 Good afternoon. You're very welcome to the Institute for International and European Affairs. A couple of housekeeping things, just not to embarrass anyone if we put telephones on silent, please. And for today's meeting, the presentations will be on the record and the questions and answer session will be off the record. We have a theme today, the future of sustainable biofuels in Europe, part of the solution, not part of the problem. A topic which attracts a certain amount of controversy and at a, I suppose you might say, at a worrying level, one which reason and science isn't always associated with the policy which seems to emerge. It's a very timely topic. One of our speakers tells me that there are decisions at committee level being made today in the European Parliament which are relevant to the process of the revision of the Energy Efficiency Directive, which is going on and should be complete within a matter of a few months. We have two speakers who are going to address this topic. Paul Dean is a research fellow specializing in energy and climate policy with the Marais Centre. Help me, Paul, the marine and renewable energy. That's close enough for me, I think, yeah, yeah. Introduce, thank you. Institute, yes. Yes. At University College Cork. And James Colgan, who's an industry and policy analysis at Ethnal Europe Renewables Limited. Ethnal Europe is a very interesting firm. They are, we're very grateful to them, sponsoring today's event. They happen to be the, to run the largest bioethnal refinery in Europe, I understand, in Europe, in Hungary. So, might I ask Paul to lead off, please? Yeah, sure. Good afternoon, everyone. Transport is really one of the big climate and energy challenges facing Europe. The graph here shows even I am the red line. What's worrying about transport is not only does it represent about 20% of our emissions in Europe, but it's also trending up. This is bulk transport emissions here. Within that, the only sector that's actually reducing emissions in Europe in transport is actually rail. And that's because of some electrification and taking some older stock out of commissioning. So, emissions are increasing and we really need to do something serious about it. To combat this, the European Commission set renewable transport targets for each member state. If we look at the graph here on the right, first of all, what this graph shows is this is a distance to target for each member state to that 10% target. Member states in red are doing really badly. Member states in green have achieved their target and doing very well. What's interesting about this graph actually is first thing, the majority of renewable transport in Europe over 95% is met by liquid biofuels. Often when we think about renewable transport, we think of the Tesla, Elon Musk, the EVs. In today's Europe, particularly electric vehicles make a negligible contribution to the overall renewable transport target. The countries that are doing well, Sweden and Finland and Scandinavia, of course, are primarily achieving their targets through the use of biodiesel and blended bioethanol. Ireland actually isn't doing too bad in terms of our target for renewable transport. That's bad, of course, relative to our terrible for the other targets that we have for emissions and overall renewable energy. We hear a lot about Norway in terms of electric vehicles. The graph on the left-hand side shows an exact number of pure electric vehicles sold in Europe last year. Last year in Ireland, we had just under 400 pure EVs sold in the country. That figure really needs to ratchet up incredibly if we're taking the decarbonisation of transport seriously. Norway, which is not shown on the graph outside the EU-28, is doing fantastically well in terms of renewable transport. They will probably reach their 10% target this year. The bulk of that target actually is achieved through blending bioliquids, but also with a significant portion, actually, with EVs. What Norway have shown us is that if you want to have widespread deployment of electric vehicles, you need to give generous subsidies. The average subsidy for an electric vehicle in Norway is about €9,300. That's not including the softer extractor costs around free tolls and bridges, free parking and stuff like this. So in terms of the overall landscape, we see that renewable fuels, renewable liquid fuels are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of decarbonising Europe's transport fleet. Electric vehicles will, of course, play a very important, fundamental part of decarbonising transport today and into the future. Our analysis in UCC and similar to European Commission analysis would show that by 2030, about 3% to 4% of energy in transport will be met by electricity in 2030. That's under pretty optimistic scenarios. The difficulty, of course, for electric vehicles, while the technology is there, is cost. And as well, it's competing against the cost of internal combustion engines that are growing in efficiency, through mechanical and thermal efficiency, but also the blending of biofuels actually improves their environmental performance. So electric vehicles really have to run fast to stand still in terms of their cost performance, but their day will come and will play an important role in decarbonising the wider fleet. So