{"id":5462,"date":"2015-03-17T05:43:35","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T19:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/?p=5462"},"modified":"2020-06-20T01:10:45","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T15:10:45","slug":"a-wee-dram-for-your-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/fuel-2\/a-wee-dram-for-your-car\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wee Dram For Your Car"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nunswithcar\"<\/a>Ok, so it\u2019s St Patrick\u2019s Day, so I’ll put this post in green text and will kick off with a wee story…<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Two nuns were driving along a remote rural road in County Mayo in northeastern Ireland when they ran out of fuel.\u00a0 They walked to a nearby farmhouse and explained their plight to the farmer.\u00a0 \u201cTo be sure, sisters, I can give you a bit of petrol so it\u2019s off on your good works you can be driving.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve only the one jerry can, so the only thing I can give you to carry it back to your car in is this old whiskey bottle.\u201d \u201cBless you, Patrick, and thank you,\u201d said the nuns.\u00a0 They walked back to their car clutching their whisky bottle full of petrol.\u00a0 As they were pouring the petrol from the whisky bottle into the fuel tank, Sean O\u2019Reilly drove by.\u00a0 Spotting the whiskey bottle, Sean shook his head and stared.\u00a0 \u201cBegorrah, that\u2019s what I call faith!\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

We chuckle about that one (or the alternative version where the farmer lends them a chamber pot) but the story can be killed stone dead if one remembers that alcohol is indeed one of the more common alternative fuels is alcohol \u2013 ethanol, methanol, butanol and propanol are good fuels.\u00a0 You\u2019d never bother setting that story about the nuns in Brazil \u2013 over there, they have cars (often the locally produced VWs<\/span><\/a>) that are designed for flex fuel \u2013 they run on petrol, alcohol or a mixture of the above.\u00a0 And we\u2019re not too bad for the old ethanol in Australia ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

And now the UK and Ireland are getting in on the act.\u00a0 A whisky distillery in Edinburgh, Scotland, has just announced that they have successfully produced a butanol blend that can be used on its own or blended with diesel or (better still from a sustainability perspective) biodiesel. They use waste products from the process of distilling whisky \u2013 an industry that\u2019s quite large in Scotland, as you might imagine.<\/span><\/p>\n

The waste products in question go by names that are anything but long bits of Latin and Greek: draff and pot ale.\u00a0 Draff is the malted barley left over after the initial brewing process (lovers of craft beer and home brewers of beer will know what I\u2019m talking about here).\u00a0 Pot ale, on the other hand, is the leftover liquid after the whisky has been distilled out of the original brew of fermented grain (something that resembles beer or ale but without the hops).\u00a0 These two products are mixed to create a blend given the traditional name \u201cbroth\u201d (isn\u2019t it nice to see a scientific product that doesn\u2019t feel compelled to use long and complicated names but just uses something with Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origins?).\u00a0 This broth goes through its own distilling process to produce the biobutanol.<\/span><\/p>\n

The plant, which has hefty backing from the Scottish government and the UK government (let\u2019s just not go into the politics of Scotland here, OK?), hopes to be up and running fully in 2016.\u00a0 Because butanol delivers plenty of oomph, there\u2019s a chance that it won\u2019t be appearing at British bowsers at this stage: as it\u2019s suitable as jet fuel, the aviation market might snap plenty of it up.\u00a0 However, the potential is there to produce lots of biobutanol, as the UK doesn\u2019t just have whisky distilleries to draw on as a source of draff and pot ale: there\u2019s the beer brewing industry and other sorts of distillery to draw on as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lastly, for the clever readers who\u2019ve spotted the two different spellings of whisky\/whiskey:\u00a0 \u201cwhiskey\u201d is for the Irish version; \u201cwhisky\u201d is the Scottish variety).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Safe and happy driving as well as happy St Patrick\u2019s Day,<\/span><\/p>\n

Megan\u00a0<\/span> http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-zaim\/migcredit-dengi-v-dolg.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, so it\u2019s St Patrick\u2019s Day, so I’ll put this post in green text and will kick off with a wee story… Two nuns were driving along a remote rural road in County Mayo in northeastern Ireland when they ran out of fuel.\u00a0 They walked to a nearby farmhouse and explained their plight to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fuel-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5462"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11774,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5462\/revisions\/11774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}