Dairy driven: Milk-based ethanol fuel being developed in US

There's a US-based company that wants to transform our vehicles from being daily-driven, to dairy-driven. And yes, we're not kidding about this one.

The Michigan Milk Producers Association (MMPA) has teamed up with a Canadian distillery company called Dairy Distiller to repurpose dairy waste into ethanol fuel for vehicles.

During the filtration process in milk production, a substance called milk permeate comes out as a byproduct. This substance is usually dumped or sold as a feed crop for livestock. But since it's a natural sugar, the addition of yeast will enable the fermentation process in producing ethanol.

Dairy Distillery is already doing this to make vodka products called Vodkow since 2018, along with milk-derived ethanol for hand sanitizers when the pandemic started.

But now that it has caught MMPA's attention, together they will construct a multi-million dollar facility for making ethanol fuel. The plant will be able to produce around 2.2 million gallons of ethanol annually and claims the milk byproduct-blended fuel could offset up to 14,500 tons of carbon emissions per year.

It's another win toward creating synthetic fuels for conventional combustion engines, and hopefully, we get to see more dairy brands adopt this manufacturing process in the future.

Source: Carscoops