HARNESSING THE FUTURE WITH INDUSTRIAL HEMP BIOMASS
By Joy Beckerman
Industrial hemp and its extraordinary destiny are coming to fruition thanks to the perseverance and ingenuity of brothers Ed and Carl Lehrberger and their partner Dr. Dick Wingerson, the founding team behind PureHemp Technology.
PureHemp Technology was formed to use the new biorefining fractionalization technology developed by parent company PureVision Technology to quickly turn hemp stalks into raw materials for the manufacture of thousands of hemp-based products. In addition to traditional uses such as pulp for papers, tissues, personal hygiene and building products, there are emerging products and markets that can be produced from hemp using PureVision technology, such as beverages, plastics, sweeteners, composites, chemicals, nutraceuticals, resins and sealers, among other possible uses.
“Everything you can do with oil, you can do with biomass and feedstock,” said Ed Lehrberger, PureVision’s president and CEO. He said the other main focus of the company “is to get away from trees and to be tree-free.”
PureVision is already in the process of expanding into Oregon, with plans to build a commercial demonstration plant on a five-acre site along the Columbia River. The plant will be located in Boardman, where a cornstalk supply is located within a 50-mile radius and wood components are within a 100-mile radius. Ed Lehrberger said that transportation becomes uneconomical beyond that distance.
“Once the technology is demonstrated commercially, we will deploy it anywhere there is a feedstock supply,” he said.
The Lehrberger brothers founded PureVision Technologies with Dr. Wingerson in the early 1990s, and Wingerson conceived PureVision’s patented technology in 1999. PureHemp was founded in 2014 upon legalization of industrial hemp cultivation in Colorado.
Wingerson has a doctorate in nuclear engineering from MIT, as well as a Ph.D. in the same subject from his time serving as an Air Force scientist. In 1974, after completing a distinguished 25-year military career, Wingerson — by then a colonel — built a home in Crested Butte, Colorado.
It was shortly thereafter that Wingerson met Ed Lehrberger, who was a freshman at Western State College.
By 1993, Lehberger had made some money in real estate and finance. He invested in a piece of real estate in Fort Lupton, Colorado — a group of eight cannery operation buildings that were previously the Fort Lupton Canning Co. from 1898 to 1979. It was a good deal, despite being a run-down property with many problems, and a canning building that had housed hundreds of pigeons for more than a decade. The team has been repairing and improving that industrial property every year since.
A to Z Storage was born at the cannery as each building was restored. A to Z Storage became the financial backbone that has propelled PureVision forward to this day. In 1996, the PureVision headquarters were moved to Fort Lupton.
As the saying goes, everything old is new again. But this time it’s with a sustainable petrochemical-competing twist.
“Just like the canning company, we’re taking locally-grown plants as an input and processing them,” Lehrberger said. “We want to promote industrial complexes that promote farmers and local producers.”
When Colorado residents voted to legalize the cultivation of industrial hemp, Lehrberger was appointed by the state Legislature to serve on an advisory committee that would assist policy formation. It took roughly two years to establish the policies. It was at one of these advisory committee meetings that Lehrberger announced for the first time that PureVision was going to be in the business of expanding biomass to include industrial hemp.
Biomass is green plant matter that is generally the “non-food” portion of plants. Using corn as an example, the kernels are starch (food), while the leaves, stalks and cobs are the biomass portion. In hemp, everything but the seed oil is considered to be biomass. Unlike oil refineries, biorefineries take in non-food biomass to produce the intermediate products and chemical building blocks for making countless consumer and industrial products.
The three primary components of biomass are cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The four dominant output product streams from PureHemp biorefineries are glucose sugar, pulp from cellulose, xylose sugar from hemicellulose and lignin. These four intermediates are the foundation for producing myriad bioproducts, including pulp-based products (tissues, toilet paper, etc.), alcohols, chemicals, fuels, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, binders, coatings, adhesives, and other precursors for manufacturing plastics and composites.
The hemp plant is composed of approximately 20% lignin, which is a polymer in plants that provides rigidity. Conventional lignins are contaminated with chemicals from the pulping process and aren’t suitable for formulating into plastics and higher value products. Lignin recovered from the PureVision technology is more akin to a native or natural lignin, ideal for products such as different plastics, coatings, binders and adhesives.
The majority of the hemp plant is composed of cellulose and hemicellulose, which are made of complex sugar molecules. The cellulose is mostly glucose and the hemicellulose is mostly xylose. “Hydrolysis” is the process of breaking down biomass into sugars and lignin. Conventional hydrolysis techniques include using enzymes (enzymatic hydrolysis) and concentrated acid. The PureHemp hydrolysis technique takes a different approach, utilizing an advanced countercurrent reactor (CCR) developed by PureVision that rapidly recovers the sugar and lignin streams from biomass.
Hemp grows more rapidly than trees, grows in a wide variety of soil and climates, and requires less water than most crops. With dwindling water supplies and continuing drought throughout much of the U.S., traditional irrigation practices are now changing in many areas. The versatile hemp plant offers an alternative to crops dependent on fertilizers and pesticides with high water demands. PureHemp biorefineries will pay farmers to cultivate hemp, while preserving their opportunity to harvest and sell the more valuable seeds.
PureHemp intends to benefit from the revived industrial hemp opportunity not only by linking the value chain from farm to consumer, but also by licensing technology packages to project developers and entrepreneurs, Lehrberger said. PureHemp’s technology is designed to utilize the entire hemp plant for the economical production of hemp-based products.
With state-by-state legalization of hemp cultivation, the company is “being flooded with inquiries from around the United States,” he said.
PureHemp is seeking additional domestic tonnage to prepare for the 2015 harvest that will need to be processed.
“We don’t have enough hemp to process,” Lehrberger said. He acknowledged that the commercial re-establishment of the crop is a few years from taking off. PureHemp currently pays $500 a ton for the commodity, compared to $65 per ton for corn stalks.
Lehrberger said the biggest remaining challenge is scaling up. Once PureHemp obtains enough hemp, the pilot plant in Fort Lupton will process a half-ton per day, and the company plans to scale up to 25 tons per day by the fall in a larger facility.
Reported hemp yields range from 1.5 to 8.7 tons of dry stems per acre. Using a conservative average of harvesting two dry tons per acre, for the proposed 25-ton per day PureHemp commercial demonstration biorefinery, this translates into about 4,500 acres of hemp, based on one harvest per year. On a much larger commercial scale, a standard 250-ton per day PureHemp biorefinery would require approximately 45,000 acres of hemp per year. That’s the equivalent of 70 square miles.
There’s no doubt that manufacturers will expand into other states as the cultivation of industrial hemp is legalized in each. As for PureVision’s five-acre commercial demonstration site in Boardman, Oregon, it will be co-located with ZeaChem and its existing $70 million biorefinery.
“The significant infrastructure in place at the ZeaChem facility will reduce the costs and timing to develop our 25-ton-per-day biorefining project … (and) will accelerate bringing our technology to market,” Lehrberger said.
“Working with ZeaChem at their plant in Oregon provides a pathway to demonstrate the PureVision technology and establish commercial operations globally,” he said. “We expect to begin operations in Oregon during 2016 using different feedstocks, including hybrid poplar and industrial hemp.”