Tag Archives: renewable fuels

Could The Fuel Of The Future Come From Whisky?

This is a possibility according to a new Scottish startup company. Celtic Renewables Ltd. hopes to turn the waste products in Scotch whisky production into a biofuel.

Science Alert.au has more:

Whisky making requires three ingredients: water, yeast, and a grain. However, only 10 percent of those products end up as whisky, the remaining 90 percent is wasted during distilling. These waste products are either released into the sea or turned into animal feed.
Celtic Renewables Ltd is a start-up company in Scotland that is working to reuse the waste products from the Scottish Malt Whisky industry to develop biobutanol – an advanced biofuel that can be used instead of fossil-derived fuel. This will in turn reduce oil consumption and CO2 emissions, and provide an energy guarantee for rural areas that have a booming whisky industry.
The team have refined an old industrial fermentation technique, and managed to change draff (husk residue left by fermented grains) and pot ale (liquid produced during the mashing process), into 1-butanol and ethanol – which can both be used as fuel.

According to About Autos, the advantages of biobutanol over ethanol is that it has a higher energy content than ethanol. Biobutanol can be blended with gasoline at higher percentages and doesn’t need a separate distribution network, unlike ethanol. Finally, unlike ethanol, biobutanol is not corrosive.

However, the major disadvantage of biobutanol over ethanol is that ethanol has a much larger production capacity and has been the beneficiary of subsidies all over the world. Hopefully this company can change that and this technology can be adapted to other whisky producing areas of the world such as Canada and the United States.

 

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.