Celtic Renewables is a company spun out of Edinburgh Napier University which is going from strength to strength.
Professor Martin Tangney, the effervescent Irishman who came up with the original idea, was delighted to welcome invited guests to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) this evening to tell them about the new investment of £500,000 partly from Scottish Enterprise and partly from their private investors.
The award winning company is now valued at £10m and will be moving towards building a manufacturing facility at Grangemouth for which they will seek new capital of around £25m.
The company takes the waste from whisky making and turns it into bio butanol.
In a distillery, only 10 percent of what flows out of a still is future whisky- the rest is Draff and Pot ale.
The whisky industry annually produces 1,600 million litres of pot ale and 500,000 tonnes of draff which could be converted into biofuel as a direct substitute for fossil-derived fuel, thereby reducing oil consumption and CO2 emissions, while also providing energy security – particularly in remote/rural areas where the whisky industry is prevalent.
The Celtic Renewables Ltd production process also produces other sustainable chemicals, acetone and ethanol, as well as high grade sustainable animal feed.
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