Hemp Biomass Questionnaire

Hows it going everyone!

I’m doing a questionnaire for a my Research Solutions paper, I’m going to be writing about the feasibility of small city scale hemp powered district. As in a proposal that a city must dedicate a small district to running off strictly renewable energy and my paper will be focusing on the possibility of hemp being the sole resource used.

This questionnaire will include questions about Energy/Water consumption for hemp farms, amounts of hemp produced and other questions along those lines.

If your willing to help answer some questions that would be extremely beneficial. I’m looking for Hemp farmers, Biomass processors, and anyone with solid information.

This is my first survey and I’ll be gathering basic information and I’ll most likely create more posts a long the journey of this paper.

3 Likes
4 Likes

Make sure you find someone who is practicing holistic farming of hemp. I dont have a clue where to look for it, but i heard about a study that showed holistic farming was actually carbon negative (sequesters carbon). Every other form of farming is supposedly a greenhouse gas emitter.

3 Likes

Definitely a fascinating topic! I was looking into this for multiple uses like remediation of airspaces with carbon farming and being able to further process it into biomass, but I’ve been tasked to narrow down into something more specific. Going more towards the feasibility of hemp as a renewable energy source on a small city scale. With the ideas of maybe a small “green district” that is completely run off renewable energy (hemp) that would provide incentives for cities to expand their green district. That’s kinda the rough idea of the paper without going into specifics.

1 Like

Can you elaborate on the process by which you would use hemp as an energy source?

NPR did a story about injecting co2 into the ground in Iceland, I believe. Their unique volcanic geography makes the co2 stay in the ground if injected deeply enough. The scientists interviewed saw that as the future of co2 capture. Co2 pollution would be captured in tanks, shipped to Iceland, and injected. Hemp does a great job of carbon capture, but only temporarily. Maybe shoving it down a deep hole in Iceland is the answer.

1 Like

If you graze animals over it, let em eat it all and shit it out, you can sequester a bunch of that carbon into the soil.

4 Likes

In this case it’s slightly more of a localized topic, but the idea would be that the pure raw hemp could be used to convert an old biomass power plant that’s burning wood, and we can replace it with the hemp. While still gathering the hemp seeds for oil aswell.
I’m not personally very educated in this topic which is another reason I wanted to get into it more.

I could be very wrong but can’t hemp be converted into a basic crude oil? Or is this crude oil more used for extraction of CBD?

I’m still gathering information to form my question exactly, but I believe I could write a paper on this theoretical topic, my goal was to compare the average power usage in a small city block. Figure out how much hemp it’d take to power that area and show whether itd be a feasible energy source based off comparisons.

The metric you’re looking for to compare various fuel sources is BTU/lb. That will help to frame the logistical and economic analysis. Most power plants, particularly coal plants, will report MWh of generation and tonnage of feedstock used for firing over a given time period which you can use to derive a representative btu/MWh. Single family homes typically consume 10-15 kwh/day.

Certain oilseed varieties will have industrial relevant quantities of seed that can be pressed to yield feedstock for biodiesel. The oilseed cake can then be used for meal or as biomass for power. Hemp biomass derived from non-oilseed varieties would be suited for use as a power or heating source. It’s a good drop in replacement for wood fired, coal fired, or msw incinerator cogen plants.

Alternatively, through pyrolysis and FT processes, the biomass can be converted into renewable gases, fuels, and other petrochemicals.

4 Likes

Thank you that’s extremely useful!! I’ll definitely be looking into that.

1 Like

Also, the cannabinoid rich extract from the trichomes is technically an oleo resin, not an oil.

Cannabis oil comes from seeds, and lipids primarily from the leaf surface

2 Likes

One could even outsource spent biomass and convert it into biocoal through Supertorrefaction, maybe not spent biomass but biomass can still be converted into biocoal.