SCOTTISH START-UP TURNS WHISKY WASTE INTO BIOFUELS

Whisky Can Heat More Than Just the Body

Celtic Renewables, a Scottish start-up based in Edinburgh, has managed to derive biofuel and other useful substances from the waste by-products of the country’s £4.3 billion whisky industry. Founded by Professor Martin Tangney, director of the Biofuel Research Centre at Edinburgh Napier University, the company first began researching how ABE (Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol) fermentation technology might be applied to biological wastes and residues. The team found that draff, the sugar-rich barley kernels that aid fermentation, and pot ale, the yeasty liquid heated during distillation, can be converted to biobutanol, a drop-in fuel which can go straight into the tank of a car without modifying the engine.

Mixing leftover draff and pot ale – neither of which is otherwise profitable – and fermenting them into a broth creates the gases hydrogen and CO2. Further distillation of this broth produces butanol, acetone and ethanol while residual solids are separated, dried, and treated to make high-grade animal feed. And with 3 million tons of waste produced annually by Scotland’s whisky industry, it’s an ideal locale for biofuel conversion.

According to Celtic Renewables CEO Mark Simmers, the company is trying to improve the commercial viability of its process in collaboration with Tullibardine whisky distillery in Blackford, Scotland and the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant in Ghent, Belgium. And with Europe’s mandate that biofuels – preferably those from waste and residue feedstocks – must make up 10 percent of all fuels sold by 2020, their timing couldn’t be better.