Greetings,
I am looking for advice on reaching a processing goal of 3000lbs of biomass a day with ethanol using conventional equipment, Cryo Centrifuge, FFE and WFE. End goal is ▲9 distillate.
Has anyone here reached this scale, willing to comment on the equipment choices they made and why ?
Thanks in advance!,
Peace
Where are you located? Not there yet but approaching, what state and city/county you are in will definitely make a difference as far as how practical that is, whether you need to do that in multiple facilities or a single huge one.
One facility, Located in BC, Canada, far out of the city
I recently saw this on Instagram and it peeked my interest:
Sounds like the “G-force seperator” would fit the scale of 3000 lbs per day you’re shooting for.
I’m also interested! And willing to see any consultants if necessary
My ffe most likely cant do 3000 gallons a day but im hoping to see it reach 2000 gallons in a 20 hour day.
Heres the link. Subscribe to my thread as i update over the next 2 weeks.
This should not be that tricky. 2 Ace30/Cup30, or one larger centrifuge, can do the trick on extraction. 2-3 off-shelf falling films, or one ecosce membrane unit can do desolvation. Especially if you reuse solvent once, seems easily doable.
Have you seem the ecosce membrane in action ? Omega Mk1 skid I believe its called
Nice thread!
If we go with ffe I would position 2 units for redundancy so we could always be processing no matter what.
No, just the videos. They’re going to be posting much more in a month and having a showroom up and running. MK2 trades dewaxing for 4x desolvation at similar price.
I firmly believe desolvation can be done with this membrane tech but I have thoughts on the dewaxing stage bottle necking or causing a blockage.
I was told maintenance life was 2 years on the membrane with no reports of bottlenecks at the dewaxing stage in their R&D, Stated that if it ever clogged to run clean solvent thru.
For me the tech is there but it has not proven to stand the test of time in our industry … yet. I think the electricity savings alone is a game changer and worth the research.
For this build out I am leaning towards conventional equipment mainly for an off the shelf solution to appease regulations, establish a redundancy standard that will scale with the throughput of the biomass we plan to process as the company grows.
With 200+ Acres, we are going to have alot of dope lol
My recommendation personally would be cryo ethanol and then just use the membranes for desolvation. I don’t think the dewaxing side necessarily pencils out with ethanol. With hexane definitely though!
We looked at Heptane and Hexane, Because of their chemical nature we found that for us Heptane and Hexane works best for post-extraction for reactive or phasing purposes but I wouldn’t want to bring it to scale. Its not only about the product being exposed to a chemical linked to cancer(hexane), or the high boiling point of Heptane … its the staff who have to handle the solvent that made me gravitate to ethanol extraction.
Of course there is always the point to make that, if you are going to distillate you can completely remove the solvent …but I would know it was there lol
Haha, you will need much more than what you have every seen.
3000lbs with ethanol, that is crazy. You will need huge storage tank for your ethanol first.
Better check with you local fire department about the storage license for ethanol. And the certify storage could cost you a lot and take forever to make.
I am specialized in WFE and WFD, and I have sold a set (both WFE and WFD) to a customer this year for 2000lbs per day.
The WFE I quote for him cost around $150,000, and can process 100-150L/hour. That stainless steel model is 15 ft tall.
The WFD I quote for him cost around $350,000. That unit can process about 25kg per hour.
Let me know if you like to take a look at the picture and the quote, i can give out a copy to you.
Wtf is a wfd
Did you guys finally reach 3000lb a day? What was the biggest issue reaching that capacity?
Just a guess from a past experience, the electrical work.
Recovering and re-proofing the amount of ethanol necessary to extract 3000lb per day is a significant undertaking in and of itself. When I’ve consulted on ethanol operations, the most common bottleneck I’ve seen is solvent recovery.
Nope, we went hydrocarbon.
Heptane or Hexane? Damn. Did you guys get passed 2500 atleast?! How do you recover the solvent at that scale
