Spoke to a tech yesterday that says they can extract to crude with plants straight out of the field. Has anyone had any experience with this technology?
butane?
Should be possible with hydrocarbons. With hexane, it might even be a workable solution. Note unlike butane, water has zero solubility in hexane.
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All I know is he said he uses a solvent that has polarity.
IDK then. Sounds iffy. If he wonât tell you basic things like what chemicals he uses, I wouldnât use such a service.
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I mean, with cold enough ethanol it should be possible but on any sort of large scale I wouldnât want to have to deal with reproofing the ethanol constantly. Also as @MagisterChemist said, if theyâre being super secretive I probably wouldnât give them my business. Too many shitheads in this industry pretending like the things they read here and on ICMAG are their own proprietary IP.
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Youâd probably have to reproof every single run. This is one reason I donât think ethanol is a good solution for scaleup, despite itâs abundant use in the industry.
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Did he mention that going any further than crude was problematic?
Not saying it is, but lots of folks have run into problems in their WFE that look to be water solubles.
With a statement like
It doesnât hurt to ask.
You know, with all that earnest/honest sharing weâve come to expect from the cannabis industry 
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I know people that currently do cryogenic ethanol extraction for their crude material that they use to make distillate.
They really like doing that because it saves them time and effort in post-processing, as it comes right out of their ethanol unit already having been dewaxed.
If itâs cold enough, wet material shouldnât be an issue. May have to run it through desiccant regularly to keep your solvent dry though.
The system probably incorporates an industrial biomass dryer (i.e. forced air tumbler)âŚor they extract with an immiscible solvent (i.e. non-polar hydrocarbon) and separate the organic phase from aqueous phase. I see you already struck out the latter, but it is definitely a viable solution.
Anybody wanna buy a frozen container full of hemp?
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No. Nobody ever freezes it right!
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May I ask for a few tips on how to freeze hemp right? I am curious about your comment
It is possible, but it seems foolish from a process efficiency standpoint. If heâs not providing better informationârun.
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What about heptane?
Itâs not actually zero my information was incorrect there. Itâs in the ppm range. Hereâs a paper listing it. Hexane and heptane are similar.
I can only imagine the lossesâŚthink live resin percentagesâŚdismal yields. Somebody here has had to try to extract wet hemp vs dryâŚanyone âŚBuehlerâŚ
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It needs to be flash frozen with liquid nitrogen.
The container that I was talking about is likely what @cyclopath has seen⌠All of the material went into the freezer at the same time. Everything around the edges froze within a couple hours. Everything in the middle got smashed and pressed and then took 3 days to freeze, so there was plenty of pooling up that became icebergs of hemp-water.
Maybe they can just let it thaw, bottle it up, and sell it as âhemp-water.â 
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That makes perfect sense, I wonder if people are using the liquid nitrogen approach on a large scale and what that would look like
Anyhow, thank you for your reply
Under vacuum
Place biomass in vacuumbag pull vacuum and place in freezer
Even the large vacuum bags used for blankets that are vacuumed out with a vacuum cleaner give better results than No vac
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hydrocarbons are the only way to extract âwetâ
heptane almost too high bp, some terp loss
hexane high bp, lots of bs wax pickup
pentane more reasonable recovery temps, but less thca/cbda solubility
butane has excellent wax avoidance while run cold, but has slight water pickup
lots of choices, all require post processing.
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