we are going to need liquid biofuels. Liquid biofuels over the last number of years have got a very bad reputation, particularly in the wider and in the mass media. Part of the difficulty here, well, there's a number of difficulties here. First of all, many of you might be familiar with the food versus fuel debate. This is supposed to be a very simplistic argument, which means that if you're growing biofuels in the EU, you're causing food shortages somewhere else in the world. The European Union and the European Commission progress report on renewable energy states this year that that is not happening. European bioenergy and bioenergy policy and transport has no impact on food shortages in the world. Part of this argument is, I suppose it's a conceptual argument, but part of the difficulty, really if you want to have a conversation about food and fuel, it really has to start with acknowledging the fact that we live in a world of excess. We are producing more food with less land in Europe at the moment. The unfortunate hardship facing about 20 million people who are facing starvation in the planet today, which comes significantly down in the last 20 years. Those hardships are primarily around access to food rather than food shortage. So food supply is uneven and not well distributed. And as well we live in a world of where we waste incredible amounts of food. I read a fact recently that globally, at a global level, the amount of food we waste is equivalent to the land production area of China in terms of what we waste. The other difficulty that's facing biofuels in the wider media is that we generally talk about bioenergy or bioliquids as one particular type. That's not true. Bioenergy is a very wide and varied heterogeneous stock of different feedstocks from different locations with different technology pathways to different fuel mixes. If you look at the photograph over in your left there, what you see, you see that gentleman working on top. He's working on top of palm bunches there. Some biofuels are good, some biofuels are very good and some are terrible. And I think you'd really have to put palm oil diesel into the terrible bracket. The scientific evidence shows that the environmental benefits from biodiesel producing palm oil is very, very low. And really we're serious about the environmental integrity of bioliquids and biofuels, which I think seriously about banning or certainly reducing the role of palm oil in our fuel mix. If we're going to talk about land-based biofuels, let's talk about how we use land in Europe. What we see here, starting from the very left, working to the right, this is the total EU land area, excluding water bodies, cities. If the next graph overshows the utilised agricultural area, this is the productive land that we have in Europe, which is about little less than 40% of the total land area. It excludes forests, thankfully for a forestation, is increasing in Europe. We have more forest. Interestingly about this utilised agricultural area, this area is actually diminishing each year in Europe. We're losing about 1,000 square kilometres a year to urban sprawl, to road infrastructure, to roads, airports. That number is also decreasing due to land abandonment issues. People are leaving the land, particularly in places of south-west Europe and southern Europe. The area of arable land is shown there, the area used for land for cereals, wheat, corn, barley, etc. is about 7% of the total utilised agricultural area. The majority of that land, actually about 66% of the land for cereals, is used for growing cereals for animals, for animal feed. Humans consume about 30% and about 1-2% is actually used for ethanol in Europe. One of the issues around the recent commission decision to try and limit the use of land-based or food-based biologues in Europe is based around the issue of indirect land-use change. This is a tricky concept and the science has contested, probably because it's actually complicated and challenging enough to model. But essentially, before I explain this graph, what indirect land-use change is, if you have an acre of land and you're growing onions, carrots or whatever spuds, you change that land-use for growing, you want to grow rapeseed oil for biodiesel. The demand for those onions will still exist and those onions will have to be planted somewhere else and either they're planted in land that has to be changed from one type of production to another agricultural production and the emissions from those indirect consequences must be taken into account. The issue also happens if you're creating a demand for a market outside of Europe, such as in the case of palm oil where land is being deforested and swamps and peat lands have been drained for the production of palm oil diesel. The emissions associated from the clearing of the land, from the preparation of the ground can be on some circumstances far greater than the emissions reduction benefit from the actual fuel itself. And what this graph tries to do is it tries to, this is a review of all the recent literature, it's a report produced by the European Commission, it looks at all the available literature in indirect land-use change. And what I'd like you to look at here is the grey columns and look at the whiskers. And what the science tells us is that