Looks like there are three main suppliers in the cannabis space for membrane skids at the moment. Anyone have recommendations/preferences? Do you feel like they perform as well as you hoped?
Please share the 3 producers know to you
With a perfect dewax, decolorization with an ethanol membrane would your finished material basically be distillate at that point? Can I substitute this type of oil for distillate?
No you ll have a refined crude at 65% tac
Maybe a bit higher but doubt over 75% is feasable
From what I’ve seen there is the X-Spiral skids.
Sambo Creek have a couple different options but seem to be focused on their skid made in Italy.
And BVV has one as well that seems to be the cheapest option.
I assume most people here would have experience with the X-Spiral skids. Would love to hear any input from others though. Im looking for a good option for scaling winterization and solvent recovery but haven’t met anyone actually running any of these in their lab.
Do you use any @Roguelab? I feel like I saw a thread from awhile back of you looking for some that work well with alkanes.
I have only seen a x spiral in action on alkanes
And quiet impressed
At the same time looking into it deeper as well reason of my curiosity
I am about to get into extraction with alkane ( pentane) as solvent so eager to hear more reviews as well
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@Roguelab Dont, Pentane at scale isnt financially viable, Pentane is a refinement reagent imho
I am already getting crude between 65-70% TAC because we are extracting cold. Do you think I’d see a significant increase if we used membranes to remove solvent etc?
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The nanoskid very well may be our very best product in terms of quality. I don’t think we have had any clients run into any issues filtering ethanol/methanol in our skids. Happy to jump on the horn and grab one of the engineers for any questions that are above my paygrade. Rebates available too, up to 80% of the cost of the skid credited back in energy rebates
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No don t think so extraction parameter dictate the tac not the solvent recovery as for the Winterization maybe but I doubt it
High would like @MagisterChemist tell us the advancement over the years and hope there are solutions to our questions
Where can I find info on the nanoskid?
Or feel free to DM me and I can answer any questions you have
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I’ve seen a dozen or so operators with skids in storage, but only one operational. I think the problem is what membrane manufacturers promise /claim their membrane skids can do vs what they can do in realistic operation. Limitations from material science, cost, reliability, consistency, consumables, etc. are reasons I’ve seen them in storage. I really wanted to see hydrocarbon/alkanes membranes work well, but don’t see them in the actual field. Maybe it’s a scale issue. I’d love to have more input from the engineers involved in membranes.
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My team (SciPhy) and I are in consistent collaboration with Xspiral/ @MagisterChemist on builds and process and we sell membrane skids.
@ganjineer710 thats fair and weve seent it too, many from being oversized. Consumables and OpEx wise tho they cut way down. Membranes arent dirt cheap, but with no hard particulates in the feed and not letting them dry out, they tend to last at least 1yr.
Theres been alot of refinement to the hardware (and membrane chemistries available) since they fist started appearing in hemp/canna over 8yrs ago. We have years of units in the field and design refinements behind us, all aimed at making the system easy to deploy and operate. The part that keeps moving is the membranes themselves. The assortment of membrane chemistries is constantly evolving and were constantly testing them, many before theyre available for B2B sale, so we can recommend the better fit for a given customer/app.
Solvent recovery is a clear win for most users and quickly pays for itself, but if a 50L roto of ethanol running part of the day is enough for your scale, that roi will be much longer than for the folks running a 750kg/hr FFE.
With such a wide variety of feedstocks and end product types/specs, dewax/decolor is more nuanced. Is it going to make a water clear oil with 90%+ TAC? For most ops, no. Can it make distillation more consistent and at least cut down or eliminate cold precip and sorbents? For most, yes.
As for Butane, this is where the most active development is happening, and I personally have alot of hands on dev time with it. We see solid results with decolor and removal of heavier components (the junk the bulk of a sorbent column is spent dealing with on avg biomass). The carotenoids tend to take more work to hold back in butane, but can be reduced enough to apply a fraction of the granular attapulgite (microsorb rvm) one would normally use (like 1/5th in our tests). And with dabbable oils, the specs for color can be quite wide ranging from brand to brand and more sensitive than oil thats getting distilled downstream. Literally getting setup to run some new experimental membranes on butane miscella right now. We do demos on all our equipment at SciPhy in Hillsboro OR. Since my marketing director will have my head if I dont plug the sale → we do have 2 of the new design X-Spirals (UL listed and EU-GMP ready) at 30% off, one 2.5 unit and one 4.0 unit. Both are triple rack (big boys) set up for all three functions (bulk recovery, dewax, color ethanol). Hit us up sciphysystems.com , happy to help
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We purchased 2 skids from Sci Fy a year and a half ago. We got a 2.5 and a 4.0. 4.0 was set up for etoh desolv and worked great. We desolved around 700gals of miscella daily. We got around 7-8 months out of a 4 pack of membranes.
