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Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky Biofuel
RabbitWho writes "It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'one for the road.' Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years.
This biofuel can be produced from two main by-products of the whisky distilling process – 'pot ale,' the liquid from the copper stills, and 'draff,' the spent grains.
Copious quantities of both waste products are produced by the £4bn whisky industry each year, and the scientists say there is real potential for the biofuel, to be available at local garage forecourts alongside traditional fuels. It can be used in conventional cars without adapting their engines. The team also said it could be used to fuel planes and as the basis for chemicals such as acetone, an important solvent."
ethanol
One for my car... one for me...
Two for my car... two for me...
IANMOFWF (I am not much of a whisky afficcionado) but I was worried for a minute there. The headline is misleading. They are turning byproducts of the whisky making process into biofuel and not the whisky itself, which would be a travesty indeed.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Is anyone else getting just a little shell shocked over all these wonderful new bio-fuel stories? This one's made of left overs from scotch distilleries. Hoorah. Just find a way to produce the dang stuff at a price that makes it competitive to good old gasoline and put it on the market. Quit haranguing us with all these wonderful expectations. Nothing's come up as cost effective, energy dense and ready to use in the current infrastructure yet. When it does, then we'll have news.
Butanol has almost the same energy density as gasoline, and burns with less air. Send me a few gallons, and after I rich out the mixture (no fancy computer-controlled mixture for me...), I'll report back!
Oh yeah, here it was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tight_Little_Island
One of the guys poured a bottle of scotch into the tank of his truck, to escape the police that were looking for the, um "stolen" whisky that was removed from a banked ship.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
people have been trying to make this stuff cheaply and efficiently for a while now -> http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Alberta was one such attempt that I heard about
Aye, ittle be just a weee bit Captain, I have to make sure the fuel is of an acceptable quality... *hic*
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I can see the filling stations now.
On one pump you have gas with 87 octane, one with 92 octane and then single-malt or blended whiskey...
What about the Americans? Will we develop a fuel based on Budweiser or Tequila?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Can I get a straw installed to the tank please?
I had better pick up drinking to save our mother earth.
Making acetone and butanol with the Weizmann organism is downright ordinary. People stopped doing in the the 1940s mostly because hydrocarbon cracking was cheaper than ABE fermentation. The feedstock isn't particularly unusual. Wonder what they're specifically trying to patent.
Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky byproduct Biofuel, is what the headline should read. The current one announces a ridiculous insanity involving using one even more scarce resource when the actual significance is that they've created a use out of a waste product. This is better than something from nothing, since the waste product was itself a problem (though I understand some distilleries were already converting it into fuel to power the plant).
p.s. I never understood the draw to whisky when I'd tried and found "meh" even the supposed coveted bottles that are semi-widely available until I was signed into the Whisky Society in Edinburgh one night. Sure selling whisky by number without identifying the source is probably another marketing tactic but this was one of those rare "wow" moments where all the hype and marketing hyperbole actually seemed understated. Water of life indeed.
Support the environment. Drink more whiskey!
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
...getting drunk and saving the world could become synonymous?
There are a lot more cars consuming more fuel than the whisky industry will be able to service.
i.e. this is an irrelevant but amusing story.
btw. Try this one:
http://www.oldpulteney.com/whisky.php
They don't half talk a load of bollocks on their web page, but their 12 year old is better than many distilleries 18year malts. It won't rip your throat out or make you want to boak. It will however give you a blinding headache the following day if you drink one too many, but they all do that.
Deleted
Great news! I'll drink to that!
Without you I'm one step closer to happiness without violence.
Better than vegemite from beer castoffs in Oz.
"Regular or premium?"
"Cask strength!"
And, of course, if you're running a turbo with about 20 pounds of boost... Talisker 10. If that don't kick your car in the teeth, nothing will.
Mind you, none of this is really all that new to the automotive industry. I mean, Irish whiskey has been good only for washing engine parts for years now... and this is the part where I go run and hide from offended Bushmill's partisans
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
They say you can use it in conventional cars without a problem. It's a lie. If the fuel system was designed for it and you don't let it sit in the tank for more than a few months, then it's won't hurt anything. But it still doesn't perform as well.
This crap is causing more damage than it's worth in everything from lawnmowers to racecars.
I've been to Scotland numerous times, and have never heard of a "garage forecourt" but can only presume it's a petrol station. I'm curious about the performance of this proposed biofuel, and whether vehicles would achieve the same efficiency as on petrol. How many furlongs to the mutchkin are we talking about here?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"Whiskey for the gentlemen that like it, and for the gentlemen that don't like it... whiskey! "
-- Colonel Jock Sinclair (Sir Alec Guinness), Tunes of Glory
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Brazil has the answer, with sugar cane ethanol. And, if that isn't enough, try some unaged cachaca distilled at 50%+ alcohol. Woooooot!
Am I the only one noticing a pattern here.
1. Reputable scientists publish research "X". /. it has totally become Y.
--> e.g.: "On some possible applications of AI-blabla to improve car safety"
2. Same scientists explain X to mainstream journalists, and in the process they simplify the message (sometimes in good faith, sometimes to get PRs).
