Hemp Bound (9 page)

Chapter Six

Fill 'Er Up with Hemp

I
t was midday on February 10, 2013, and I was
very smoothly
cruising south out of Denver, Colorado, in a hemp-powered limo. A sleek cream-colored 1979 Mercedes 300D, in fact, purportedly originally owned by Ferdinand Marcos.

“Plenty of space,” the driver told me when I asked for the keys to the trunk before the drive. “Imelda's shoes aren't in there anymore.”

Hemp oil was the fuel, but it's not the kind of thing that I, the pampered passenger, would notice if I weren't a cannabis journalist. The vehicle was equipped with a proprietary shock system that results in the sort of sensory experience I normally associate with water beds. The giant backseat (more of a backroom) sofa—indeed, all the seats—was covered in sheepskin. There was room enough for me to do my morning yoga back there.

Regardless of the unbelievably comfortable ride's lineage, Bill Althouse, the chauffeur, was trying to demonstrate something on this enjoyable winter outing to Colorado Springs. What the longtime sustainability consultant and renewable energy engineer was showing is that in 2013, a plant cultivated by humans for eight millennia can replace petroleum.

2013 is a year during which we same humans will no doubt surpass 2010's consumption of 37.7 billion barrels of oil—that's 87 million barrels a day, or a million barrels a second.
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It wasn't proving my least eventful road trip ever. We noticed before we hit Castle Rock that we'd slightly miscalculated the distance for our planned spine-o'-the-Rockies drive this day. But, with a few roadside top-offs, we pulled it off on fumes thanks to the excellent twenty-two MPG we got on hemp biodiesel running through a big old engine engineered for dictator spinal comfort, not for efficiency.

We wound up using seven gallons of hemp oil for our ride. The U.S. government says that petro diesel spews 22.38 pounds of CO
2
into the atmosphere per gallon. That means, since the statistics folks at the Energy Information Agency also say biodiesel releases 78 percent less carbon, that in this short road trip we prevented 122 pounds of carbon from, ya know, clouding the future of our species. And we didn't give a penny to ExxonMobil.

For reasons of scale alone, seed oil might not immediately prove the ideal part of the plant for exploiting hemp's energy potential, according to Althouse. Which is to say it'd take an awful lot of hemp acreage to prove cost-competitive at the pump. Sure beats fossil diesel, though, in odor alone. The exhaust smelled organic. Like all vegetable-oil-based fuel, it made one hungry.
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Ran quieter and more efficiently, too, Althouse said.

The fuel itself, I earlier noticed as I watched the sixty-one-year-old Althouse pour it in from a heavy plastic container, was the fecund green of a lily pad, and it wasn't easy to acquire or process. Althouse managed to get his hands on some five-gallon “cubies” of food-grade Canadian hemp oil, which was then processed into biodiesel by a local Colorado outfit called ClearEcos.

Back in Imelda's limo, Althouse said that he'd like to see cannabis's fiber harnessed for energy rather than the seed oil we were using. At the very least he'd like to see oil cultivars specially developed for fuel, per Potter of the CIC's sense that a hemp application only works in the big leagues if the right varieties are utilized.

“This Finola [cultivar] we're driving on produces an ideal omega ratio,” he said. “It's food, not fuel.”

Here's why this matters: ClearEcos's Kurt Lange said that the very lignan and other nutritive components that make hemp seed oil a genuine superfood make it difficult to process to the viscosity needed for federally approved biofuel.

“We increased the process time to deal with the additional fatty acid chains,” he said of my limo ride's tankful of hemp oil. It's not ready for prime time at the corner gas station, in other words, despite the carbon we kept from emitting on February 10 even with this prototype form of cannabis fuel. It'd probably price out north of ten dollars a gallon—until American farmers get those two million acres planted.

Lange's piece of behind-the-curtain processing information explains why at no time does my Vaporware Sensor sound more piercingly than when I venture into the energy sector. Probably because it's so vital to our Netflix, texting, and Cancun vacations (not to mention our food supply) that we resolve our little fossil/nuclear problem, we subject ourselves to a lot of premature excitement about Next Great Energy Supplies. Most of these, so far, have turned out to, at best, require more time and infrastructural investment than excites our insufficiently climate-concerned representatives.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with huge investment in important endeavors. It took a massive investment to create, nearly overnight, a wartime economy that could beat Japan after Pearl Harbor. One day General Motors made cars, the next it made tanks. Indeed I keep waiting for President Obama to keep his campaign promise to put America back to work building a sustainable energy grid infrastructure. Make no mistake: Climate change (the sum of its causes and offshoots) is a Pearl Harbor, minus the instant explosions so useful for mobilizing public opinion.