The 2.5 we could never get good output from. Imo the heat ex was too small and couldn’t get the miscella cold enough to dewax properly. I ended up removing the heat ex and installed another heat ex 10x the size. Even after that we just couldn’t get it to produce enough output to match our needs. Not to say it didnt dewax, but it just was SLOWWWWWW. I ended up removing it from the process and had to go back to dewaxing ye olden way.
With that said, they do work well for desolv. Unfortunately we closed due to the cbd/state/federal world fuckery so they are in storage. Hoping to get thc licensing next spring so they’ll probably go back into processing if/when that happens.
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Can you fully separate cannabinoids and aromatics from each other? Want little or no cannabinoids in my “hte” and vice versa
been working on recommissioning a 2.5 with zev for a few months, slow going cause we got alot going on but we are getting close. gonna focus on desolve first.
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The number of people running the skids for pentane/hexane/heptane was always quite few, though i’ve always promoted it to people. I’m not surprised people have not seen one in the field. Actually in that use case we never had a membrane go bad. They have lasted indefinitely long. At my own lab i’ve been running the same demo membranes I bought 4 years ago. That applies to alkanes, not to alcohols. The alcohol membranes I have always rated at about 4 months of single shift days and that has held true. I have sold probably 20 machines to alcohol customers for every 1 that wanted to run alkanes.
I am aware there were a lot of secondhand units resold last year. Some of these were never turned on and had been bought by companies that did not even get operational in the first place. There were a few units in Arkansas recently and they’re now being turned on under other buyers. Generally speaking units on auction in 2026 have come from companies that were wholly liquidated, with all of their equipment, not cases of this unit being pulled from an operating company to replace with something else. Unfortunately as everyone is quite aware, the number of labs that were entirely liquidated as nonviable businesses was very high in the last two years (on future alone we’ve had dozens of people with labs up for auction). I have had 7 companies in 2026 so far who bought units up from liquidated companies and connected to get them running at new locations.
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@CollectiveObjective @MagisterChemist, Thank you for the insight! It certainly aligns with what I’ve seen. I’m curious about @pangea question as well.
I can certainly say that the xspiral skid is the one I’ve seen most. I’ve also seen the Sambo unit for hydrocarbons.
I guess for clarity, lets say for 4.0 units…
Alcohols:
Can they dewax? How fast? Cost/maintenance needs?
Can they remove solvent (Ethanol/methanol)? To what PPM? How fast? Cost/maintenance needs?
Color Remediation?
How much solvent is required for a given batch size?
Hydrocarbons:
Can they dewax? How fast? Cost/maintenance needs?
Can they remove solvent? How fast? Cost/maintenance needs?
Can they fraction terpenes? How fast? Cost/maintenance needs?
Can they fraction other aromatic/volatile compounds?
Color Remediation? Same Questions…
How much solvent is required for a given batch size?
Sorry for the wall of questions but this is technology I want to endorse when talking with consults and customers.
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For alcohol, the solvent recovery speed is 180 gallons/hr. This is for bulk solvent recovery; it does not reduce to a dry PPM level, but rather more like a 50:50 mix of oil to ethanol. In an alcohol extraction SOP this generally equates to removing about 95% of the extraction solvent at this stage and then drying the remaining 5% at a secondary stage, which could be a rotovap, pot still, falling film, etc depending on the scale. Dewax and color remediation run at half speed compared to solvent recovery (90 gph). I rate these at 4 months of single-shift days before replacement, but this is based on them gradually losing performance and then being pulled when that has become unacceptable (i.e., they don’t suddenly one day fail, they just get slower over time). The 4 months is based on replacing them when their performance is 2/3 of what it originally was. On the other hand, if the system was larger than what you needed in the first place, then you could run them longer without it cutting into production. A replacement set is $4800
In regards to hydrocarbon, as I stated, replacement period is not bounded because I have ran these for years without having to replace them. So I can say the number is certainly in excess of a year, but I can’t place an upper bound on it. The speed is highly dependent on the situation; the speed actually orders based on the solvent molecule size; pentane is faster than hexane is faster than heptane is faster than octane etc… The speed should be quoted based on the specific application in that case. However the minimum speeds measured are equivalent to ethanol and they get faster from there. In pentane I have seen them max out a 2.5s ability to discharge at several hundred gph.
For dewax/decolor/solvent recovery results in alkanes I have various posts on instagram (@magisterchemist) showing the color changes qualitatively. Color remediation and dewax are the same unified function when running alkanes.
I recommend running a 4 on no less than a 55 gallon drum of material, to make sure the holding volume/cleaning volume are surpassed by the work done. Ideally it would be best to save up for a tote (275 gallons) or more.
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