Hemp Bound by Doug Fine

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.
    The project at once put one of Brandenburg’s most depressed areas back to work and made it energy-independent. And Feldheim is not the only German town living the dream. I’m keenly interested to see if the European experience is mappable to the United States.
    Is regionally based renewable energy modular? Will distributed biomass plants make small-town America (and big cities for that matter) energy-independent? I’m really asking you, the folks reading this, if you have the engineering know-how or venture capital to make it happen.
    Now, I can tell you after spending half my life in extremely rural communities that organizing farmers to unite, even in their mutual best interest, is a bit like asking snowflakes to canvas for Democrats in Houston. But when the future of the species is at stake, maybe we’ll see some overdue rallying.
    Gasification, of course, isn’t the only way to turn biomass into power. But it exists in the real world and has a relatively low start-up cost compared with, say, the $350 million that BP is investing just to upgrade a Brazilian ethanol plant.
    That kind of alcohol making for power and driving sounds terrific, but besides the fantastically high facility costs, ethanol requires sometimes unsustainable catalysts, and depends, in the case of Brazil, on forest-depleting sugarcane monoculture. As an industrial-scale technology, ethanol might very well mature. Hemp would work in such a scenario. I chose to focus on biomass combustion herein to show one solution whereby farmers and communities are already becoming energy-independent via their farm waste. As we’ve established, anything’s better than torching it in the field.
    There are still other biomass technologies out there. Methane can be harvested from livestock and ag waste. That could figure into, say, a hog-and-hemp-farming community’s formula. You can even feed the hogs the hemp seed cake harvest, which consultant Anndrea Hermann does on her Canadian farm.
    Althouse said he’s also keeping his eye on a cellulosic process now being developed in British Columbia known as lignol. This, he said, takes not just your hurdy fiber but the whole plant and “leaves you with a pure lignin 33 that can be used for paper pulp, fine clothing fiber, or a great spray insulation. GE developed it during the first oil crisis, in 1973, and it’s easy to re-create the process in the lab.” Sharp guy, that Althouse. I look for that in a chauffeur.
    Then there’s the good ol’-fashioned hemp biodiesel that got Althouse and me around Colorado in such cushy fashion. It’s quite feasible that just as hemp cultivars are being developed for consistent high-tech industrial applications, so might there be a seed cultivar ideal for fuel—one that won’t take away from food.
    Oh, how I wish Warren Buffett would stimulate this market by converting his BNSF trains to run on American-grown renewable hemp fuel instead of natural gas. A Grand Canyon tourist train already runs its diesel engine trains on vegetable oil. The United States almost certainly has the acreage for all the industrial cannabis applications that could ever come to mind and then to market.
    Know what else she has? Thousands of small farmers desperate for a new cash crop that’ll grow without much water as climate change continues to hammer the heartland.
    In the end, all of these promising initial hemp applications might prove to be “bridge” technologies: part of a nation’s or community’s transition from petroleum. Personally, I like technologies that don’t have to burn anything. Harness is the word that comes to mind for