Hey Everyone, Im in SC where Hemp will lead the way for a couple more years prob. I’m in the retail business and want to get into the processing world but it’s a large investment and theres a lot of questions that hopefully you guys can pitch in on.
I read the white paper from @cyclopath and @Photon_noir (awesome btw!) and put together numbers that kind of matched up with the processing equipment spreadsheet from the admin Future, and the numbers are not as I thought.
My assumptions:
Mid range setup, for example, will cost me somewhere between 200k-600k to setup entirely and will produce around 10-15L per day of distillate out of 300-500lb or raw hemp. If you take the high end of this you will take in 15L x $6,000 for a total of $90,000. Your cost is 500lb x $75 = $37,500. That leaves a little of $50k per day for Ethanol, utilities, employees, and profit.
IS THIS RIGHT??? what am I missing? How hard is it to sell this much distillate for someone just getting into the industry? how unrealistic is it to expect it to go this smoothly.
I know its a lot for pros to give away to a noob but I come from the glass world and people in these industries have always been good to one another and if anyone would care to foster a relationship with serious people on the east coast, I would love the opinions, suggestions, and partnerships that can be formed.
One thing you aren’t accounting for is how you will be removing the thc from the distillate to make it compliant to be able to sell it to a larger market. You can always go to isolate but then you will be seeing 60-70% distillate to isolate yield and prices on isolate are around 5k and even less now.
That sounds fairly reasonable, if indeed you are using hemp that has little to no THC in it. Understand that CBD distillate will automatically begin to crystallize, so you might as well isolate the CBD. You can certainly set up a facility of this production scale (aka kilo lab) and even about double that capacity for 300 to 400k. If you use an ACE system, your ethanol loss will be less than 1 gallon for each 30+lbs of pulverized hemp biomass… not including any losses to vapor from your solvent recovery system. Including some solvent vapor loss, 500lbs of hemp only burns about 15 gallons of 190 proof ethanol… so maybe 450 to 500 bucks… basically you can assume a dollar of solvent is consumed per pound processed.
It is true that margins are slimming, but as of now, that scale can still be a viable business with the right choices and support.
Is there another alternative that makes this business more viable or is isolation the best solution? Dropping the volume produced by a third seems like a major loss, especially since the resulting isolate is even cheaper than distillate
Removing thc from the distillate via chromatography is a option, still pricy but there was talk in another thread about this and a unit that was only 65k:
Another route would be isolating the CBD and then remediating the mother liquor and adding the isolate back in to make full spectrum distillate. There’s been some talk about creating isomers like delta 10/cbn recently that could possibly work to achieve this.
I’m pretty new to all this myself and just getting started with my first isolation of CBD with goals of remediating the mother liquor but that’s still a ways to for me so I’m probably not qualified to give that much advice.
That being said with the budget you have mentioned I would highly recommended talking with a consultant about your options.
I am in Virginia and would be interested in startup of ethos extraction, could you connect for mutual benefit, such as buying two unit and get discount for bulk purchase.
Thanks
mittalpusa at gmail