Nature
PUBLISHED
New Zealand-based company DB Export have come up with an excellent recycling idea, where fuel is made using natural beer waste taken out during the process of brewing.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Instead of filling cars up with petrol derived from fossil fuels, motorists in New Zealand can fill up with one of the by-products of making beer. But before you pour a beer directly into your car, it’s the slurry of yeast not used in fermentation that can be reused to create ethanol. This is then distilled and refined into a high enough purity to fuel a car, which DB Export humorously named "Brewtroleum".
While innovative, Brewtroleum, or at least the thinking behind powering cars using a powerful natural substance, has been around for a while. In some fields in the United States, corn is grown solely to be processed into biofuel. In Brazil, sugarcane waste has been recycled into ethanol for many years. And, since the mid-1990s, North American brewing company Molson Coors has been turning its beer waste into ethanol to reduce "reliance on fossil fuels."
Most cars built today aren’t made to run on 100% ethanol, which is why a gasoline/ethanol mix is used. If the proportion of ethanol to gasoline is equal or higher, problems can occur within the engine.
This special brew is only available for a limited time. However, if demand is continually high, the makers may produce Brewtroleum for a while longer.
[H/T: Popular Science]
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