Energizing Hemp
As part of its ambitious plans, Eureka Energy Corporation wants to use hemp to produce fuel and electricity.
Hemp could play a valuable role as a renewable input for producing Earth-friendly energy, according to the top official with Eureka Energy Corporation, a Wyoming-based start-up with a bold vision for transforming the domestic power sector.
The company would like to see hemp become one of the organic materials available to it—just like landfill waste and animal manure—to generate electric power and make liquid transportation fuels efficiently at the novel clean-energy plants it aims to build and operate across the United States, said Roger Ford, Eureka Energy's president and chief executive officer.
Accordingly, the company plans later in 2022 to begin taking concrete steps to make this happen, said Ford. This will be a multiyear endeavor, with scientific, technical, logistical, and regulatory tasks to accomplish, he told Zygote Nation. This activity would include petitioning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at some point to approve hemp for this purpose.
"If we are not the first, we will be one of the first," said Ford, when asked when the company might file a petition.
Takeaways
1. Eureka Energy Corporation would like to use hemp for producing electricity and fuel at the clean-energy plants it aims to build across the United States.
2. Hemp would be one of many organic inputs for generating renewable natural gas that the company could then refine into biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel.
3. These power plants could help to bolster the resiliency of the U.S. energy sector.
“We will be producing thousands of barrels a day of fuel product.”
Mapping It Out
In parallel to those activities, Ford already is working to secure the land and funding to construct Eureka Energy's pilot energy facility, a smaller scale version of its notional full-scale plants. Its provisional location is Elkhorn City, a town in eastern Kentucky, an area of Central Appalachian coal country near the commonwealth's border with Virginia. Ford grew up near here and still resides in the area. If all proceeds on schedule, this facility could commence operations before the end of 2024, he said.
The company also is currently exploring opportunities to construct full-scale energy plants in California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Wyoming, said Ford. These plants would be "hybrid" in nature, combining a solar energy farm for generating electricity, a facility for converting numerous types of organic materials to methane (a gas comprising carbon and hydrogen), and a complex for the gas's subsequent processing into liquid transportation fuels like biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel. (These fuels are considered Earth-friendlier alternatives to traditional petroleum-based diesel and jet fuels, respectively.)
Artist’s rendition of the biomass/feedstocks-to-renewable natural gas component of an Eureka Energy Corporation clean-energy plant. Courtesy of Roger Ford
"I don't see anybody else doing this in the way we are doing this, so I think we are pioneers in that respect," said Ford, when asked about Eureka Energy's multifaceted operating concept and the company's position in the clean-energy sector. Ultimately, these plants could help to bolster American energy resilience and lessen domestic dependency on foreign sources of energy, he said.
The company also is pursuing separate projects to build small-scale solar energy farms in rural parts of the country, he said.
“We’ve got two technologies in play here and our uniqueness is being able to integrate those.”
Methane Matters
One of Eureka Energy's first hemp-related projects later this year will be identifying varieties of the plant that are well-suited as an input, or "feedstock," for energy production, said Ford. This ultimately means determining which varieties, or "cultivars," produce the most methane when their "biomass"—the stalks and other plant parts—decomposes in a controlled environment. In energy industry parlance, this type of methane is called "biomethane" to emphasize that it comes from renewable sources (i.e., currently above-ground plant and animal materials) and to distinguish it from the methane found in gas wells which is said to derive from deep underground sources where organic materials decomposed over thousands or millions of years.
The company will leverage data on the crop yields of a handful of cultivars that several farms in Kentucky will grow this year to yield the plants' fiber and/or grain, said Ford. It wants to learn how much biomass each variety produces per acre, he said. While Eureka Energy is headquartered in Sheridan, a city in northeastern Wyoming, close to the Montana border, Kentucky is the site of much of the company's initial activity.
Eureka Energy then intends to contract a laboratory, also in the commonwealth, to measure the amount of methane that can be derived from each cultivar, said Ford. The goal will be to pinpoint the types that yield the most gas per acre of their biomass, he said. Some varieties might not produce as much biomass per acre, but may deliver comparatively greater volumes of the gas, so there might be multiple factors to consider, he said.
