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Over the last 15 years, the science has gone from a few people in a lab to industrial production.

We all recognise that we have to live our live in a more sustainable way. But billions are being spent to ensure the wrong choices are convenient.

That’s where this company comes in. They’re meeting the consumer at their needs and not asking you to sacrifice.

Celtic Renewables have designed a fuel based on whisky run-offs that can run a car without a modified engine.

Celtic Renewables | Leading the green chemical revolution

So, how does it work?

To produce the fuel, biobutanol, you use the by-products of whisky distillation. The ethanol’s out, that’s for thirsty people not thirsty cars, but the heavier alcohols can be used for fuel. The tails that we talked about in: The Sweet Spot of Distilling

and the draff which is the blend of barley kernels and water which facilitates fermentation are used.

In 2019 it was estimated that around a million tonnes of these by-products were thrown away in the bins of whisky distilleries. 

Now as they’re a company trying to make money, there’s very little written about their patented method for turning the mixture into biobutanol, but the founder of Celtic Renewables Martin Tangney has said the following:

"What we developed was a process to combine the liquid with the solid, and used an entirely different traditional fermentation process called ABE, and it makes the chemical called biobutanol.”

Basically special strains of bacteria convert sugars into solvents through a process known as acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation. It’s fermentation but you produce other products not just ethanol.

He goes on to claim that this biobutanol “is a direct replacement” for petrol. The primary issue is scale. Although Celtic Renewables now has the only biofuel refinery in Scotland using these by-products, they account for a tiny percentage of the fuel used in the UK; biofuels on the whole only run about 3 percent of the global transport industry. 

Whisky and fuel is still a developing story. But with the immense volume of these by-products being thrown away worldwide, and the massive tax levy on whisky in the UK. This could be an alternate revenue source for distilleries.

We’ll see how long it will take before biofuels become a regular option at our petrol pumps. But we can say “Finally, a use for bourbon.”

I joke, but this isn’t the first time whisky’s been used for fuel. In fact King Charles III has an Aston Martin DB6 which runs on a blend of wine and cheese, gifted to him by his mother on his 21st birthday. This car had a heavily modified engine of course and takes a positively French amount of cheese and wine to run.