Biofuel issue needs work
Bernard Rice, Bio-fuel Researched, Teagasc, Oakpark Research Centre, has advised that while opportunities are beginning to emerge for the transfer of significant areas of land from conventional food production into energy crops, there is still a lot of work to do to achieve the potential.
“We still need to improve the profitability of producing and processing biofuel crops. This will require a number of changes at policy level, and an intensive research effort in agronomy, cost of feedstock crop production and profitable utilisation of the by-products of biofuel production and processing,” he says.
The value of native and imported solid and liquid biofuels and the environmental impact of more intensive energy crop production will also need to be evaluated, says Rice.
“In the longer term, systems for small to medium scale electricity production from biomass and for liquid biofuel production from the cellulose component of plants will be approaching commercialisation and will also need to be evaluated.”
According to Rice, it is likely that much of the biofuel to be used under the recently announced scheme by the Government will be imported, with the Government losing excise revenue and no benefit to Irish agriculture or little improvement in the fuel supply security. “It will also result in biofuels being transported over long distances to get here. A big effort is required from all sides to ensure as much as possible of road biofuels are sourced here. For researchers, the challenges will be to reduce the cost and assure the quality of home-produced fuels, so they can compete with imports.”