--> e.g: "Cars will become more intelligent in the next 5 years"
3. Mainstream journalists write articles where X is further stretched.
--> e.g: "May be cars will drive themselves in the next 5 years"
4. Headline of such articles go a further mile in stretching X.
--> e.g.: "Are drivers obsolete?"
5. by the time X morphs on
--> e.g. "Scientists claim that uber-intelligent robotic cars have made drivers redundant. And my home-assembled truck overlord is also baking pizzas. It runs Linux."
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
-HJS
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Yeah, I bet they'll have plenty of patents on it.
I had a coworker who one time actually did try the fuel-grade ethanol. Strong stuff. Unfortunately for him, they need to put benzene in fuel grade ethanol, and he got very sick. Turned green. Didn't move for a few days.
Qxe4
Butanol, actually.
I hear butanol has a vapor pressure, ignition point, flame propagation rate, and energy content that let it be dropped in essentially straight as a substitute for gasoline, without retuning modern engines.
Does anybody have better info than this rumor?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What else would they make? Tequila fuel? (Saki fuel?) Duh!
Speaking for the people of Kentucky, I'd like to say:
Please, please, please work with bourbon.
There's about a dozen distilleries within 50 miles of where I live. I'd love to use locally produced fuel.
Plus, drinking bourbon would be considered an environmentally friendly act.
This sentence no verb.
"It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "one for the road". Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years.
Whisky accounts for approximately £2bn of Scotland's £86.3bn GDP.
Nice try though. Check your references before making absurd generalizations like this one. (I'll bet you also didn't know that there are also large swaths of the country that neither produce nor consume Whisky in meaningful quantities. )
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It WAS whiskey that powered his breakaway on the TdF, not PEDs! In your face, WADA!
I don't think AC bothered to click through to the article at all.
Photo by-line says 30% more power than ethanol -- so if they are doing that with ethanol, doesn't that imply (through recursion) a new source of infinite energy?
Cool!
Wasn't this a Dukes episode?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'll be interested to see how well cars running this mix perform in the cold. Many years ago I was in Brazil where they have Alcohol powered cars, and during winter there it was a problem getting these cars to start. To put that in perspective a cold winters day in Brazil is a like a warm summers day in New Zealand. This was many years ago and may well be solved by now.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
"What people need to do is stop thinking 'either or'; people need to stop thinking like for like substitution for oil. That's not going to happen. Different things will be needed in different countries. Electric cars will play some role in the market, taking cars off the road could be one of the most important things we ever do."
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
For this most special occasion, I shall indulge myself to listen to Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch, for that's what this seems to be.
I think I need to tell my sister that we should drink more scotch and less tequila... :-) Time to head down to the liquor store and pick up a bottle I think. Of course, Irish whiskey should work just as well from the biofuel perspective. So, I guess that bottle of Jameson's I got tonight will serve as well?
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was implied by the article that the spent grain, draff as it is called, is going to waste. I would really hope that is a mistake in the article.
Spent grain is very nutritious for livestock and unsurprisingly they love it, especially pigs. It's only the alcohol the distillers are interested in, but the farmers and their pigs are interested in the extra nutrients converted by the yeast that remain in the draff. There are also many old, traditional recipes for making bread from spent grain. I know a few that actually brew small beer just to have a supply of spent grain for these recipes.
These "byproducts" are very valuable economically even they might not have a high direct resale value. It's not too unlike metal shops and the filings swept up at the end of the day. I read about a fellow that had arranged to sweep shop floors at the end of each shift for free. After a few years, he had a small team of employees and was covering many shops in the region and turning a good profit. That was before the metal shortage. Once converted to meat or bread they have high value.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Let me know when I can turn fuel from the gas station into Laphroaig.
Turned green. Didn't move for a few days.
Did he have a strong desire for brains afterward?
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
Instead in using Scotch as fuel, they should use Scotch for drinking. Drunk people shouldn't drive which automatically results in more walking for the drunk (exercise is good and healthy) and less traffic (good for nature, less noise of the public, and fewer accidents).
More cheap Scotch for everyone. You could use Bourbon as fuel it is much better suited for fuel than for drinking. ;-)
why use it as fuel for cars when you can just as easily start burning it the make more whiskey!
That saves you from dragging stuff around as well...
He was in dire need of brains indeed. Before he drank the stuff. Otherwise he'd thought better of it.
I thought most of those byproducts weren't wasted, but used to feed cattle? No more happy days for the cows, it seems, and Scottish milk is bound to deteriorate from now on (no more whisky flavour).
It's hard to believe that the nation that invented haggis to be able to use *all* parts of a slaughtered animal should simply toss away the byproducts of whisky-making.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Sigh... burning WHISKY is terrible. It is too good for whiskey.
One is Scottish. The other Irish or worse... Your engine would spit out the American stuff. Although to be fair, it makes a better solvent. American whiskey is a close relative to vodka, but without the taste.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Leaving home distillation laws aside for the moment, I'd be interested to see if the process could be used by the home distiller.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I can put whiskey into my horseless whisky carriage and ride around! How splendid!
No, but he did smash everything in our office.
Today's front-runner for "Slashdot headline that most sounds like a headline from The Onion."
Eh, my humble little Geo Metro wouldn't be able to handle any sort of whiskey anyway. She's too much of a lightweight. Now, if something like a pina colada, daquiri, or wine cooler could be burned as fuel... :p
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