if you look at the grey columns from ethanol, they're much lower than the grey columns from the biodiesel, meaning that the land-use change risk from ethanol is much lower than from biodiesel. Some of the, let me see, is there a pointer on this here? There's some of these, no there isn't, if you look at palm biodiesel, that actually goes off, the whiskers actually display the risks around the high values and the low values. What's very clear again from the scientific evidence is that the risks of indirect land-use change from biodiesel is much, much higher than it is from ethanol. Now these series here are a series of average graphs. What they hide is a lot of nuance and a lot of local conditions. If you're growing a crop on land that has been set aside or that is not competing with land-use, then of course you have a zero indirect or a very low indirect land-use change. But essentially what we want to do from a policy perspective and from an environmental perspective is that we want to encourage fuels that have low risk in terms of land-use change and we want to discourage fuels that have a high risk. What's interesting actually in this graph is that and what's kind of awkward from a European commission level is that if you look at the advanced and the ethanol section, advanced biofuels are supposed to put forward as the next generation in terms of biofuels. What the review of the scientific literature said is that those advanced biofuels are not actually immune from indirect land-use change risk either. So really what we need to do is we need to tailor and design policies that rewards biofuels that limits the risk of indirect land-use change and we need to really reduce the ones specifically in terms of biodiesels that have high risk associated with them. Let's look a bit closer to home how we use biofuels in Ireland. As I said Ireland is actually going to re-sale me well and we're about mid-table in terms of our renewable transport. I think we're about 6% or 7% renewable transport at the moment. We have a biofuels blending obligation in Ireland where 8.5%, 8.6% by volume of mineral oil blended must be blended with bioliquids. The majority of our bioliquids in Ireland come from biodiesel. 75% that has actually used cooking oil. About 22% of that is tallow to buy product from slaughterhouses. Most of that feedstock is actually sourced from the two great democracies of the UK and the US and we have some small imports with small tallow activity here in the refinery in Cork as well. A much lower percentage of our blended fuel, about 37% comes from ethanol and the majority of that is wheat-based, corn-based or sugar-based. Ireland, most of our bioliquids in Ireland come from within the EU except for some of the stuff that they use cooking oil that comes from outside of the States. One thing to note though when you're looking at this graph, certain bioliquids such as used cooking oil which are waste-based or tallow which is waste-based qualify for a double accreditation or even higher when it comes to credits. So that allows Ireland to actually hit a higher paper on targets than we're doing in reality. But still I think we're doing reasonably well but we need to do a lot more I think in progressing renewable transport in Ireland. Again in Ireland we hear a lot about emissions reduction and electric vehicles. Electric vehicles do provide emissions reductions in Ireland but small in comparison to the actual emissions reductions due to the biofuel obligation which is about 350 kilotons of CO2. Of course the figure for EVs will rise, one of the advantages from a policy perspective and if you want we can go into this in the Q&A but when you electrify transport you essentially move the emissions from the what we call the non-traded emissions sector into the traded emissions sectors and essentially they become the responsibility or the problem of the folks who produce electricity rather than the burden of the Irish state. That's one of the advantages from a policy perspective of EVs over biodiesels. But really in the challenge and I think the news yesterday in terms of how Ireland is doing in terms of emissions and transport are increasing and we need to look at ways of doing things a little bit more clean. There are some technical challenges and some economic challenges that are specific to Ireland that are not necessarily specific to other member states. So there's a couple of things that we need to think about a little bit more in terms of renewable biofuels in Ireland. Number one starting, that's my local Maxall there down in Clinicality. You will notice what it's very clean, it has only two pumps. If you go to Europe you'll see that a lot of cities will have tree pumps. So if we want to blend higher levels of ethanol in Europe we need to, those petrol grades need to be kept separately so we will probably have to consider looking at costs or some way of incentivising folks who own the forecourts to put in extra pumps or extra tanks. Also a lot of the ethanol that we bring into Ireland comes into ports like fines, Dublin, Whitegate. We would probably need to build extra infrastructure as well to store that grade of petrol. It needs to be kept separately from different blends. So there are two costs and some practical issues. In terms of the UK