World's first biofuel from whisky residues aim for lead in £100m market
A Scottish company has revived a defunct fermentation technology to create biofuel from the residues of whisky production.
Edinburgh-based Celtic Renewables said it now plans to build a production facility in central Scotland after manufacturing the world’s first samples of bio-butanol from the by-products of whisky fermentation.
Celtic Renewables is a spin-out company from the Biofuel Research Centre (BfRC) at Edinburgh Napier University that has developed its process as part of a £1m programme funded by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) under its Energy Entrepreneurs Fund.
The company said it is now seeking funding from the Department for Transport’s (DfT’s) £25m advanced biofuel demonstration competition and, if successful, hopes to build its first demonstration facility at the Grangemouth petrochemical plant by 2018.
Company owners estimate it could be the market leader in an industry worth more than £100m to the UK economy.
Celtic Renewables, in partnership with the Ghent-based BioBase Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP), produced the first samples of bio-butanol from waste using a process called Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) fermentation earlier this month.
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