The really good news is that hemp energy needn't be hugely expensive. Althouse's message is that, until we develop the right cultivars and grow them en masse, it might not be hemp at the gas pump we see first (via seed), but hemp at the power plant (via fiber). Which is, from a climate stabilization perspective, actually far more important to our species' survival. Why? Because 40 percent of carbon emissions come from power plants, according to Daniel Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign.

So if not hemp biodiesel (in the short term, at least), how exactly are we to transition from climate-altering petroleum and coal without giving up Netflix and Cancun? To answer that, we're a-headin' to Kentucky.

Hemp Pioneers

Bill Althouse, Engineer, Hemp Advocate, Limo Driver

Everyone's an individual, but in the hemp world everyone's really an individual. A character. And thank heaven for that. If my overeducated hemp-oil-powered limo driver wanted to rant, like the limo driver in
This Is Spinal Tap
feels compelled to (and in fact as seems to be part of the baseline training in limo driver college), I was going to let him. I mean, c'mon, the guy was giving me the literal road-test proof of the value of hemp. This was a breakup letter to petroleum.

So here is the sixty-one-year-old Althouse's reply, from
way up
in the driver's seat of Ferdinand Marcos's limo (practically in the next county—I had to shout to be heard from the sheepskin coach where I was chillin'), when I asked him, “How does it feel to drive via hemp power?”

“Awesome. Absolutely awesome, of course. But I'd like it to develop into some other part of the plant rather than just the seed, or the seed variety we're driving on. Because this seed oil is one of those superfood deals. I think the stalk might be the first place we go for energy. But what I'm really saying is I'd like to see unfettered research taking place. For instance, here”—he pointed out the window as we passed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's headquarters outside Golden, Colorado. “And at Colorado State University—ninety minutes from here—there are brilliant people who have spent their lives understanding the biochemistry of plants better than anyone else in the world. They need to be working on hemp yesterday.”

Chapter Seven

A New Utility Paradigm
—

The Distributed, Sustainable Community Energy Grid

A
n entrepreneur in the Bluegrass State is out to craft a win–win scenario whereby locally grown hemp allows struggling rural communities in former resource-extraction economies to transition to a sustainable economy (in this case from coal and monoculture tobacco).

The first thing to know about Roger Ford, CEO of Patriot Bioenergy, is that he's not wearing a tie-dye. In fact, from where I sit there's nothing quite like hearing the CEO of a Deep South energy company extol, in a mild regional accent, the virtues of ending the war on cannabis.

“Hemp has historical ties to Kentucky,” Ford told me. Except for this current break, “It's been a major producer since colonial times, especially for shipping. George Washington grew it in the South. Today we have land affected by surface coal mining. We can implement the use of biomass on former mine sites for reclamation. Federal law has to change so we can ramp this thing up. The obvious question is, why did we ever stop?”

Ford is not alone in wondering. Most Kentuckians today, like most Americans, want to end the drug war. And Ford is doing more than wondering: Patriot Bioenergy is the first corporate member of the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative Association trade group.

Make no mistake: Patriot's in it for bottom-line reasons, and the plan is to use hemp's fiber. “When farmers are growing hemp for the seed and long fiber, what you have left is the hurd—your woody materials,” Ford told me, displaying an innate instinct for dual cropping.

Remember when we wondered what happens to the hurd that's sitting around the field once the value-added applications have moved on to processing? Ford wants it to be turned into electricity, in part via combustion techniques like the gasification technology we've touched on. In the Patriot model, this will happen not on individual farms, but in a community-based “integrated energy park” that also includes ethanol production from regional sources of agricultural feedstock like beets.

Ford doesn't see a 100 percent hemp-powered Dixie, at least not right away. In fact, he's not even turning his back on Kentucky's coal. “We're looking at feedstock blending with coal and natural gas in a multiple-generation scenario,” he said. “With gasification of biomass product—hemp and industrial waste—as the goal so we get a combustible material. It generates steam in a clean-combusting boiler, which produces electricity. These things are commercially viable on a large duplicated scale.”