that's not actually in terms of Brexit. The type of unleaded petrol that we blend with ethanol is a specific type of petrol that primarily comes from the UK. If the UK deviates away from their current biofuels policy that will make the market available for that unleaded petrol a little bit more niche and potentially harder to get. So that's one of the other things that we need to think about. And finally in terms of weather this primarily affects biodiesel not at all. Ethanol, it's very difficult to blend levels of biodiesel when the weather is cold. It can sit in your tank and there can be flow conditions. So in generally what we do in Ireland for biodiesel that we blend into our pumps. And generally when any of us buy diesel or petrol in Ireland most of us if you drive a diesel car you're probably driving about 500 kilometres on biodiesel on average in the year. But that blending is avoided in the winter months because of cold conditions which can limit the viscosity of that blend. The refinery in Cork is looking at exciting new techniques around hydrotreating vegetable oil which is behind the blend. That will allow you of course have much higher blends. And of course there is a cost associated with each one of these things. So these are cost challenges, some technical challenges. It puts stuff in Ireland that we generally need to think about a little bit more. So in conclusion I think the future if we're serious about decarbonising transport in Europe and Ireland we seriously consider the role of all biofuels in transport we probably need to have more mature and more sensible conversations about land-based biofuels. They should be evidence-based and they should be science-driven. Really what we need is looking at because the family of biofuels is so heterogeneous we really need policy at European and maybe Irish level that's nuanced enough to encourage the correct types of biofuels that deliver meaningful emissions reduction. And finally in Ireland we do need to think a little more about some of the most practical challenges that we're facing we need to evaluate the costs and really is supposed to decide where we want to take transport in the future. So thank you very much for listening, thank you. Very much Dr Dean, James. James I didn't say is an electrical engineer, is it? Electronic engineering. Yeah, both houses. I just go forward, yeah. Great, okay, thank you very much. All right, well thank you very, very much everybody and thank you Brendan for being interested in the first place and actually opening up this dialogue. Okay, so that didn't come out so well. Yeah, I do. Do you think there's something we can do on that now? In the meantime I'll tell you a little about Ethnal Europe Renewables Limited. It is a very much a new entrant into the bio-energy world in Europe, founded just eight years ago and operating just since 2012. It's a family and management owned firm. It's Irish, founded by the Turley Brothers who are here in the room. And it was a complete surprise in the industry in Europe and so far as at the time the project was developed based on the 2009 Renewables Energy Directive. That Renewable Energy Directive created demand for enormous amount of biofuels that weren't already required and that meant that hundreds of new biofuels operations were going to be needed in Europe. Okay, some of them, the less busy slides aren't... Okay, that looks badly affected but the rest seem okay. Okay, so the plant opened. It's a corn-based ethanol plant, ethanol refinery located in Hungary simply because Hungary is the corn basket of Europe. Hungary produces a lot of corn and has the capacity to produce a lot more. The plant was a surprise and so far as nobody was expecting somebody to come on the scene and actually go ahead with such a large ambitious project. And there were a lot of other projects on the table at the time and none of them have gone ahead. There was only one. And even more of a surprise to everybody in the industry that these Irish people who had never produced bioenergy before actually were very successful at it and it's now the single biggest ethanol biorefinery in Europe. It's the most resource-efficient and also economically efficient refinery in Europe. We buy over a million tons of grain per year from the local farmers. We make 500 million liters of islec-free ethanol. 500 million liters is the equivalent of one-two-hundredth of world capacity of ethanol. And I say islec-free ethanol, islec-free, is the indirect land use change acronym. It's the acronym that's used to signal that there's a risk that when you produce something using a crop, an agricultural crop, that maybe you're displacing other markets for that crop and that could either drive up prices or deprive more needy markets for it or both. I say islec-free because if you go and look at the agricultural community that we buy the grain from, all of that grain is additional to what they were producing before we built the plant. So, and none of it would have been produced if we hadn't built the plant. So, none of it's being diverted from any other market. It hasn't come from extra land either, so it's not as if the land has been diverted because in fact the amount of land being used for corn production in Hungary over the last five years so it's a positive, it's