You can'l drink and drive, but your car can ... maybe

New startup wants to create a biofuel from, basically, whiskey

by James Joiner

You may not be able to drink and drive, but pretty soon your car will be able to. That's the goal of a new project based—where else—in Scotland that is using some next-level alchemy for a new take on the lead-into-gold cliché: turning golden whiskey into unleaded fuel.

Biofuel, that is.

Don't worry, they're not going to be taking your precious Scottish nectar itself to the pumps, it's actually way better than that. The folks at Celtic Renewables Inc. want to synthesize the waste left behind when the whiskey is finished, which accounts for as much as 90% of the raw materials, into something called biobutanol; basically ethanol with a Lance Armstrong complex.  You see, ethanol, whose production is subsidized in the U.S. and is made primarily from government-subsidized corn, can only be used as a 10% additive to standard fermented dinosaur origin gas. But biobutanol is so damn potent, only ten or twenty percent less than gasoline's, it can be mixed at a much higher level.

Biobutanol has been around for a while. Almost a hundred years, in fact. And energy giants such as BP and DuPont have been sniffing around at ways to cash in on it, especially since the production method is similar to ethanol, and existing infrastructure can be converted for use. You can even pump it through pipelines, which is difficult at best with its weak little brother. So why isn't everyone already doing it?

Money, of course.

It cost almost twice as much to make, until recently, which naturally made it a less economically viable option. But recent advances in the manufacturing process are leveling the playing field, and, since biobutanol can be extracted from anything from corn and sugar beets to wood chips and grass, it's being heralded as the fuel of the future. These guys are even making it through a carbon-negative process out of cellulose.

When you figure that the whiskey industry churns out a combined 551 thousand tons and 422 million gallons of leftover material annually, that's a lot of driving to and from the pub that could be enabled with Celtic Renewable's vision, not to mention the fact it could ultimately inject $90 million annually into the troubled Scottish economy. It's also a start-up model that could eventually be saying, "go home, Big Oil, you're drunk."

The other way to look at it is, pretty soon the more Scotch you drink, the better it will be for our world at large. How's that for an environmental initiative?