Despite hanging on to the energy c-word (Ford believes the addition of biomass will clean up coal emissions), what's appealing about the aptly named Patriot business plan, dressed as it is in a business suit with apple pie crumbs on it, is this: Ford is blueprinting a method by which communities can at once take control of their regional energy production, put themselves back to work, and heal the soil. Hemp can help farmland in a number of ways, but one of the most important is simple soil stabilization thanks to its long, fast-growing taproots. This phytoremediation, the process of using plants to repair polluted terrain, is in fact a key part of the hemp calculus in the climate change era. Plus, a decentralized regional energy model is more secure than a single mega grid that could all go down at one time.

But how will it work? “We finance and build plants in rural areas—producing to scale as needed locally,” Ford explained. “And in the process create rural jobs. That's our model: rural economic development through sustainable energy production.”

In starting the company, Ford studied how the petroleum market developed in the late 1800s, and was surprised to find small refineries all over the country.

“Historically, John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil focused on facilities that produced a few thousand barrels a day,” he said. “We're replicating those models. We're not talking about fifty-million-gallon-a-day facilities [that cost] hundreds of millions of dollars to build. We're mapping that strategy onto biomass.”

The Kentucky legislature overwhelmingly passed a hemp cultivation ordinance on March 26, 2013, which the governor allowed to become law without signing. The Bluegrass State's key politicos are pretty much all on board, starting with its chief farmer. “We could be the Silicon Valley of industrial hemp manufacturing right here in Kentucky,” Agriculture Commissioner James Comer told the
Kentucky Enquirer
in January 2013. (At the end of all these kinds of statements, you can add, “as soon as the federal drug war ends.”)

Describing Patriot's ambitious utility-localizing strategy as “in the planning stages” (understandably, given hemp's dubious legal status for the moment), Ford said that he's got locations scouted from Kentucky to Mississippi. Patriot has signed a letter of intent with local government in tiny Whitley County, Kentucky, he added, for the first of these regional energy parks. This, incidentally, is the setting for the Grateful Dead's ode to the hard life of the coal miner, “Cumberland Blues.”

“That facility will at first produce four million gallons of ethanol per year from sugar beet feedstock until industrial hemp comes online, for growing in marginal post-mining land,” Ford said. “And it's replicable in other communities.” This mention of marginal land emphasizes another quality of hemp: its ability to provide a viable harvest in areas other crops can't. Hemp has even been discussed for radioactivity mitigation around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
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I asked how much each energy park would cost. I'm glad I did. I love it when people sniff at sums that seem unfathomably large to me. “Oh, less than seventy-five million to build,” Ford said. “We want to make this viable economically.”

Vaporware alarm sounding faintly even though the company already has some beet acreage planted, I asked if the privately held Patriot, based in Bowling Green, had that kind of dough. Ford sounded confident. “We're having conversations with venture capital folks, and working with local and state government. They know this plan will increase the local tax revenue base, which is getting hammered in this economy, especially given the coal situation.”

At this point in our interview, I wondered aloud how a onetime member of his college campus Republicans club came to hemp as a major feedstock player for his regional energy plan?

“It's proven that we Kentuckians can produce a [hemp crop of] quality second to none in the world,” Ford told me with folksy pride. “I'm comfortable working with anyone on this. Democrats, Republicans, hemp activists.”

Patriot Bioenergy does have history on its side. Kentucky really was the hemp world leader before federal prohibition kicked in after 1937. In 1838, “There were 18 rope and bagging factories in Lexington that employed 1,000 workers.”
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Our limo-driving engineer Althouse thinks Kentucky's on the right track. “It works,” he said of gasification. “You get very efficient energy out from the biomass you put in. If it's done right.”

He should know. Far more than just a chauffeur, Althouse worked on a federal-funded report that advocated bringing in a biomass project to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, area in 2006. The wood waste energy in that plan would come care of gasification furnaces of a technology similar to (but, Althouse says, with thirty times the energy output of) commercial models manufactured by a German company called Herlt.

Page 15 of the New Mexico report has a lucid diagram that explains how the boiler at the heart of biomass combustion technology works. Although to a right-brainer like me it looks like Hawkeye's mid-tent
M*A*S*H
gin still. Or something Wile E. Coyote would build when trying the laboratory approach to roadrunner hunting.