certainly an islec-free story and the other positive impact is that several hundred farm families who now have secure long-term demand for their grain and they know that every year if they produce it, they've got somebody who's going to buy it and that means they can buy new tractors, that their kids can study agriculture, that the ones who've gone away and learned English and are working in London can come back and get a job and that's actually what's happening and it's a very tangible, measurable thing. I'm from Cork and Cork is a farm direct investment city. My father works in Pfizer, so I'm a farm direct investment child and I know very well what it's like to live in a place where the whole economy is lifted by FDI. Well, if you go to the place where this plant is in the last five years, you can see the lift in a very, very tangible way. We produce 350,000 tons of GMO-free protein feed which is an excellent substitute for imported soy protein from the Americas and 15,000 tons of corn oil. It puts about half a billion euros into the local economy every year. In addition, it's not just producing feed in ethanol, it's a hub of development activity for new bio-economy projects and their energy, their feed, but they're also materials and some very quirky stuff, which I'll mention a bit later. This year we got 135 million of fresh finance. Part of that was substituting American finance that was in the business and part of it is new for new project development innovation. Even though it's located in Hungary, the scientist, engineers, managers, finance is all coming out of here and that's continuing. So there are new Irish scientists, engineers, and managers involved. We've just opened a new office here in Dublin with seats for another 30 people, so that gives you an indication of the direction of things. Why are we here today? We are very proud actually to be active in policy discourse in Ireland, in Europe and the world. That was another surprise, I think, to the guys who set it up. They didn't expect to be here today or doing what we're doing now in terms of getting involved in engaging in public discourse. I just came back from two weeks in Bonn as a partner to the United Nations Climate Committee. We were selected as a partner after they reviewed ethanol as an instrument in addressing climate change. We spent two weeks there as an awareness exercise to enable all of the delegations from the 160 countries that were there to come and explore if they wanted to. We were also in Rome in October at the United Nations Committee on Food Security because the FAO, after a little bit of doubt 10 years ago, is firmly the view that biofuels and food are interlinked, and that there can be a very positive interlinkage rather than a negative interlinkage. So we are a partner on the Committee on Food Security. We're very active in EPUR, the Association for Renewable Ethnol, very active in Farm Europe, which is an upstart, a new entrant into farm policy thinking in Europe, but it's a very ambitious, active, smart, and agile organization located right across from the Berlin Building in Brussels. And their ambition is really to be there shaping the cap reform for after 2020. And they're already making a big impact there. We're involved in the European Commission's bi-based industry joint undertaking, and then a few of their energy platforms. We've definitely been engulfing with the Irish government, and thank you very much to anybody in the government here who's met us, and we've met quite a number of people. That's been terrific. We're submitting to the Irish government consultations, and we're here today, and I know I've met some of you before, and I'm sure some of you probably heard from me before through the email and so on, and it's actually been a great experience in Ireland recently. So that's all. We've got to tie it back to what the burning platform is and why we're all here in the first place, which is climate change, and the huge engineering and industrial solutions that are urgently needed to deal with it. And so, you know, my two weeks in Bonn with the Cup 23 is all founded on the notion that we've got to do something very big very soon. As Paul outlined to you, transport is definitely the worst offender. So I was, the difficulty when speaking with transport is speaking with, on the one hand, a mindset which imagines electric vehicles on the road virtually instantly, and then the mindset that recognizes that we've got two, you know, more than a billion vehicles on the planet, most of them are, all of them actually, effectively, are burning fossil fuels, and that fleet is growing quite quickly. All of the growth is in fossil fuel burning vehicles right now. And so how do we manage the fact, the notion that we have two mindsets, we've got the mindset. I heard the ex-head of the UNFCCC declare in Bonn that the transport carbon challenge was solved, that we had electric vehicles. And that our only problem now, and there was Americans in the room, there was the big American contingent there, our only problem now was what to do with the 400,000 American truck drivers who were out of work. So that's just to illustrate to you a kind of a complete disconnect between some of the thinking that's going on and the reality on the road. I live in Italy, there