbitte, was to have opened the conference but cancelled, as did a senior official who had been invited to address the gathering in the Tullamore Court Hotel.