How Whisky Makers Could Soon Be Providing A Superior Biofuel
With any luck, future whisky fans may be able to enjoy their three fingers in the afternoon with the added knowledge they’ve contributed to a climate-friendly energy economy. According to E&E News, a biochemist in Scotland recently founded a company to piggyback biofuel production off the whisky distillation process.
Distillation produces two byproducts: draff — a residual sludge of barley grains — and pot ale — the leftovers in the vat after the high-grade alcohol has been syphoned off. Collectively, they account for roughly 90 percent of the raw material that goes into whisky-making. The industry currently produces 551,156 tons of draff and 422.7 million gallons of pot ale annually, and sells about half the draff as cattle and pig feed. But the rest is simply disposed as waste, at considerable cost.
Martin Tangney, the founder of Celtic Renewables Ltd., hopes to turn that waste into a feedstock for the production of biobutanol — an alcohol similar to ethanol, the most widely used biofuel. But it packs a considerably larger energy punch on a pound-for-pound basis — almost as much as traditional gasoline — and current combustion engine technology can take biobutanol at virtually any fuel mix. By contrast, most American cars can run on 10 percent ethanol at most. Biobutanol’s also much more amenable to pipeline transportation, an option that isn’t available for ethanol.
Tangney also works at the Biofuel Research Centre at Edinburgh Napier University, which got the project of deriving biobutanol from whisky’s byproducts off the ground back in 2010. They’re using a once widely-employed fermentation process called ABE fermentation (for acetone-butanol-ethanol) to get the job done. Biobutanol’s production process has been considerably less cost-effective than ethanol’s, but a number of projects are working on bringing those costs down. E&E pointed to several biobutanol plants, from Russia to Shanghai, that are producing the fuel using feedstocks like corn, wood chips, and waste from the logging industry.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/15/2946641/whisky-biofuel/