isn't a single electrical vehicle, nobody ever talks about it, nobody has one. I live in an affluent area of Rome, 20,000 people there with 20,000 cars and there isn't a single electrical vehicle where I live, same in Poland and pretty much the same in Ireland. So we've policy thinking being dictated by people who live in the Nordic countries and who do actually cycle and who do actually buy stuff in supermarkets in the organic section. And yet in the real world we've got to deal with a problem that's much more intractable than that. So I did some calculations just to say that peak oil on the road is nowhere here, here yet, even with the most optimistic scenarios for electrical vehicle introduction of which I'm a fan, I don't have a car myself anymore. I do have an electric bike. Peak oil on the road nowhere near is going to come anywhere near before 2035 on any of the even optimistic scenarios right now and it could be way beyond that. By the time we get to 2050 we may have got carbon emissions on the road back down to today's levels by which time the fleet will have doubled and we'll have half electric mobility and half fossil fuel. That's worldwide. Hopefully Ireland will be in a much more positive place compared to the average. But it's not an absurd scenario for Ireland either in terms of fleet growth generally and the mix of energy in the fleet. So just coming back then to Aeternal specifically as a solution, what is it? It's a climate friendly petrol substitute for today's fleet for the kind of technology we've got on the roads right now. It's produced by high-tech fermentation of grain or beat to beer and then that beer is distilled to alcohol. So it's a very old business. It's just done an extraordinary high-tech way. So we're getting enormously high amounts of alcohol at per tonne of grain compared to people producing beer or vodka or compared to how people were compared to the yields people were getting even five or ten years ago. So I mean one of the quotes that we have is that if we were producing today at the same yields that we were producing five years ago we'd be out of business. That's how quick things are changing. People say what is the biggest development in the ethanol sector right now? The biggest development is that continuous improvement rather than some amazingly disruptive thing that's going to change anything. Five percent of most petrol today in Europe is ethanol. Up to 100% in some vehicles. We've got Laura if it's up to nine percent in Ireland by volume. That's still five. And the obligation? Actual real. Certified 66% less greenhouse gas than oil. So that's certified in sort of, there's a very rigorous annual certification process that goes on over all of Europe over all the plants. And every single tanker load that leaves our factory goes out with its own certification in terms of its carbon animations and its life cycle analysis profile. As Paul was saying, only 2% of the EU grain crop goes into it. And then that's only the low value starch and sugar in the grain crop. So the protein, the fiber, the vegetable oil go back to the farm for GMO free feed. And at the same time we've co-production of exciting new biorefinery products coming out of it as well. Output could easily be upped to let the petrol sector exceed the 20-30 goals in Europe. So just if we look at ethanol as a solution for the petrol sector it is feasible that ethanol could be the primary solution instrument in this time frame for reaching 20-30 climate goals. We're not the business competing with other solutions. It's great to have mixed solutions. What we're looking for is a policy framework that allows people to choose to use ethanol if that's what they want to do rather than deciding that you can choose things for one reason or another. So again, as Paul referred all biofuels are made equal. So broadly speaking we've got the good, the bad and the okay and the bad. Definitely European crop-based ethanol is safe and effective. It's a peace of mind solution for policy makers. No policy maker will ever wake up and find that ethanol has bit them in the butt in some way. They're all of the envelopes of usage scenarios are pretty well safe. So we could make and use lots more of it and still be safe. So the biodiesel so it's produced from European crops is also a very safe solution. All of the current supplies of European biodiesel are safe and effective. They don't bring about adverse side effects. However, if one were to go and produce lots more but in Europe one would have to do with governance to ensure that it was done on marginal land done on crop rotation, gone from certain types of crops. But there is definitely scope for producing more. If anybody in the room is familiar with the term palm oil as we've heard it earlier and land use change issues which is the basis of the commission's current negative attitude to buy fields in general, palm oil is the street word for ilac. Forests and peatlands are being destroyed in order to make European palm diesel puzzle. Europe accounts for 5% of palm oil output in the world and it accounts for European biodiesel and it accounts for 15% of palm oil growth and demand worldwide. So it's a significant driver in the whole palm debate. If we get rid of palm oil diesel we pretty well make biofuels in Europe