Hemp gas (bio-diesel) adds fuel to fire of pending marijuana legislation
With the high cost of gasoline and other petroleum based products, should we expect any less from our healthcare? What are the true costs when our item is scanned or energy paid for? Why did we not move towards energy sustainability or independence when we had the chance and surplus budgets?
Everyone has many questions and only a few have sensible answers.
I found some answers in a recent article entitled Hemp Produces Viable Biodiesel featured on Environmental Protection.
Industrial hemp, which grows in infertile soils, is attractive as a potential source of sustainable diesel fuel.
Researchers at the University of Connecticut have found that the fiber crop Cannabis sativa, known as industrial hemp, has properties that make it viable and even attractive as a raw material, or feedstock, for producing biodiesel – sustainable diesel fuel made from renewable plant sources.
“For sustainable fuels, often it comes down to a question of food versus fuel,” says Parnas, noting that major current biodiesel plants include food crops such as soybeans, olives, peanuts, and rapeseed. “It’s equally important to make fuel from plants that are not food, but also won’t need the high-quality land.”
If you mix in the addition to high unemployment, higher government waste and even higher profits for big business on the foreign territory most of us consider “Wall Street”, well, that just seems to be making people upset. Well growing Industrial Hemp for fiber may have a desirable by product, gas. The article goes on to say:
“If someone is already growing hemp, they might be able to produce enough fuel to power their whole farm with the oil from the seeds they produce,” he said. “The fact that a hemp industry already exists means that a hemp biodiesel industry would need little additional investment.“
Well, that is in countries other than the United States of America, land of the free and home of the foreign oil dependent. As the alternative fuel industry fires up, our country is left at a disadvantage before the game even gets started. The article goes on to rub more facts in our face:
The hemp biodiesel showed a high efficiency of conversion – 97 percent of the hemp oil was converted to biodiesel – and it passed all the laboratory’s tests, even showing properties that suggest it could be used at lower temperatures than any biodiesel currently on the market.
What energy is it going to take to bring the people back to politics and ultimately restore order to a broken two party system. One can only assume it will take the ideas that can ignite a variety of folks for a large movement. To light a fire under someone and motivate them to take action seems to take a personal touch. The article reminds us again that The United States is not growing industrial hemp, for any reason.
Although growing hemp is not legal in the U.S., Parnas hopes that the team’s results will help to spur hemp biodiesel production in other parts of the world. UConn holds a patent on a biodiesel reactor system that could be customized to make biodiesel from a range of sustainable inputs, hemp included…
… are preparing to build a pilot biodiesel production facility using a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the Department of Energy.
I thought it a very personal touch that they not only remind us again about not being able to touch the hemp cannabis plant in the USA. Although based in the USA, the Connecticut based study adds insult to injury as their work helps produce jobs elsewhere. Maybe this is the fuel need to settle the smoke and mirrors game we have come to know as “war on marijuana”.
Every time you go to the gas station and fill up your automobile or flip on a light switch, ask your self if there could be a better way.
To read the entire October 7th article on Environmental Protection, the following link has been provided for your convenience.
http://eponline.com/articles/2010/10/07/hemp-produces-viable-biodiesel.aspx
Biodiesel Magazine also covered the story: http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=4473
BusinessGreen.Com story also mentions hemp gas (biodiesel) will be made from a non-psychoactive plant. Crazy I know…they even add that they will use the plant fibers to make the actual car. Now that is taking it green to the extreme. http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2271276/scientists-reveal-hemp-biofuel
As with many other commercial uses of hemp, Parnas’s process would use the Sativa variety, which unlike its cousin the cannabis plant is not psychoactive. Hemp fibre is also being used as a core material in some car body designs.