Harvested hemp stalks tied in bundles. Photo from 123rf.com
Complement Not Panacea
Hemp—varieties of the cannabis plant with low, non-intoxicating levels of the substance tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—became legal to grow again in the United States at the end of 2018 after some 80 years of federal government prohibitions. It is poised potentially to become the nation's fourth largest agricultural crop already by 2030, behind the giants corn, soy, and wheat, according to leading hemp industry analysts. By then, they envision farmers cultivating millions of acres of hemp annually.
Parts of the hemp plant, especially fiber from the stalk, have numerous potential industrial applications (e.g., use in bioplastics, clothing, packaging materials, insulative building materials, paper). Hemp seeds are considered a valuable food source and many people use extracts of hemp flowers and leaves for their well-being.
One of the reasons that hemp is attractive to Eureka Energy as a feedstock is that the plant is "one of the best producers of methane of any crop out there," said Ford, referencing research out of the Netherlands. This means that hemp could be an important component in the company's sustained profitability when it is available in abundant supply at a stable, affordable price, he said.
“How that all blends together to give us the maximum yield of gas, that’s the key.”
However, as promising as hemp may be, Eureka Energy has no intention of working solely with it as a feedstock, said Ford. "Hemp is a good complement, but if we had no hemp, we could still do this," he said, when discussing the company's business model. "We can’t build a business solely around the use of hemp," he said. "If you have one input, what happens to your business if that one input goes away or its price becomes unsustainable?" he asked in emphasizing this point.
Consequently, Eureka Energy would convert numerous types of biomass and feedstocks, along with hemp, to biomethane at its plants, said Ford. More examples of potential inputs are corn stover, food scraps, agricultural by-products, leftover wood from forestry/timber industries, sewage sludge, and animal carcasses, he said. The company will experiment with combinations of inputs in the laboratory to arrive at the optimal "recipes," or mixes, that best convert to gas, said Ford. "How that all blends together to give us the maximum yield of gas, that's the key," he said.
Roger Ford, Eureka Energy Corporation president and CEO, speaks at an event in Kentucky. Photo courtesy of Roger Ford
Local Recipes
The best mix for a plant in one part of the country likely would differ from the optimal recipe in another area due to the varying availability and breadth of biomass and feedstock types, said Ford. "We hope that we will develop an optimal mixture … wherever a facility is at," he said.
Once biomethane is collected, the company would then clean up the gas by removing residual carbon dioxide and trace amounts of other gases that would prevent the biomethane from burning most efficiently, said Ford. At this point, the purified biomethane would be a marketable product known in the industry as renewable natural gas (RNG) which Eureka Energy could sell on the market and distribute through the nation's existing pipeline infrastructure, he said. (RNG has applications like heating homes and businesses.) Or, the company could process the RNG into the aforementioned biodiesel or sustainable aviation fuel, he said.
“EPA does not currently have plans to certify industrial hemp as a feedstock, as we do not have a pending petition for this feedstock.”
Being "environmentally responsible" is a key component of Eureka Energy's operating concept, said Ford. Not only would the company be utilizing waste products that it could cleanly transform into energy, but it would also be capturing the outputs of its plant operations like the carbon and preventing their release in the atmosphere, he said.
The full-scale plants would have a footprint of roughly 200 acres to 250 acres, said Ford. They would be able to process between 300 tons and 7,000 tons of biomass/feedstocks per day, he said. The acreage would include some 50 acres for the solar farm; 15 acres to 20 acres for the biomass/feedstocks-to-RNG conversion complex; and the remaining acreage for the liquid fuel refinery and for storage facilities for fuel and other materials.
"We will be producing thousands of barrels a day of fuel product," said Ford in describing a plant's eventual scope of operations.
Ideally, Eureka Energy’s plants would be located near rail infrastructure and/or an inland waterway or ocean coast to bring in feedstocks for gasification and ship out liquid transportation fuel. Photo from 123rf.com
The estimated cost to build a plant lies between $100 million and $120 million, but these figures may change due to spiking domestic inflation, he cautioned.
Easy Access
Ideally, the plants would be located within a radius of approximately 100 miles of their biomass/feedstock supply, including the hemp, and would lie in proximity to an inland waterway (e.g., Mississippi River), and/or rail infrastructure, or even an ocean coast, said Ford. The rail/water access would be important for getting the biomass/feedstocks to the plants and especially for shipping out the biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel from them, he said. “Now, that is not to say that we can’t bring [biomass/feedstocks] from other locations, but obviously, the price of transportation being what it is in the moment, that presents a huge problem in terms of logistics," he said.
