Once upon a time, a user who has now found a toll processor, asked the following
I have 1000kg of winterized, decarbed hemp crude from cold ethanol extraction that I would like to have waterwashed/degummed and taken to distillate. Looking for a price of $20/kg or less.
Seems to me that the answers they received should say, even as the original classified thread is delisted.
It costs considerably more than 20/kg to even do this. If you have a large reactor it costs more to fill it up and process a few kg than the price you offered. Not to mention time. Per hour of waiting for the saline washing process to neutralize it and drop it out.
Seriously is this a realistic deal ?
Damn
So 1000 liter crude
Minimum 5000 liter solvent
Minimum 20 kg citric acid
Minimum 15000 L of RO water
450 kg NaCl
Electric cost to recover these amounts and distill this crude and the labor and machine time
And not to forget the waste for 20 bucks
Whahaha who ever takes this deal is crazy
Oeefff
Hope your thc levels are below 0.3% 
5000 liters of solvent?
That’s seems a little high i do 1:1 and get good seperation using heptane
200 grams/liter of citric seems like a lot too
Id use 3000 liters of ro water for this, id do a wash with the acidic water at 1:1 then 2 ph7 neutral washes and call it done. I would filter it before i roto it to get any of the gums out that are emulsified and wouldnt seperate with the water
Meaning you are loosing 100 ml of your alkane to the water wash
Unless you take forever to wait for the split
You where right about the citric 20 kg will do
Listen I hope you find someone I yust am choked at how this market has gone to shambles
It really depends on the goals, and it is very important to properly define them before assuming the cost.
There’s waterwashing, and then there’s waterwashing. Is the target 0% gums? Or is it <1%? <2%?
Is this for a pharma-type operation, with special product requirements? Or just getting it clean enough to distill easily, with minimal “gums/sugars” that would impact distillation?
Generally, gums/sugars impact yield during decarb, and impact yield during distillation, but you don’t need 0%; getting into the <1-2% range virtually eliminates both yield losses and issues with gear pumps and fouled lines. Of course, it is also important to define exactly how you measure that 1-2%.
We’ve found that degumming crude is very critical when it comes to either older biomass, or older crude. Gums form in the presence of moisture and heat; and tend to form in the presence of other gums. While you cannot unwind existing losses to gums, by effectively degumming the material you can eliminate future losses, which happen dramatically faster in the presence of high heat.
This is why some poor quality crude turns into huge chunks of glass-like, asphalt-like crap under heat; its already saturated with amorphous gums in the oil layers (sometimes you’ll see the sticky residue on the bottom of an empty barrel). Our industry often calls them sugars.
Everything suggested here so far is overkill. Hot tap water, a barrel of heptane, a centrifuge, evaporator, and a wiper will suffice. $20/kilo seems to be in the right ballpark for price.
If you reorder your extraction steps, degumming and winterization become super easy. Take a look -
What you’ll see is on the consumer scale, but would be easy to scale up. The only mess would be cooling down and dumping out the waste water before final reduction.
Some old posts of old degumming trials at scale:
With solvent:
https://www.instagram.com/p/COjZ6GnhYsM/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Without solvent:
https://www.instagram.com/p/COwi1d_h1-2/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=