Glengoyne, Strathblane
The picturesque distillery near Glasgow has invested £170,000 in a facility to process distillery waste and has created a wetlands area to attract wildlife.
Diageo leads the way
Diageo has made a significant investment in bio-energy schemes. The £65 million combined heat and power plant at Cameronbridge, Fife, will provide 98 per cent of the heating steam and 80 per cent of electrical power. At its Glenlossie and Roseisle distilleries in Speyside, draff will be used as fuel in bio-energy plants to produce steam that will be used in the operations on site.
14 • THINK TANK
with Helius Energy, is now taking its green ethos into the 21st century by using around 130,000 tonnes of draff annually and mixing it with timber as biofuel for a new £50m combined heat and power (CHP) plant. The biofuel provides the fuel to a boiler to create steam, which is then used to provide process heat for CoRD’s new animal feed plant and to drive turbines in the CHP plant to produce electricity. The CHP is expected to generate 7.2 megawatts of electricity – enough for 9,000 homes – which can be used onsite or exported to the National Grid. Frank Burns, General Manager of CoRD, said:
“The local whisky industry always had a sustainable approach to its business – for example, finding uses for its by-products, particularly in farming. “In fact, we have always been pioneers in
sustainability. At the beginning of the last century, we came together as a local industry to provide economies of scale to process our waste products economically, and in the 1970s we were among the first to invest in new technology to create pelleted animal feed. Now, in the 21st century, we are pioneering CHP technology to produce sustainable energy and heat for both our operations and export to the national grid. “The whisky distilleries have spent a great deal of time and effort in getting this project to where it is today and there is plenty of local support for it. It’s certainly not just being done for publicity. At £50 million, it’s the biggest construction project in the area and the people of Rothes are very supportive of the project.” Diageo is another company making considerable investments in green technology, via some of its 27 malt distilleries and the two grain distilleries it operates in Scotland. This includes a £65 million CHP at its
Cameronbridge distillery in Fife, a £6 million bioenergy plant at its Glenlossie distillery and its new £40 million
Research project
Professor Martin
Tangney heads up the Biofuel Research Centre at Edinburgh Napier University and is at the forefront of some exciting work using whisky by-products to produce fuel for vehicles. He is using pot ale and draff to produce butanol, which can be blended with petrol or diesel to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and he believes it could herald the birth of a new industry for Scotland.
He said: “This is a more
environmentally sustainable option and offers new revenue on the back of one of Scotland’s biggest industries.” He now has funding for his company
Celtic Renewables and is now scaling up his laboratory process and is hoping to build a pilot plant next year.
THE SCOTCH MALT WHISKY SOCIETY
Roseisle distillery, both in Speyside. Michael Alexander is Diageo’s head of
environment (policy and communications) and he is aware of some of the cynicism toward the industry about environmental initiatives. He said: “We are aware of the concept of
‘green wash’ [using environmental initiatives just for PR purposes], but we are not investing hundreds of millions of pounds for warm and fluffy reasons. We are doing it for sound, long-term commercial reasons. “These are very large investments in our business and they don’t happen overnight. Cameronbridge is a £65 million bioenergy project that was five years in planning so any PR is largely irrelevant. For most of our consumers it’s below the radar and they don’t know anything about it. “If you look at the return on investment on these
capital projects, the payback is very long. But they are important as they have other benefits to us: they not only help us meet our carbon reduction targets, but they also give us a secure source of energy.” While Diageo juggles with its huge £100 million-plus budgets, whisky enthusiast David Thomson has been pouring his own cash – and his soul – into rejuvenating the old Annandale Distillery on the Solway coast, which was closed in 1919. The £4.5 million restoration project has been designed to make as minimal impact on the environment as possible. David explained: “We’ve given a great deal of thought to the design of the distillery to make it environmentally efficient and brought in the Carbon Trust to help advise us. It’s really all about making small improvements, such as installing variable speed pumps to save energy and using the most efficient boiler system available. We are also going to be using natural gas as we have supplies very near and a lot of our heat will be recycled around the plant. “We have done some exciting work with the Biofuels Group at Edinburgh Napier University to look at the best ways of neutralising our effluent using a process that combines anaerobic digestion with a bio-reactor. However, while we’d love to use a system like this, at a cost of £750,000 it’s not an option for us at this early stage.”
J
ulie Hesketh-Laird also believes it’s not just big energy projects that are going to play a role in reducing the industry’s carbon footprint. She explained: “In addition to looking at energy technologies, the industry is also looking at increasing the yields from raw materials. For example, we are looking at traditional and new varieties of grain – which can account for 50 per cent of the carbon footprint on the supply side – to not only increase
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