Green Whiskey
Arecent reportshows that the Glenturret distillery in Crief, Perthshire, Scotland (the home of Famous Grouse whisky) is taking steps to reduce their carbon foot print. Not only that, they are using the same process to help clean up their waste water. With the help of Scottish Bioenergy Ventures they are developing a process for taking their waste and converting it into fuel and fish food.
Who would have thought that the production of Scotch contributed to Global Warming? Actually, all distillation processes uses energy to heat the liquid to the boiling point of the component being removed. Since most industrial energy in use today comes from fossil fuels, it should come as no surprise that almost any distilled beverage contributes excess CO2 to the atmosphere.
The process takes the waste water, contaminated with copper from the distillation process, mixes it with the carbon dioxide rich exhaust gas from the facility boiler, and uses it to feed a strain of algae, Chlorella, that tolerates the presence of copper. Like all green plants, the Chlorella takes in the carbon dioxide and uses it to produce hydrocarbons and oxygen; the oxygen is returned to the atmosphere.
The boiler gas is piped into the bottom of the bioreactors where the Chlorella is grown and oxygen comes out the top. As the algae ages and dies it falls to the bottom of the bioreactor where it is harvested. The vegetable oil is physically separated from the algae to produce biodiesel. The protein rich remains of the Chlorella is mixed with the distiller's grain (the remains of the fermentation process that provides the feedstock for the distillery). That material is then used as fish food.
As a fuel production technique, Scottish Bioenergy Ventures claims that it is a carbon negative process, removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than is returned when the fuel is burned. In this case they claim that for every 3-kg of CO2 produced when the produced biofuel is burned, the process consumes 8-kg of CO2 from the exhaust of the boiler. The remaining carbon is turned into food and the excess oxygen is returned to the atmosphere.
Scottish Bioenergy Ventures has completed the pilot scale test of this process. They are preparing to move into the second phase of testing. Ultimately the company expects to be able to produce better than a metric ton of biofuel each day from a distillery of the size of Glenturret.
