A perspective on decarbonising whiskey using renewable gaseous biofuel in a circular bioeconomy process
Published Thu 13 Feb 2020
On a world-wide basis final energy in the form of natural gas typically has twice the market of electricity. This is a huge challenge for decarbonisation. Large users of gas include for alcohol production, dairy and cheese production, and baby formula. These industries are based on evaporation processes and are best suited to gas as an energy vector. The latest paper from MaREI bioenergy (in the link below) examines methods to reduce the carbon footprint of whiskey production.
Renewable energy generated from process by-products such as draff and pot ale offers opportunities for circular bioeconomy systems. Four scenarios based on a whiskey plant size of 2 million L/a were evaluated to determine the potential energy recovery (in the form of electricity and heat) and CO2 emissions reduction. If the produced biogas from the recommended scenario is used for producing heat and electricity in a combined heat and power system, 446% of the annual electricity demand and 25% of the heat demand of the traditional distillery can be covered, leading to a reduction in energy related CO2 emissions of 61% from whiskey production. Preliminary economic analysis shows that the proposed system can have a payback period of 4 years.
This authors on this work were funded by: the China Scholarship Council; by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) through the MaREI centre for energy, climate and marine; Marie Skłodowska-Curie; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Irish Distillers Limited, Pernod Ricard.
