Scotland's oldest whisky distillery is taking part in a ground-breaking project to capture its carbon dioxide emissions and turn it into a biofuel using oil-producing algae.

Home to Famous Grouse whisky, the Glenturret distillery in Crieff, Perthshire, is one of Scotland's top tourist attractions - producing whisky since 1775.

It is now the centre of a demonstration project that has just come to the end of its first phase turning boiler exhaust gas into oil that can be used as a biodiesel.

An added benefit of the process is that it cleans up the wastewater from the distillery process, with the algae consuming chemicals and copper residues generated by the fermentation stills.

Having shown that the process works, Scottish Bioenergy Ventures, the company behind the project, is now embarking on an expanded algae reactor system.

The so-called "phase two" of the demonstration project from this summer should see the system capable of producing about 6,000 litres of biofuel during the course of a year - capturing 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the process.

Success could lead to a third phase, with a "commercial-sized" algae reactor system that could prove too large for the Glenturret distillery, which is not only Scotland's oldest distillery but also one of its smallest.

http://bioenergy.checkbiotech.org/news/scotlands_oldest_distillery_captures_carbon_make_biofuel