A Whisky for the Road?

This blind Bambi is all for renewable energy sources and reducing our dependence upon petroleum, so when I saw a short piece in the 27 August 2010 edition of "Science" magazine about turning the byproducts of Scotch whiskey production into butanol to fuel cars, it caught my eye. Now Scotch whiskey is apparently Scotland's biggest industry. A Scotch single-malt whiskey is distilled ethanol produced by using yeast to break down the glucose in barley. When the process is complete, what's left over is a residue known as "draff" and Scotland's hundreds of distilleries produce about 187 million kilograms of it each year. Now, Martin Tangney, an industrial microbiologist at Edinburgh Napier University, has discovered and patented a process to turn the sugars remaining in the leftover draff into a fuel that can be used in vehicles. In my simple mind, the beauty of this solution is that, although an area like Scotland cannot grow sugar cane, like Brazil, to produce ethanol, they have found a similar process to simply convert a "waste product" which is plentiful in their region to potentially achieve a similar, and almost more elegant, result. I raise a toast to the Scots and wish them the best of luck with ingenuity like this.