A Scottish company is eyeing whisky byproducts as the next source of biofuel. Celtic Renewables, based in Edinburgh, is developing a commercial system that will churn out biobutanol on an industrial scale. The British government had granted the company £11 million ($16.7 million USD) to build its facilities.

Celtics Renewables founder Professor Martin Tangney started the company in 2012 as a spin-off of Edinburgh Napier University. To produce their biofuel, he and his team revisited a 100 year-old fermentation technique used to produce explosives during World War I. The process is called Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE), according to Science World Report.

Efforts to further develop the process were abandoned because of cheaper petroleum options available then. The current need to replace petroleum with something more sustainable, however, has brought new life into ABE. Celtics Renewables is targeting the whisky industry's byproducts known as pot ale and draff, Reuters reported.

Pot ale is leftover yeast liquid after distillation that contains copper and draff is made up of sugar-rich kernels of barley. The actual whisky is actually less than 10% of the total distillery output. There is so much residual waste that Scottish distilleries produce 750,000 tons of draff and 2 billion liters of pot ale per year, AG Week reported.

Celtics Renewables combines the two waste products and applies a different fermentation technique to come up with a high value product that can be a direct replacement for petrol or diesel. Biobutanol, the biofuel produced using the Celtics Renewables model, differs with ethanol as it does not take plants from the food chain to produce the biofuel.

Ethanol is made mostly out of sugar cane or corn and is one of the reasons for the fuel versus food debate. According to Tangney, biobutanol is, by far, a much more environment-friendly, as well as more efficient, biofuel option.

Tangney says, "Butanol, which is our fuel, is an advanced fuel that's a four carbon alcohol, so inherently it has more energy, it has almost the same amount of energy as petrol, whereas bioethanol has only got 70 percent of it."

He adds, "You can store it and pipe it and use the existing infrastructure to distribute this, and in fact you do not need to modify an engine. So this is a genuine like-for-like substitution for oil or diesel - and moreover the fuel is not restricted to automobiles. It's currently being trialled in shipping industry and is a very good base unit for jet fuel."

See the company website here.

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