Under Eureka Energy's planning, a plant would have a solar energy farm in place at launch to produce electricity that the company would sell and feed into the country's electric grid to bring in revenue right away, said Ford. The solar farm could also supply at least some of the electricity for the plant's operations, he said.
“I think it’s about net-zero. I think it is achieving a balance and managing your carbon footprint. It’s not about eliminating [fossil fuel], at least not in my world.”
The new facility also would have the capability to convert biomass/feedstocks to RNG at initial operations, said Ford. Eureka Energy is using technology from a partner company for the conversion; this method is water-based (as opposed to thermal-based), he said. "It basically creates a slurry [of the organic materials] and then that slurry has bacteria added to it … and the bacteria eat, and they pass out the methane. It's anaerobic digestion. It's basically decomposition; you are capturing the gas," he said. (Anaerobic means without oxygen.)
As with the solar energy, the company could sell RNG on the market or convert it on site to electricity and offer it, together with the electricity generated by the solar farm, for sale, he said. "If I did nothing else, I could monetize that gas and do things with the gas," he said.
These revenue streams could also fund the plant's expansion into processing RNG into the liquid transportation fuels, said Ford.
A modular, transportable gas-to-liquid fuel unit built by Infra Technology of Houston. Eureka Energy would use technology like this at its plants. Photo courtesy of Roger Ford
Net Zero
At some point, a fossil fuel component likely would come online at a plant, most likely natural gas, said Ford. It is here where he said he deviates from others in the clean-energy sector in that he supports use of natural gas and other so-called fossil fuels (e.g., coal, petroleum products). They remain valuable sources of energy that Eureka Energy could responsibly handle and process to avoid impacts on the environment, he said.
"I think it's about net zero," said Ford, referencing the idea of having a production process that releases no net amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. "I think it is achieving a balance and managing your carbon footprint. It's not about eliminating [fossil fuel], at least not in my world," he said. "I am 100 percent for it. I believe in mining more coal and drilling for gas and oil."
The natural gas for a plant could come from wells, be captured at oil refineries that otherwise would flare the gas (i.e., burn it off), or even be derived from coal, said Ford. The plant could mix natural gas with RNG into a blend that could then generate electricity, be sold on the market, or be refined into the liquid transportation fuels, he said.
“We still have to get more hemp being grown.”
Blended Family
To refine RNG and or RNG/natural gas into the liquid fuels, Eureka Energy has identified technology from a second partner company that uses an-improved-upon Fischer-Tropsch process, said Ford. (The Fischer-Tropsch method extracts gas from coal and also can convert various gases into liquid fuels.) "Depending on the catalyst, we can create diesel, we can create aviation fuel, or we can create a gasoline product," he said. "All three [are] readily blend-able with existing petroleum-based fuels."
Ford said Eureka Energy currently stands out in the industry with its ability to bring together the technologies for producing RNG and for making the liquid fuels. "We've got two technologies in play here and our uniqueness is being able to integrate those," he said. "Both technologies are proven, both technologies work. We just have got to find the right spot to build [a plant]."
Broader Yet
Eureka Energy's vision does not stop there. The company intends to build its plants from the onset to incorporate new technology easily and shift to cutting-edge types of energy generation over time, said Ford. "Our long-term goal is to have flexibility to be able to adapt," he said. "My thinking is the ultimate clean energy source for transportation fuel and/or electricity is hydrogen. … Ultimately, we are going to do, in a perfect world, research and development that gets us down this road to hydrogen."
Eureka Energy’s operating concept calls for capturing carbon and preventing its release in the atmosphere. Photo from 123rf.com
With the significant disruptions to global supply chains during COVID-19 and now the Russia-Ukraine war, Ford said he agrees with those who think the age of globalization might be over. As a result, he said he thinks there will be dramatic changes in the domestic energy sector, hopefully in the direction of the United States becoming much more energy independent. "We need to do as much of that as we can ourselves as a country," he said.
