Looking for massive industrial scale continuous extraction equipment or work with group of process engineers to design and build the equipment. We are planting 30k acres for a winter harvest and working on putting solution to process that material in the field. All the equipment will be going on trailers to pull up to a farm and setup semi permanent lab to process wet hemp biomass. Where looking for a continuous process system that can process 18,000 lbs per hour and the support equipment to removal the ethanol from the extraction process. We have over 500 million budget for equipment and to get project built in 4 months.
What is your desired end product - “full spectrum” crude, refined/purified crude, isolate?
I’m going through a full clean sheet engineering process for my facility, and I’m only targeting about 1000 lb/hr per system.
Absolutely nothing off the shelf is going to even come close to what you’re trying to do, and there aren’t many people with the experience to do or help with what you want done. It’s a good thing you claim to have a lot of money to throw at the problem, you’re going to need it. 4 months is tight but it could certainly be done if you’ve actually got that amount of cash to burn.
3 Likes
We are looking for winterized crude at first. We have close to 500 sanitary steel welders/ fabricators that our partners work with and ready to be on the project within 2 weeks. We just are looking to work with someone or group that has a design or a process that we can either scale up or build more machines to meet our demands.
1 Like
Easiest way to deal with things is to not extract them in the first place. Don’t pull fats or waxes or chlorophylls and you don’t have to winterize or worry about carbon scrubbing.
Can your fabricators design and fabricate large centrifuges? Ones that won’t explode and kill people? If not, you’re likely getting someone else to do the majority of the fab work, I can’t see you needing more than a handful of those fabricators.
Do you have any in-house process/systems engineering experts that can validate the information provided to you by whoever you hire? My system and process could likely be scaled up to meet your requirements. Mostly by just adding more systems, as there are diminishing returns from a capex/opex perspective once you go too big.
What is your plan for power? You’re probably going to need well over 4,000 A @ 480V.
7 Likes
We plan on putting large mobile generators and all the other support equipment for the process. We don’t have any process engineers currently on staff but willing to bring on as many as we need to get project accomplished. We need to be at roughly 6 millions pounds of wet biomass per 24 hr day with a process that can be run continuously for 30 days. Also we will need to factor in GMP certification with a CIP function. We have been looking at a counter current screw conveyor with a ln2 jacketed system to run cryrogenic
temperatures of at least -50c four our main extraction but open to a process that works. Have pretty much an open budget and unlimited man power to get this built.
2 Likes
I don t want to ruin your plan but
IT takes me one 40ft container to process 1000/1200 lbs a day
You Will Need a trailer park
I Need 120 KW to run this little. Show
You Will Need a trailerpark 
Probably a portable nuclear reactor
And a army of workers i have 30 men on deck
Check luwa for large scale evaporation devices
Dont know If You reealize You want to Evaporate 500000 liters of ethanol a day
Since cooling that is even more of a pain
I guess You Will have to winterize warm with alumina and other solvents
So multiple by 2 minimum is your solvent evaporation Need
That a small oil refinary size on trailers
Pfff good luck
18 Likes
Wait, are you talking 18,000lb/hr or 6M lb/day? There’s an order of magnitude of difference there.
I’m a mechanical engineer who has already done most of the heavy lifting on determining what’s required to go to a full industrial scale with this type of process and make it efficient. I’d be willing to consider consulting on this and make some recommendations. I can make intros to various people that can help with the rest of the missing pieces as well.
5 Likes
I wonder what revenu calculations You have used but pretty sure prices Will drop heavly once your product hits the market
That is If working with decent strain biomass
We are planting 30k acres and with an estimate of 2000 lbs dry or 6000 lbs wet per acre would equal 180 million pounds roughly of wet biomass. Would take roughly 30 days to harvest that material and then we would need to be at 6 million pounds per day of wet biomass. We have been looking at a running a 32" jacketed stainless pipe 48’ long with a counter current flow screw on the inside. The volume of the pipe is just over 7000L. We wanted to flash freeze material in liquid nitrogen before going into extractor to crush material and fit more in pipe. At a volume of 255 cubic feet of capacity we are figuring out how many runs per hour to have continuous throughput of roughly 18,000 lbs per hour per machine. We figured we need roughly 14 machines running continuously but wanted to build 20-24 so that we can guarantee of hitting the 6 million pounds per day even during maintenance and down time for cleaning. This is getting built based on order we have of 200k kilos per month with money in escrow and surety performance bonds securing contract of 24 billion dollars over 12 months.
4 Likes
Where are you getting this 180 mil pounds of biomass ? International imports?
Ok so what you actually need is the ability to process a minimum of 250,000 lb/hr continuously for 30 days, which means you need to shoot for more like 350k / hr to get anywhere near the actual throughput you need.
Now the $500M budget makes a lot more sense.
With those numbers you’ll need something on the order of 10 runs per hour to hit 18,000 lb/hr/machine. I’d round it up to 15 to be safe.
1 Like
Exactly and and regardless how we get there if we need 20 machines or 100 machines as long as we get that through put.
1 Like
You Said extraction of wet biomass correct ?
And by the way 2000 pounds per acre is very very little so You Will most probably have 2x that yield
When you run auto flower you get half pound to pound per plant. That is what we are designing the system based on an estimate of 2000 lbs per acre which would be our winter/ spring harvest. We have hit as high as 14000 lbs per acre up in Vermont but that us when you put in ground around mothers day and harvest in October.
4 Likes
Well have a looks at a coffee decafinating factory iT s CO2 bases extraction but handels that volume
1 Like
I think a good starting point would what you have on the ground right now. Then you can get individuals to fill in the blanks. I have someone on my team that might be interested in consulting on a project like this. We are already working on the logistics of a similar operating down in Colombia.
4 Likes
Really happy you took the invite to join us @BG305. I knew you would bring a fresh aspect on some of these topics. Thanks for always surprising me with some of the stuff your involved in! 
2 Likes