We are building a lab to extract hemp for a vertical operation. I have used alcohol extraction & butane extraction in the past. We are looking to extract the highest end product & the most versatile extract possible all while preserving Terps & cannabinoids. Obviously cost will be a considered factor but not the end all be all if one is superior to the other.
With this in mind does this exclude ethanol or will cryo ethanol extraction be an option? Will CO2 extraction leave behind cannabinoids that ethanol will pick up? In the past it was touted that CO2 extraction was ineffiecent, has this changed?
Looking for answers & some clarity before taking the plunge. Btw great community here and been learning the extraction ways since days of Grey Wolf & Hashmasterkut.
Edit to add: volume would need to be able to extract up to 500 to 1000 lbs a day.
You’ll never be able to do that volume with CO2 regardless of what your goals are for end product. You would need an immense warehouse or several warehouses with millions spent on equipment alone. CO2 does make beautiful crude that you can put right into a vape cart and it’s used in the THC markets quite a bit for that reason. But it just doesn’t scale when you need to process hundreds of pounds of biomass per day.
Thar CO2 systems will do ~1100 lb/shift, for about $2.35m last time I talked to them.
You can do 10x that for well under $1m if you spend some time learning a few tricks.
That’s what the sales guys for CO2 systems say, so it must be true. They also tell me that CO2 is cheaper than ethanol, it counts as solventless because “CO2 is in the air that you breathe, man,” and that ethanol is bad because if you consume too much alcohol you’ll die.
The sales guys for CO2 systems are generally REALLY good sales people. They have to be.
they also neglect to mention that you either want to add ethanol as a cosolvent (wait, you just told me it was bad?) in the CO2 machine, or actually have to dissolve the primary extract in ethanol and winterize to get a commercially viable product.
rather than give my usual rant on why I think ethanol is “safe”, I’ll just link this…
I can’t help but wonder if the EPA will step in at some point and outlaw the use of any solvent that inevitably impacts the environment, for this industry anyhow. I don’t know the exact effect that offgassing hydrocarbons and what the impact of increased ethanol production will have. Seems that even ethanol production, if not done sustainably, dumps extra CO2 and O3 into the atmosphere.
CO2 used for extractions gets harvested from processes that we’re doing anyway which produce it as a byproduct. There’s room for better utilization of it as well (i.e. dumping the excess CO2 lost when switching vessels into a reserve tank for a grow, thereby converting it to O2) which would technically then be beneficial to the environment as that CO2 would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere.
