Bourbon is primarily produced in Kentucky, which accounts for roughly 95 percent of the world’s bourbon, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association and multiple industry reports. However, every barrel produced ends up generating a waste product that no one really knows how to deal with. This leftover liquid resulting from distillation is called stillage and with each barrel of bourbon produced, roughly six to ten barrels of this waste product result. Much of this stillage is currently sold to farmers as animal feed, but its weight makes it costly to dehydrate and difficult for local farms to absorb as distillery production has surged.
By pressure‑cooking the bourbon stillage, chemists made carbon‑rich hydrochar to create hybrid lithium‑ion supercapacitors that could store up to 25 times more energy per kilogram than conventional versions, while a second set of double‑layer devices retained almost 96 percent of their storage capacity after 10,000 charge‑discharge cycles, according to the University of Kentucky.
