What is the highest daily volume throughput you guys have seen? Most extractors around this site seem to be around 1000# per day on the higher end. I don’t think that is enough to compete with where this market is headed. It is also going to lead to a bottle neck in the market.
What would be options to reach 10,000 or even 100,000 # per day? I think the only viable solution is some sort of countercurrent continuous feed extractor. does anyone have experience with these, such as the KPD or other similar models?
I bring this up because I was speaking with an individual yesterday who claims to be in the process of building out a facility capable of processing 200k pounds per day. if that’s the case (dude could be blowing smoke, but seemed legit), there is no way smaller guys will be able to compete doing batch processing on a small scale.
What are your thoughts on where everything is headed?
The question becomes, where does all that biomass come from? This is a basic math question really. So for instance, last year here in CO we had roughly 21,000 acres of hemp grown. Average yields vary but if you were to get 1,500 - 2,000 lbs of biomass per acre that’s 31.5M - 42M lbs of biomass. This is assuming all of it went to CBD production which isn’t really probably the case. So let’s take the high end at 42M lbs. If you have a facility that does 200,000 lbs per day you would be able to knock down the entire state’s harvest in 210 days in one facility. This also assumes that everyone is willing to sell you all of their biomass which would be a false assumption as well. So now you have a facility that will have to truck in massive amounts of biomass to stay busy all year. Given that a lot of folks are vertically integrating in part or in whole it would be reasonable to assume that a facility that large would be pushing very hard with independent growers to be profitable. Then of course you have the whole issue of fire codes and allowable amounts of solvent in any one facility. There’s a lot to consider if you want to be the ConAgra of hemp.
yeah, this guy was attempting to sign farmers up for biomass buyback at between $1.25 and $1.50 per point, they personally grow somewhere around 7000 acres (or work with farmers who do). also would have to think a project of that scale would take at least a year to be operational, so that would be for 2020 and beyond most likely. then there is the fact that said facility would be in Puerto Rico, so who knows how they plan on shipping millions of pounds of biomass there.
just was curious what y’all thought, seemed a little pie in the sky to me.
Definitely doable would be $100’s of millions and require 100’s of thousands of sq ft with external multi story evaporators and distillation units. Would be a massive undertaking for sure. Buildout and engineering alone would require at least a year probably more. Sourcing biomass and solvent, removing and handling waste, and process chilling would be massive projects on there own. Definitely a multi year project.
The end products on that scale Will by no means be of the quality market already expecs i am in contact with several groups
That for now i call day dreaming
The sop and equipment Ian t there yet to make a top end product fully automated
Not yet
I have talked to other people setting up plants they claimed would be ready for 300,000 per day in a couple years. I am not sure if that particular plan is legitimate, but I think it could be done. I know many verified plants in the 10,000+ area.
To do 100,000 per day, is like 4200 lbs/hr. One large decanter centrifuge can easily handle that sort of separation load. In fact that’s far from the largest ones available. There are ones doing 5x that. It would take money to be sure but I don’t see the technical side as being all that challenging.
Infrastructure is the better question. Every lab I saw making these kinds of claims also said they were sitting on huge farm acreage and planned to be vertically integrated.
I think guys full of shit, the MAQ (max allowable quantity) of ethanol is what will be limiting if you’re doing this within the letter of the law and a fixed location (which I think some people are trying to avoid based on some IG posts I’ve seen of truck/trailer-based extraction systems). No doubt because some are running non-UL listed, no engineering review Chinese import systems. All of our insurance is going to go up when one of them goes kaboom doing so.
Based on experience with the permitting process it’s going to be near-impossible to have more than ~500 gals in play in your system at any given time per control area following the NFC/NFPA. Even with a continuous system you would still have to deal with the energy requirements to evaporate an absolutely massive amount of solvent and the logistics to bring in fresh and remove spent material, that’s a minimum of probably 40 semis per day moving around.
If you’re extracting cold, double those energy requirements.
It’s the quality and execution. I have several labs setting up to even just do 10,000 pounds a day. And for probably 6+ months they will produce absolute shit and a lot lower production capability then they expected. Because numbers and theories are all well and good. But when it actually comes to production the quality is terrible and suddenly they can’t pay back the tens and tens of millions of dollars that is producing 1/3 of projections and they can only get 1.00$ a gram cause it’s such low quality product
it’s very hard to go from someone’s peak performance dream on paper to running a tuned lab outputting to near that potential. it takes longer than anyone ever expects to get onto a good production rhythm while dealing with scaling issues.