Resources on commercial extraction procedures

Hash and Stuff Extraction
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Hi,

I was recently contacted by a friend who wishes to enter the CBD market, has potential investors, has experience growing marijuana, and is looking at a 200 acre plot of land he happened upon. He contacted me to handle the extraction side of it.

I’m an undergraduate chemistry student, however I know next to nothing about marijuana extraction (or indeed plant matter extraction at all). I recognize that we will have to hire consultants as this is beyond my scope of knowledge. However, I would like to learn as much as I can before hiring professionals so that we can have a fluent and productive conversation.

We are looking to product CBD distillate and isolate. As I mentioned earlier, we will be growing about 200 acres of hemp. However I expect that we will begin with a pilot grow, something like 10 acres (my partner mentioned something about having to do a pilot grow to check THC concentrations for compliance purposes?)

I have been looking online for the past couple days, however most of the resources I find online are brief overviews written for laypeople. I am looking for specific for end-to-end procedures aimed towards chemists. Where can I find more in depth information on the methodology from start to finish? Preferably a book or publication?

P.S. From what I have read so far, this will be the general outline of the procedure required:

First the hemp is dried and milled. I will leave this to my partner as he has experience with this.

The biomass will then be placed into a closed-loop butane/propane extractor. As far as I understand, this seems to be the best method in terms of least post-processing. The downside being it’s harder to scale. We were looking at Precision Extraction’s multisolvent extractors (X10 or X40?) so that we may switch to ethanol if required for scaling.

The resulting crude oil contains fats that could clog up the distillation. This is removed by winterization: the oil is dissolved in ethanol, and then reduced to -70ºC or so for the wax to precipitate. This is filtered through a vacuum filter.

This oil is then fractionally distilled under vacuum. Looking at Precision’s CDU 1000 for this. At this point, ethanol should be easily removed right? Or will the quantity of ethanol be too much for the distillation apparatus, and better removed using some other method before distillation?

This results in distillate. We can sell this directly, or…

We can continue on to make isolate. This part is a little bit confusing to me — I have seen people say to crystalize the oil from pentane. This is a fairly simple procedure requiring minimal equipment so it’s attractive to me. However, it seems that most people use HPLC for this purpose. Thoughts?

Am I missing any big steps? Or do I have the general gist down?

Again, looking for more in depth sources. An in-depth book/article would be good.

Thanks,

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Don’t do it.

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Don’t do… what?

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You’re missing the step where you turn the investment into money again

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Is the CBD isolate market no good? My business partner is involved in the community (I personally don’t smoke weed or use weed products), and said the market is hot. He has investors interested in this business idea.

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Nope. Market is tanked. Read around on some threads here and you’ll get the gist of it.

Selling cbd is a running joke at this point

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Interesting. He owns a successful contracting company so I trust his business sense. He has has been researching this and is involved in the community and told me that the numbers are staggering. I don’t really care either way since nothing of mine is at stake… but I don’t want him to fail if this is truly the case.

Side question, from hemp (say 10% CBD) what yield can be expected after a typical extraction to isolate?

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The numbers ARE staggering. Staggeringly bad. Bop him on the nose and tell him he needs to retune his spider senses and stop believing the hype.

Side answer: from a typical extraction, you can yield a net loss of investment.

I’m telling you this for your own good- take your chemistry degree and use it to make real drugs.

3-MEO-PCP for example- just as legal as Delta-8-THC- but waaaaay cooler. It’s like PCP but more likely to get you into a fight with sixteen cops.

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read 100k posts around here and you’ll have some idea what’s going on. maybe.

the search bar is helpful if you have specific questions.

https://future4200.com/search?q=distillate+yield

@rowan is not wrong in suggesting "CBD Is over"

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Cbd is so dead that people are advertising services to convert it to substances that are specifically listed as schedule 1 substances and hoping that they won’t catch the eye of a local crusader as though they just disappeared off the map.

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nah, you’re just trying to scare the competition away :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :shushing_face:

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Market is there. Don’t be a dumbass. The crowd goes zig, you go zag.

Do your due diligence and then attack with educated opinions.

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If I was evil I would encourage him to cast himself into the flames with the rest of us poor saps who had that same bright thoughts and then ended up on this worst possible timeline

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Ask your partner how he plans to harvest and dry 200 acres of hemp without effing up the terpene profile, losing cannabinoid content, or it going moldy. Ask him what his plan is for culling males and hermes. Ask him who is going to buy the finished product and what that finished product is.

This isn’t to scare you. I know of many operations that struggle to harvest 10 acres profitably.

If you know anything about commercial refining, it’s all about the crack cost compared to the spread between product A and product B. If the economics make sense, they crack all day. If not, that unit shuts down operations because it’s not profitable. You’re going to have to go very far down the production chain (aka finished products for retail sale) in order to find a profitable spread. And even then you’re going to need a sales team.

Know what you’re getting into and be prepared to take a few licks.

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I’m mainly focusing on converting cbd to compliant d8 with less than .3% d9. If the person needing processing wants something non-compliant I would hope they have verified the legality of them selling d9/d8 blends.

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@thor.lucas I also support @Rowan notions to do serious research before considering CBD isolate.

  1. Scale (your scale is not competitive) Share this link with your partner.
  1. Price - are your price models realistic, this string touches on pricing related to CBD hemp
  1. Approach - there are many here that have the knowledge, considering you are eyeing CBD isolate, ethanol only extraction seems appropriate.
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Why do you think I’m getting a degree in chemical biology? :wink: Alexander Shulgin is my hero

Thanks for the tip, I’ll crunch the numbers with him. Maybe we pivot!

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Thank you @Dirteagle for the info. I don’t know what his plan is, but I know he’s harvested a lot of weed in his time so I didn’t think to question it. I will get more info on this for sure.

Personally I was just psyched to get something interesting on my resume and a bit of wage in my pocket :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the links! Will be giving those a read and sending those his way.

I have seen numerous conflicting reports on ethanol vs. butane. It seems to me that ethanol requires quite a bit more post processing work than butane. Why is it better for CBD? Does it solvate CBD better, vs. butane for THC?

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@thor.lucas Hydrocarbons are amazing and give a dynamic profile, but all this will be lost if going to isolate. Thus the mention of ethanol. I would also determine if you have requirements around C1D1 with your hydrocarbon extraction. This can swing your CAPEX. @TheGratefulPhil had a good string going into this.

C1D1 HVAC Design

Good luck researching, I do too every day.

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