Welcome to Team DEFA’s website! 

​

We are a team of 5 students at the University of Strathclyde studying MSc Sustainable Engineering: Chemical Processing and MSc Sustainable Engineering: Renewable Energy Systems and the Environment. We have created this website to help give clarity to the different decarbonisation options available to the whisky industry. 

​

The whisky industry was chosen as it is currently hard to decarbonise due to its distillation process being dependant on steam generation through fossil fuels. The whisky industry accounts for 1% of Scotland’s emissions. Of the whisky emissions (Scope 1 and 2), 88% comes from distillation and therefore this is the area we decided to focus on. The whisky industry has also shown an eagerness to decarbonise their sector with members of the Scotch whisky association committing to Net Zero by 2040.

 

The team has created a tool that compares different low carbon technologies for the whisky industry. On this website you will be able to download the tool, find more information on each of the technologies, see our results for a case study carried out on a Highland malt distillery and see our data validation processes for the tool. 

We hope this will be of help to the industry in meeting their target of Net Zero Production by 2040.