a safe and effective thing generally. We pretty well have solved the problem. Ethnology is essential to Ireland, not just for the climate. And it's essential to Europe not just for the climate. European biofuels bring in 7 billion euros of farm incomes. That's the equivalent to over 10% of cap, so it's actually a huge amount of income for farmers. Or 2,000 euros for every single tillage farmer in Europe if you were to average it out. It also brings 15 million tons of GMO and antibiotic free feed. That's a high quality feed. Now we recently reached out to a half a dozen of Europe's animal nutrition researchers and asked them what they thought about it and I have to say the reactions were mixed but then I've discovered why the reactions were mixed because 10 years ago if you were producing ethanol and you produced feed as a byproduct you really didn't care whether that feed was good or bad and you didn't care whether it changed from one month to the next. But that's completely changed in the last 10 years. Now that feed is seen as a high value part of the output of that plant and the plant couldn't exist without it. So an awful lot of emphasis is put on making sure that that feed is extremely high quality and that that quality is maintained from month to month. That means the colour of it, the nutritional characteristics, the smell of it, the humidity of it and then how it's handled and shipped. So we've got a brand called Pinonia Gold and that Pinonia Gold essentially created a whole family of brands of very high quality European protein animal feeds. Reducing our imports of GMO soy from the Americas. In addition then we've got about 220,000 off-farm jobs in rural areas. I mean in our plant alone we've brought over 2,000 jobs into the area and investment in innovation in the bioeconomy. And as I've heard we've got a new office here for 20 or 30 people in Dublin. That's all about those investment in innovation in the bioeconomy. It's the new companies that have been opened up in our group in recent months. It's the science that we're funding. It's the product launches that are taking place very soon. We've got an interesting set of dynamics going on in Brussels which impact agriculture life in Europe. It's not an easy place at Europe to be a farmer. And it's not somewhere where your kids might want to take up the role after you. We've got cheap imports from outside Europe. We've got trade talks where farmers are being used as trinkets in trade deals where we sell more BMWs to Argentina and we'll take more of their beef. We've got Brexit which is going to completely destabilize Irish agriculture. Ireland has tended in Europe that I understand to be an ally of the UK in European policy debate that impacts farming. That ally is gone and Ireland now has to very much play its own for it and be much more in control of its own destiny and take a more leadership role. Which by the way it's already doing, there's not a criticism. But what you see are island alliances emerging in Europe among the farm friendly countries and this is something that Ireland will be getting more involved in terms of determining who are its new allies in things. A very clear example of this is President Macron in France has been fighting very much for his farmers beef and his farmers ethanol. Now he doesn't really care that much about the ethanol. He cares about the fact that ethanol is a farm demand. It's a massed form of protectionism. So if you're a farmer you should really want ethanol to be protected because it protects farm demand. It's not about for Macron it's not strictly speaking about the fuel itself. In our opinion Ireland would do very well to be an ally of President Macron in his beef and ethanol position as regards Mercasor. As opposed to just being on the beef side of things. In part the basis of that is that if we are supporting Macron today on beef and ethanol he'll be supporting us tomorrow on something else. And that would be the same with the Central and Eastern European countries, the Visigal group who are very much farm orientated in how their economies work and they've actually found their let's say their fighting spirit in terms of protecting their farm sectors. So we would hope already we hope to see more of Ireland understanding the new landscape in Brussels in terms of who the farm allies are and to engage in strong European farm friendly alliances. In terms of the transport viafuels specifically and how we would actually use the ethanol we need to put up who's doing it already, who does seem to be able to make progress, who's making progress, who's using a lot of byfuels and Sweden is in the top three. Sweden has 24% renewables and transport already overall and that's growing reasonably quickly. So they're way ahead of their target and 17% of the 24 is actually byfuels. Sweden has a 30-70 mix between petrol and ethanol across the entire fleet so that's including trucks and buses which is similar for Ireland. Their ethanol is mostly in the form of 5% E5 which as Laura said is the same but they've also got the very high blends of E85 and EG95 which go into either captive fleets or haulage and public transport. They've got a reasonable balance of domestic and imports so it's not like they have some kind of magic well of byfuels that they have