by Jeff Spross (ThinkProgress.org) 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. READ MORE