Whiskey may soon help fuel your car; understand

Around 44 bottles of Scotch whiskey are shipped around the world per second, making it the most internationally traded spirit and generating export earnings of £4.5bn ($5.9bn) last year.

But for every liter of whiskey there is an enormous amount of waste: about 2.5 kilos of solid by-products known as draff, 8 liters of liquid known as pot ale and 10 liters of spent lees, an aqueous residue.

That equates to 684,000 metric tons of draff and over 2.3 billion liters of pot ale every year, according to Zero Waste Scotland. Some are used for animal feed, and some go to landfills or are dumped into rivers and oceans.

A biofuel scientist has come up with a creative and high-value use for these wastes.

Martin Tangney, founder of Celtic Renewables, uses a fermentation process to turn whiskey’s by-products into biochemicals that can replace some of the gasoline and diesel used in cars, and can also be used to make other alcohol-based products. Petroleum.

whiskey powered vehicles

Biofuels are not new. In the late 1800s, Rudolph Diesel experimented with peanut oil as the original fuel for his eponymous engine, and in the 1930s, Henry Ford saw plant-based ethanol as the “fuel of the future.”

But crops were expensive, and oil offered a cheap alternative. The goal of Tahttps://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tudo-sobre/dieselngney was to find an inexpensive base material to make biofuels commercially viable – and also more sustainable.

He set up the UK’s first biofuels research center at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2007, and explored “everything from newspaper to seaweed” before settling on whiskey by-products.

Seeing the commercial potential, Tangney formed Celtic Renewables in 2011 as a spin-out of the university.

The startup uses a process known as acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation, in which bacteria break down the sugars in whiskey and beer into acids. They, in turn, are broken down into solvents like butanol and ethanol, which can be added to gasoline or diesel to power a car.

Celtic Renewables demonstrated the fuel, driving an unmodified Ford on Scottish roads using 15% biobutanol made from whiskey.

Tangney says his fermentation process isn’t limited to whiskey by-products and can use waste from other food industries like dairy. “That’s where we see ourselves as adding value,” he says.

A viable solution?

Biofuels made from renewable organic materials such as corn, soybeans or sugar cane are often promoted as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels, but producing them often requires large amounts of land.

This could undermine the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Alison Smith, a senior research associate at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

As aviation and other industries look to biofuel as a quick fix for decarbonization, Smith warns that there are “huge tradeoffs and impacts on biodiversity, carbon storage and food security” depending on the feedstock.

However, fuel made from “genuine waste” such as whiskey by-products is “probably the best possible type of biofuel,” she says, as it avoids these problems.

Tangney commissioned an independent product lifecycle analysis to assess environmental benefits, to be published later this year.

Scale is also an issue. With biofuels currently accounting for just 3% of the fuel used in global transport, they have a long way to go before making a serious impact on carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, the transportation industry should emphasize reducing demand, says Smith. “This makes it much easier to meet the rest of our transportation needs from sustainable sources, whether that’s renewable electricity or biogas or liquid biofuels,” says Smith.

In addition to waste-based fuels

There are already whiskey-powered vehicles driving around Scotland. The Glenfiddich Distillery, operated by William Grant & Sons, uses biogas made on-site from the by-products of its own whiskey to power some of its trucks, reducing the trucks’ carbon emissions by 90%.

Whiskey waste can be used to create more than just biofuels. Solvents from its fermentation can be used as an alternative to oil in plastics, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, apparel and electronics, says Tangney.

Celtic Renewables has raised over £40m ($52m) with support from private investors, government grants and crowdfunding, as well as support from Napier University, which remains a shareholder.

The company built Scotland’s first biorefinery last year, with the capacity to convert 50,000 tonnes of whiskey by-products into biochemicals. Tangney says the plant will be fully operational later this year once testing is complete.