and that we don't have and there's certainly benefit from the cleaner air dimension of that because ethanol once you put it into your petrol from 10% blends and up you've got significant reductions in the pollutants, the tailpipe pollutants as well as greater engine efficiency. Today is a very important day in the legislative cycle for renewable energy in that the lead committee in the European Parliament called the ITRA committee is voting on it they voted this morning a couple of weeks ago was very important because the European Council published its fourth version of the legislation the Council's version and there's Minister Knox in there who I met in Bonn 10 days ago and the Council's version was very positive from our perspective but I think from everybody's perspective in so far as it's certainly pointed the way towards a high level of ambition for renewables generally so above the 27% that the European Commission proposed it's behind having a target for the transport sector specifically of 12% so 12% is much lower than the average in recognition of the fact that transport is a very hard sector to decarbonise but it's giving it a target nonetheless. Confirming the 7% cap on crop based bifuel which is to limit things like Pam diesel but not reducing that cap as the Commission had proposed and then also putting in a clause which would allow a safe effective bifuel like our ethanol to be supported of the cap so that there wouldn't be a label put on a bifuel so it's crop based, bad, that label has been taken away. The idea that you can simply in a very simplistic way decide what's good or bad just by one single label has been taken away which is a very positive thing so definitely ambition married to common sense what the European Parliament Committee voted on today was 35% renewable energy overall so definitely at the very high level of ambition on scale, 12% in transport which is good but much more complex on the 7% and how that 12% of transport would be achieved. A lot of what the Committee voted on today in terms of how the 12% would be achieved is based around advanced bifuels, advanced solutions and one of the characteristics of advanced is that it's not actually an incumbent technology it's not a tried and tested technology so what they're looking at is putting in place a requirement to use solutions which aren't actually tried and tested and aren't actually economical. Now we're not the business of competing with them but we are in the business of telling people whether or not we think the policy is rational or not and the idea that one would put an obligation on countries to do something that nobody has yet done in the world and even the most optimistic that if you do try and do it it'll cost you an absolute fortune. I don't think that's a very sane way of devising renewables policy. Ireland's climate ambition in all of this right now well just on the 17th of November the European Council published the Ireland's comments on the most recent renewable energy directive draft and in summary Ireland is saying we shouldn't have a target for renewable in transport simply because it's very hard to reach and that's true it is very hard to reach especially if we feel that there's no appetite for actually doing anything to try and reach it so you know where there's a will there's a way if there's no will then of course it's going to be very hard to reach we may not reach it so that's kind of a difficult quandary to have to resolve but if the overall target is going to be 35% and it's looking like it is going to be in that for all of Europe in terms of renewables in energy then it's not unreasonable to expect that transport generally is going to have to reach 12% or more if the transport is reaching 12% or more it means all the countries are in the same problem having the same problem together it's true that Finland and Sweden are way ahead of the pack but Ireland is actually in a very long tale of people are all behaving very badly so it's not as if we're somehow the class dunce and we're the only ones who aren't going to be able to solve it we should be able to come up with solutions with them which will be a mix of more electric vehicles and a mix of more biofuels my observation about it is that the Irish position right now means to very limited climate ambition and very low support for farm and food and bioeconomy so last slide so what should we do well no time to do that Ireland should say yes to climate progress so get its mojo back be more optimistic be more forthright in coming up with solutions and driving them through say yes to farm incomes food quality and the bioeconomy and just to leave you with an image of what I think what 2030 is going to look like in terms of the mix of transport energy on the road it's going to look pretty much what it looks like today the car there is a mini you can buy it it's a hybrid plug-in electrical vehicle but I call it a double hybrid because it's got a combustion engine in there that can run on ethanol and petrol so it's very flexible and it's got an electrical engine in there that can run on wind and coal so equally flexible so you're not forcing the vehicle to match your energy supply you've got a system that's very accommodating both on electricity and on internal combustion thank you very much