But you get energy from biomass with negligible carbon emissions. The plan was so doable (at less than twenty-eight million dollars per facility) that Althouse is convinced the Land of Enchantment was at the cusp of building a biomass infrastructure that today would be a perfect fit for hemp.

“Then fracking happened,” he said. “And the project fell apart. We were almost there. The way the world works is
I'm green unless it costs me something
.” Althouse's take echoed Hemp Oil Canada's Crew, who said that the reason Canada hasn't been exploiting hemp fiber energy is “gas is still too cheap.”

Althouse told me emphatically that the hemp/biomass energy speculator has to answer some comprehensive questions before entering the sector: “What's your plant start-up cost, for one?” he asked. “For, say, a small, municipal-sized, potentially multiuse community biomass plant” like Patriot's planning. “It's called a value chain analysis, and it has to be rigorous.”

But Althouse remains a believer in gasification technology. “If it's a closed-loop dedicated energy facility, you're emitting almost no carbon.”

He added that, just as Canada's Cramer was worried most about building regulations, he also saw a major bureaucratic hurdle to leap before implementation of a new energy paradigm. “If the emissions regulatory framework can be hammered out domestically, that'll be a huge step forward,” he said. “They did it in Europe, but it could prove more difficult here, where in most states utilities control the system.”

Here Althouse rattled off a litany of cards in a stacked deck against independent energy aspirants, before adding, “In Germany the citizens pay a buy-in tariff, and control their energy.”

And therein, for me, lies the rub.

Who's not rooting for out-of-work coal miners out to restore their backyard and mitigate climate change while producing their own energy? The whole time I hung out with Althouse, who carries a colorful bio beyond his engineering pedigree that includes seven years in the South Pacific doing energy consulting with the government of Palao, he never let me forget this point: A biomass energy transition model loses its appeal if it just creates a new utility monopoly, albeit a cleaner one.

Indeed, when I checked out the appendix in that New Mexico biomass energy report on which Althouse worked, I saw that “community ownership” and local “energy trusts” are considered integral to the plan's viability. Whereas Kentucky's Ford, Althouse reminded me, is citing Standard Oil.

Energy independence, of course, is the Holy Grail of both our domestic and foreign policies. And after seven years of researching it (and trying to live it on my own solar-powered, goat-dominated ranch), I don't pretend to have all the answers or even all the questions. I'm just trying to fire up this debate and figure out what role all that hemp hurd we're going to have lying around by the thousands of tons in a few years might play. Wasting it is not an option.

The two words I promised Althouse I'd attach to that search are “community empowering.” Really this was my only payment for the limo ride other than breakfast.

“Don't forget the farmer!” he shouted as I started my own vegetable-oil-powered rig in the street in front of his Denver house. My exhaust, as usual, smelled like Kung Pao Chicken.

I hardly had a chance to forget. As I was about to send this book to my publisher, the
New York Times
reported on August 17, 2013, that the U.S. Army, frustrated by fuel hauling hassles in danger zones, is embarking on an eight-million-dollar gasification test program, based on a furnace the size of a shower stall, called the FastOx. A community-sized model! Huzzah! This might be the military's greatest gift to society since the Internet.

But really, is distributed, locally owned and grown energy a viable plan in the real world? Is there anyplace where it's already happening? The answer to those questions is a resounding yes. It's happening in Germany and a few other spots. Not on a wide scale with hemp yet, but with other biomass from local crops.

To a fan of local and renewable energy and an opponent of resource wars, the website of the town of Feldheim, in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, is a thrilling read. Or as thrilling a read as a technical energy production site can be. Right there in the first paragraph, it tells us that the town's five-hundred-kilowatt biomass plant is “owned by the local agriculture collective.” Althouse's primary problem solved.

Though it was already famous for turning 30 percent unemployment into 0 percent by putting everyone to work at the community energy park, I first heard about Feldheim from a 2011 Associated Press article.
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It pointed out that the energy and the jobs all came when consultants suggested stuffing the local agricultural waste into a gasification and methane (natural gas) harnessing plant.

“It is possible to live completely from renewable energy,” German transport minister Peter Ramsauer glowed in the article.

None of it means anything to a guy like Althouse without that “owned by the local agricultural collective” sentence. I'm not arguing. Even though, all other things being equal, I tend to wear a free-market hat, when it comes to energy, things are not equal. We've got our children's air and water at stake, we've got a silly utility system and an antiquated grid. I am more than slightly open to alternatives like the Feldheim miracle in my own community.