Extracting wet material or frozen/thawed material

Recently attempted to extract crude oil from a bail of fresh outdoor hemp. Testing came back at ~6-7%, however, with a hydrocarbon extraction we failed at producing a respectable yield or respectable quality crude oil.

My guess is that the bail of hemp being very wet prevented penetration of the solvent where it needed to go. Thoughts?

We receive the same material being dried (but bailed wet just like the first wet run) and got similar results.

Another extractor was claiming to pull a sufficient amount of cannabinoids via CO2 on the same material, however, was unable to provide coa’s of pre ran flower, post ran flower and crude oil extracted. Can CO2 pull cannabinoids from a wet flower?

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To clarify, the bail of hemp came compressed in vacuum style plastic and was at least 40% water by mass. It had a decomposition smell and had been previously frozen and thawed an unknown amount of times. We ran this experiment to see if it was at all possible to perform an extraction on this specific material (the potential customer has A LOT of these bails, unfortunately) in a timely manner.

you tried extracting a Bale of wet hemp?
Whole?
with Hydrocarbons?
you got pictures of that rig?!?

hydrocarbons have very little affinity for water, if the water is frozen around the trichomes, you won’t get their contents.

if some idiot just stuffed the cannabis in a super-sack and froze it over the course of a day or two, they wrecked it. Drying it in the sack doesn’t sound like a win either.

Live Resin Cannabis CO2 Extracts describes “live resin” using an Apeks machine, but the picture posted is a BHO based on a google image search (confirmed directly).


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yep, for all intents and purposes they wrecked it…

not sure if it’s recoverable without a LOT of extra work.

farmers really need to discuss extraction with their extraction expert before they harvest.


you should be able to get most of the remaining cannabinoids out of the partially rotted material by drying it before extraction, but because all the cells have been lysed, it is going to take a lot of cleanup.

We broke the 1800lbs bail up with a pick axe and shovels. It was a nightmare, but it was a paid experiment requested by the owners of the bail.

Sorry, do not have pics, but we did the 1800lbs in three days. 1800lbs yielded about 5.5kgs of trash crude that looked like the worst differential oil you can imagine.

The water encapsulation issue is certainly something I discussed with the customers prior to moving forward. If they pay, we will play… :man_shrugging:t3:

Any idea what moisture content of properly dried flower looks like? Fresh frozen? I have had much luck in the past with butane on a fresh frozen flower… this flower was pulled from a room and appropriately treated to get desired results. Certainly not bailed to create pressure nor frozen and thawed over and over.

Can CO2 penetrate a wet bailed flower? We had claims from a CO2 extractor only leaving 0.39% cbda in the plant after two runs… like I said, though, no verifying coa’s were present. CO2 being a non polar solvent, I called total bull shit.

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The only variable remaining and that will unfortunately remain a variable is the level of asshole the farmers had to the material.

My thoughts were that all bails of wet material were unusable.

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imo that is only a slight exaggeration.

properly frozen wet material can be processed. but it’s more work, and more exacting work. so there needs to be a good reason for doing it. for THC dominant material, it’s clearly worth the effort. For CBD production, without concurrent terpene capture, drying to bone dry, then vacuum sealing and storing in a cool dark location is the gold standard.

“you’ve got someone who will processes those 10,000 super-sacks of wet weed?”

OK, come talk to me next year. before harvest.

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They have something like 600,000lbs of this? That’s the claim. If so, that SUCKS, because it’s trash.

I’m assuming that any non polar solvent is going to not be viable due to the encapsulation? Also, ethanol being miscible with water is not going to be a viable option either. Looks like they’re holding a bunch of bails of shit. Very unfortunate.

unfortunately they are almost certainly not alone.

getting the material bone dry will make either hydrocarbon or ethanol extraction possible (presumably CO2 too).

the resulting crude will have more gunk in it that usual.

winterizing, degumming, and scrubbing should get it to the point where it can be distilled, then crystallized, but I wouldn’t take it on if there was properly dried biomass available to process.

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I agree that currently it is a more arduous route for the extractor… Being a extractor myself that is at the fore front of my concerns… But as we see this scale and we begin looking at massive amounts of space required to hang dry material as well as the trichome and terpene loss entailed in transporting, hanging, drying and handling, not to mention the additional cost, at what point does it begin to make more sense from an over all systems approach to have a solution in place to just buck and toss into refer trucks in the field? I hear murs murs of extraction being performed in the field directly at harvest but have yet to see this in action.
Maybe its a h20/enzyme based solution since the material is already 3/4 water weight anyway and to avoid ice encapsulation, or maybe it entails milling the material a bit while frozen to liberate more of those trich’s and extracting with a very non-polar hydrocarbon in large vats with plenty of agitation to ensure as much surface area contact as possible.
It’s both exciting and daunting that there is so much still in process of being sussed out in this burgeoning industry.
The biggest issue i see is just scaling a suitable solution since your doing 4 times the work to acquire the same amount of cannabinoids…

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Hexane sonic bath and a whole lot of ccountercurrrent cleaning with methanol etc might do the trick

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@ErrlDabbins303 what state are the bails located in?

IMO the more water in a CO2 extractor the more headaches you run in to, water will accumulate in a CO2 stream overtime (maybe that’s why they cited two runs to deplete the cannabinoid content?) but I just can’t imagine it’s cost effective for hemp of all things.

Large scale freeze drying or forced-air tobacco type dryers to knock down the moisture content could help - if it’s in the Oregon area let me know.

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What temperature was the material/solvent at during extraction?

Has anything changed since last year? Anyone have any success with wet extraction?

Yes,
There are many options available

Can I rent a spoon? Or at least a map suggesting a direction?

Wet Baled

And i hear its the orkel you need to rent…

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I found the crumb, thank you kindly for the guidance. I had thought heavy alkanes supposedly had poor performance with wet material (which doesn’t make too much sense in my head but nobody ever said it was screwed on properly in the first place). I guess at least one large plant is doing it sounds like.

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image

Pulled this out of my recycling. There were a couple more in there. Why do I need a 20year old road atlas?!?

I have to say, I really enjoy that this industry and especially this site is like a giant scavenger hunt/map to buried treasure; everything has already been done in another age, but we move so fast there isn’t time to guess wrong on what is important and what isn’t. On the other hand, if I can get the company to start actually driving on roads the vintage of the map might be very important.

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