{"id":7036,"date":"2016-12-08T18:30:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T18:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/?p=5523"},"modified":"2016-12-08T18:30:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T18:30:26","slug":"hemp-could-replace-petroleum-as-a-fuel-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/hemp-could-replace-petroleum-as-a-fuel-source\/","title":{"rendered":"Hemp Could Replace Petroleum As A Fuel Source"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0 5px 5px;float:right;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/hemp-could-replace-petroleum-as-a-fuel-source\/\" send=\"true\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p>It 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPlenty of space,\u201d the driver told me as when I asked for the keys to the trunk before the drive. \u201cImelda\u2019s shoes aren\u2019t in there any more.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hemp oil was the fuel, but it\u2019s not the kind of thing that I, the pampered passenger, would notice if I weren\u2019t 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 back seat (more of a back room) sofa &#8211; , indeed, all the seats &#8211; , were was covered in sheepskin. There was room enough for me to do my morning yoga back there.<\/p>\n<p>Regardless of the unbelievably comfortable ride\u2019s 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 today, in 2013, a plant cultivated by humans for eight millennia can replace petroleum.<\/p>\n<p>In this same year, 2013 is a year during which, is a year during which we same humans will no doubt surpass 2010\u2019s consumption of 37.7 billion barrels of oil &#8211; that\u2019s 87 million barrels a day, or a million barrels a second.27<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t proving my least eventful road trip ever. We noticed before we hit Castle Rock that we\u2019d slightly miscalculated the distance for our planned spine-o\u2019-the-Rockies drive this day. But, with a few roadside top-offs, we pulled it off on fumes thanks to the excellent 22 twenty-two MPG we got on hemp biodiesel running through a big, old engine engineered for dictator spinal comfort, not for efficiency.<\/p>\n<p>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 CO2 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\u2019t give a penny to ExxonMobil.<\/p>\n<p>For reasons of scale alone, seed oil might not immediately prove the ideal part of the plant for exploiting hemp\u2019s energy potential, according to Althouse. For one thingWhich is to say, it\u2019d 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.28 Ran quieter and more efficiently, too, Althouse said.<\/p>\n<p>The fuel itself, I earlier noticed as I watched the 61sixty-one-year-old Althouse pour it in from a heavy plastic container, was the fecund green of a lily pad, and it wasn\u2019t easy to acquire or process. Althouse managed to get his hands on some five- gallon \u201ccubies\u201d of food- grade Canadian hemp oil, which was then processed into biodiesel by a local Colorado outfit called ClearEcos.<\/p>\n<p>Back in Imelda\u2019s limo, Althouse said that he\u2019d like to see cannabis\u2019s fiber harnessed for energy rather than the seed oil we were using. At the very least he\u2019d like to see oil cultivars specially developed for fuel, per Potter of the CIC\u2019s sense that a hemp application only works in the big leagues if the right varieties are utilized.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis Finola [(cultivar]) we\u2019re driving on produces an ideal oOmega ratio,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s food, not fuel.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s why this matters: ClearEcos\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe increased the process time to deal with the additional fatty acid chains,\u201d he said of my limo ride\u2019s tankful of hemp oil. It\u2019s 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\u2019d probably price out north of $10ten dollars a gallon &#8211; until American farmers get those two million acres planted.<\/p>\n<p>Lang\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Not that there\u2019s 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: Cclimate change (the sum off its causes and offshoots) is a Pearl Harbor, minus the instant explosions so useful for mobilizing public opinion.<\/p>\n<p>The really good news is that hemp energy needn\u2019t be hugely expensive. Althouse\u2019s 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\u2019 survival. Why? Because 40 percent% of carbon emissions come from power plants, according to Daniel Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re a-\u2019headin\u2019 to Kentucky.<\/p>\n<p> <img src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/hemp-could-replace-petroleum-as-a-fuel-source.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"> <\/p>\n<p>News Moderator: Katelyn Baker <a href=\"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\" target=\"_blank\">420 MAGAZINE \u00ae<\/a><br \/>\nFull Article: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/environment\/how-hemp-could-replace-petroleum-fuel\" target=\"_blank\">Hemp Could Replace Petroleum As A Fuel Source<\/a><br \/>\nAuthor: Doug Fine<br \/>\nContact: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/feedback\" target=\"_blank\">Alternet<\/a><br \/>\nPhoto Credit: Shutterstock<br \/>\nWebsite: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Alternet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was midday on February 10, 2013, and I was very smoothly cruising south out of Denver, Colorado, in a&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/2016\/12\/hemp-replace-petroleum-fuel-source\/\" class=\"read-more\">[Read More]<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1607,9,1,3],"tags":[4175],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7036"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}