Quite a few of the staff at Sixt rent a car in the UK are interested in the future of motoring and in particular the advances being made in alternative fuel technology. We introduced electric cars to our fleet earlier this year and are always keen to find out more about the industry and which steps are being taken to maintain our obsession with motoring and driving whilst minimising the impact on the environment. It was with this in mind that I stumbled across this news story from north of the English border.

Scientists at Edinburgh Napier University have developed a brand new biofuel to run your car on, made primarily from the by-products of making whisky, following 2 years of extensive research at the university’s biofuel research centre. The team used samples from a local distillery to create biobutanol, which is the next big step for the biofuel industry and produces 30% more power than ethanol.

The by-product samples were provided by Diageo’s Glenkinchie Distillery in Edinburgh, which the scientists then took to test out thoroughly. By using components that are already treated as waste the fuel could have a far smaller impacts on the environment in comparison to normal biofuel which some companies grow specific crops to generate the fuel.

The 2 main by-products of whisky making are “pot ale”, liquid created in the copper stills, and “draff”, which are the waste grains. Every year the whisky industry produces large amounts of the by-products with well over a billion litres of pot ale and nearly 200,000 tonnes of draff simply going to waste at the moment.

Hopefully, when it is released onto the market, it should help the biofuel industry in achieving the 10% of total fuel sales by 2020 set out as an EU directive in 2003.

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