Whisky for Fuel!

“This car runs on surplus English white wine”, said King Charles. 

“Surplus alcohol! In England? No chance” said everyone else. 

Indeed King Charles does have an Aston Martin DB6 which runs on a blend of wine and cheese which was gifted to him by his mother on his twenty-first birthday. This car had a heavily modified engine of course and takes a positively French amount of cheese and wine to run so today we turn to the world of biofuel. 

Celtic Renewables, a company you will see mentioned a whole lot throughout this issue, are central to the history of whisky and biofuel. Over the last fifteen years the company has grown from scientists in a lab in Edinburgh to actually seeing a car run on whisky fuel without a modified engine. 

So, how does it work? To produce the fuel, biobutanol, you use the by-products of whisky distillation. Draff which is the blend of barley kernels and water which facilitates fermentation and, pot ale, the liquid which is left over after the distillation has finished. In 2019 it was estimated that around a million tonnes of these by-products were thrown away in the bins of whisky distilleries. 

There is very little written about their patented method for turning draff and pot-ale 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.”

The founder goes on to claim that biobutanol “is a direct replacement” for petrol. In fact, biofuel has been used to drive vehicles but 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 and with the immense volume of these by-products being thrown away worldwide, it is an industry which needs more time and more investment. We shall see how long it will take before biofuel will become a regular option at our petrol pumps. One thing is for sure, Scotland is a shining light not just in world of whisky, but in renewable energy as well.