Among the changes he said he would welcome is a transition in power generation away from monolithic utilities that are publicly owned and operated to a network of distributed, decentralized, smaller scale power plants. "Companies like ours, and what we are proposing to do, can adopt new technology a lot quicker than these government-protected public utilities and do so at a cheaper price, in my opinion," he said. The big public utilities could be left to focus on maintaining the nation's distribution infrastructure, he said.
Pilot Facility
The pilot plant eyed in Kentucky has an approximate cost of $30 million, said Ford. It would have a footprint of about 100 acres, including about 50 acres for a solar farm, 15 acres to 20 acres for the biomass/feedstocks-to-RNG conversion facility, and the remaining acreage for components like a research laboratory and a small refinery.
“Hemp is a good complement, but if we had no hemp, we could still do this.”
This site will serve as Eureka Energy's national hub for training its workforce, said Ford. "We won’t have to re-invent the wheel wherever we go," he said. "We've already got a facility where we can [train] and try out new methods, new technology going forward." Trainees would experience a live working environment, not simply classroom instruction, said Ford. "Most of this stuff is not simple. There is some high tech," he said. Among those that the company would target are former coal miners in the local area who are seeking opportunities for new types of meaningful work, he said.
If all goes according to plan, Ford said he thought ground-breaking could occur by year's end, and the plant's initial operations could commence 18 months to 24 months after that. The facility would start generating electricity from the solar farm at launch, and it is possible the RNG production component would be ready by then, too, he said.
Ideally, Ford said he would like to see the research laboratory come online much earlier than the plant's start date: perhaps as soon as the second quarter of 2023. The company would utilize the laboratory to conduct the experiments to arrive at the best biomass/feedstocks recipes for gasification, said Ford. Initially, the company intends to analyze materials like municipal waste, some hemp varieties, cellulosic timber material: items that it could acquire affordably within the region, he said. The forthcoming completion of US 460, a highway that runs east-west through Virginia and parts of Kentucky, would make it easier to acquire biomass/feedstocks from the local area in Kentucky as well as western Virginia and even parts of West Virginia, he said.
Eureka Energy plants would have a solar power component that would generate electricity that the company could sell on the market to bring in revenue. The solar farm could also provide at least some of a plant’s electricity for its operations. Photo from 123rf.com
At first, the pilot facility, which would operate around-the-clock, likely would employ 12 to 15 staff members, among them engineers, computer technicians, and maintenance personnel, said Ford. The company had not yet determined how many trainees the plant would be able to accommodate on site at one time, he said.
The pilot plant would have a biomass/feedstock-to-RNG conversion capacity of "at a minimum, about 100 tons to 300 tons a day," said Ford. At a later time, it might incorporate the ability to process RNG into liquid fuels and also have a natural gas component, similar to the vision for the full-scale plants, he said. The facility would be a continual source of revenue for the company through the sale of its electricity and/or gas or fuel, he said.
It is likely that the pilot plant would go online before the Environmental Protection Agency has certified hemp for use as a feedstock, acknowledged Ford. However, that is not a concern since the company would still have access to multiple other readily available inputs and would incorporate hemp after its approval, he said.
“If we are not the first, we will be one of the first [to petition EPA.]”
Pathway Pathway
At the time of publication, neither Eureka Energy, nor any other company, had filed a petition with EPA for what is called "a renewable fuel pathway" that involves use of hemp. As a result, "EPA does not currently have plans to certify industrial hemp as a feedstock, as we do not have a pending petition for this feedstock," Taylor Gillespie, a strategic communications advisor for the agency, told Zygote Nation.
"The time it takes to complete a pathway application depends on the complexity of the feedstock and how similar or different it is from previously evaluated feedstocks," she explained. "Since EPA does not currently have an application before us for hemp, we are not in a position to judge how long it would take to evaluate the pathway."
Among EPA's requirements is that a fuel with feedstock inputs must achieve a reduction in atmospheric emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, compared to a petroleum baseline, according to the agency's website.
The agency's approval process likely would take "a couple of years, at least, I would imagine," said Ford.
