Hello I am a production manager in Oregon, and I was asked take about 11kg of CO2 oil and run it through my boiling point distiller. I have only ever had experience with ethanol distillation.
We already have it in a CO2 oil form, I was thinking to wash it down to an 10:1 or 5:1 ethanol mixture, and then take the resulting “mix” and winterize and filter, then roto evaporate it and then distill. However my boss was saying we should just run the material in the CO2 form.
Has anyone ever ran material this way? Is it safe to fun this in a 0.1 mmHg distiller without cutting the ethanol back in?
Definitely winterize first. Distillation and especially clean up sucks when you have waxes present.
Is the material decarb’d? You meantion you want to run the material in the CO2 form - do you mean the non-decarboxylated form? Because you can’t really distill that stuff. You need to decarb first or you vapor pressures from decarboxylation in the distillation apparatus will ruin your vacuum pressures. You can likely find oil decarboxylation SOPs on this site. Even if the oil pre-winterization was made from decarboxylated weed, you should still decarb further after winterization.
You need quite different equipment to distill cannabinoids than that which is generally is used to distill ethanol.
If you are not familiar with “short path” distillation, or Wiped Film Evaporation you’ll probably want to do a fair amount of reading before taking this on
I am firmilar with winterizing and i believe the material may have been winterized and filtered. I believe it was ready for CO2 cartridges.
It may or may not be decarb’ed but i can deal with that during my distillation, i normally decarb after my residual ethanol pull.
We are trying to a refined oil through our boiling point distiller. I am just worried about any issues i might encounter using CO2 oil in an ethanol process. Is there anything I should be cautious about with running CO2 in a 00.01mmHg vacuum?
Or am i worried over nothing?
Define “boiling point distiller” first. End of the day you need winterized decarbed material. If you’re not 100% sure its winterized, winterize it. If you’re not 100% sure its decarbed, decarb it. After that it’s ready to distill.
If you’ve distilled winterized extract made from an ethanol process, they’ll act pretty similarly in a distillation apparatus, as far as I know. Might want to compare the pH first.
ExTek90 Thank you for your insight! I’ve been extracting/refining primarily high THC cannabis varieties for about 5 year now. I once had a lower potency result from crude that was a combination of CO2 and BHO extract, and I couldn’t figure out why. The company I’m working for would like to utilize CO2 for a primary solvent, then follow up with distillation. I’ve tried to convince them to use hydrocarbons or ethanol, but I don’t think I’ll make much headway. The regulations in Ohio are a bit tight… Soooo I wanted to ask how to adjust the crude PH to 7. I figured it would involve dissolving the crude in some hydrocarbon, adding NaOH (or some other base), filtering the solution, then evaporating the hydrocarbon solvent. I wanted to see if you had a better suggestion. Thanks again for all the helpful info!