Industrial Hemp as an Energy Source?
Could industrial hemp be a useful feedstock for anaerobic digesters to produce renewable natural gas?
According to Nick Walters, managing partner at National Hemp Growers Cooperative, the answer is a resounding yes.
Walters shared with Lancaster Farming the executive summary of a white paper to be released next week that shows that hemp not only can compete with other energy crops, but that it surpasses other crops in its input-output ratio. That means hemp requires fewer inputs than traditional biofuel crops like corn and beets but produces a higher-energy fuel than them.
Walters said hemp has the potential to produce 208 million Btu per acre, which is the equivalent of 60,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to run a clothes dryer 24 hours a day for 27 months, based on research by his team, which is led by agronomist David Cornett and Eberhard Lucke, CEO of Lucke Consulting Technology Services.
Apart from its energy potential, hemp grown regeneratively (with no-till, cover crops etc.) can pull carbon from the atmosphere and lock that carbon into the soil, thereby being a method for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation.
Hemp is also an attractive energy source, Walters said, because it doesn’t “enter the food versus fuel conversation. You are squarely in the food versus fuel conversation as it relates to fodder beets, because those are getting fed primarily to livestock.”
As to why the co-op is publishing this study, Walters says it’s part of its “very unique business model that enables our members and our investors to be involved in multiple value-added processing facilities for the various uses of hemp all throughout the country. And we are focused on building wealth for our members through regenerative agriculture and sustainable development.”
Plus, we talk to Lori Daytner from DON Services in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where work has been completed on the Project PA Hemp Home. She gives us an update on the project, including how they turned locally hemp grown into HempWood flooring.
National Hemp Growers Coop
DON Services
DON Processing
https://processing.doninc.net/
Project PA Hemp Home
https://healthymaterialslab.org/projects/pa-hemp-home
Register for the Pennsylvania Hemp Summit
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