Hemp harvest. Photo from 123rf.com
Sourcing Hemp
Eureka Energy sees two main viable scenarios for sourcing hemp, said Ford. In the first case, the company would take in and process the leftover "waste" of hemp plants that have been stripped of their fiber and/or grain (i.e., seeds). In this scenario, farmers who wanted more than one revenue stream for their hemp crop could harvest the plants and send them to a processor who would separate the stalks' bast fiber (the quite-strong sinewy strands on the stalks' outer part) from their hurd (the stalks' woody interior) via a process called decortication. The fiber—about 20 percent of the stalk—is a valuable component and marketable for making items like paper, packaging materials, ropes, clothing, even automobile panels. The residual material—the hurd—is what Eureka Energy would utilize. Deviations of this scenario involve growing hemp just to collect the plants' grain and then selling the whole stalks—including both the bast fiber and hurd—to Eureka Energy; or harvesting the grain, decorticating the stalks, and then providing the hurd to the company, said Ford.
The second scenario involves utilizing harvested hemp plants that have not been stripped of fiber or grain, said Ford. "Maybe we are just cutting [the hemp] like hay and not doing anything with it," he said. "We are just crushing it up, baling it up, bringing it over to a Eureka facility, and processing it into gas. … Leaves, fiber, everything." While farmers in this scenario likely would not make as much money off their hemp crop due to having a single revenue stream, some farmers may prefer this option since it is more straightforward and requires fewer steps, he said.
“I don’t see the efficiency of government paying people not to do something with their land.”
Not Enough Supply
Those scenarios aside, the situation today is that there is simply not enough hemp being produced in the United States for industrial needs, said Ford. “We still have to get more hemp being grown," he said. "There’s not an adoption by farmers because farmers by nature are conservative—they are not risk takers."
Moreover, "there is just not going to be enough land to grow hemp on with the family farm," said Ford. That means there has to be widespread buy-in by the large, corporatized farming sector, he said. Thus far, that has not happened. “I think there has to be a consideration among some of these large, corporate farms to replace at least part of their crop with hemp, maybe as a rotational crop," he said. "They are not going to do that until they feel that the industry is to a point that they are going to get a comparable good price for their crop." The hemp supply chain has not matured yet to the point that it can sustain pricing, he said.
Hemp biomass could be one of the inputs Eureka Energy uses to produce liquid transportation fuels like sustainable aviation fuel which would complement traditional jet fuel. Here, an aircraft during refueling. Photo from 123rf.com
Acreage Reservoir
As one potential means of facilitating greater hemp cultivation, at least in the near term, Ford said he advocates opening up tracts of farmland that currently stand idle across the United States under the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). With this initiative, farmers and landowners voluntarily enroll and, for a decade or more, agree not to plant agricultural crops on certain land. Instead, they plant grasses or trees on the land in order to improve water quality, control soil erosion, and enhance wildlife habitats in the area. In exchange, they receive an annual rental payment and cost-sharing assistance. At the time of publication, there were some 22 million acres of land enrolled in the program—an acreage nearly equal to the size of the state of Maine—some of which is considered prime cropland.
"I don’t see the efficiency of government paying people not to do something with their land," said Ford. "There needs to be a consideration of the program and how we can revamp it to allow for some of this ground to be used for the farming of hemp."
Talk of potential CRP changes entered the headlines in March 2022, albeit not focused on hemp. Rather, agricultural advocacy groups and three Republican senators (John Boozman of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming) urged Department of Agriculture leadership to open up some CRP land quickly to increase domestic production of food crops, especially wheat, to stave off looming food shortages due to global supply disruptions caused in large part by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
“Let’s get a hemp-based product to market that can be mass-produced.”
"I think it's a positive development," said Ford of the calls for opening up the acres. "Let's get that land out of under the control and regulation of the government and let's put it to work for the market," he said. He acknowledged that hemp would not be the focus for right now given world circumstances.
Department of Agriculture leadership publicly has opposed making changes thus far, citing the program's environmental benefits.
Eureka Energy plans to convert multiple types of organic waste materials to renewable natural gas. Photo by Michael Sirak
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Also, the hemp industry should winnow its ambitions for utilizing the plant, at least initially, said Ford. “There is just this big wide range of potential things that you could do with hemp," he said. "We get thrown off on tangents. … We’ve got to get more attuned and more committed to a few things and just push through the temptation to veer off here and there." Doing so would help farmers in the various parts of the United States to settle on the hemp cultivars they will grow, said Ford.
"Let's get a hemp-based product to market that can be mass-produced," he said in emphasizing the need for stability in the nascent industry.
