I got ya bro.You are not "wrong" so much as you are missing a lot of information.
This article was lightweight. But it is not wrong.
I didn't call out this article because it WAS about hemp, and it IS about one of the products we'll sell. So even though the wrong person wrote it (somebody with more technical knowledge, or at least understanding, should have written it), I would be quite happy if all of the content of the Hemp Black blog was this relevant to our business.
So, let me see if I can break this down for you.
Hemp sequesters carbon commensurate with its biomass, storing this carbon in its fibrous stem (our raw material), leaf and root (leaf and root is garbage we leave in the ground. It never shows up in the final "weight" of the finished product).The leaf and root carbon is returned to the soil, adding an important component of soil fertility.
The ROOT is important. Because it is huge, and it sequesters carbon, and it is a "tap root". Looks like this:
All this stays in the ground. Sequestered. The leaves too. We don't need 'em. This is a big part of "more than 100%".
Between 1.7 and 1.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere for each tonne of hemp cellulose produced (note, that is 170% and 190% respectively already).
We typically grow 10 tonnes of hemp straw per hectare. Another 2-3 tonnes of cellulose mass is produced and stored in the root system. So each hectare of hemp we grow in for Hemp Black purposes could be said to immediately sequester some 22 tonnes of greenhouse gases.
So 20-30% of the carbon is now sequestered in the ground!
(Follow here, that's 17-19 tonnes for the stalk harvested, and another 3-5 tonnes of roots and leaves that stay in the ground!)
Now, we take the stalks and subject them to "pyrolysis" to extract the carbon (our end product, the "ink", which is made from crushed charcoal mixed with one liquid or another depending on the application) and get rid of all the other stuff in the stem. A lot of that "other stuff" is actually biofuel, if they choose to do it that way, that they could use to partially power production facilities. The rest is lignin, flavonoids, tannins, electrons, fig newtons and morons etc...
"Pyrolysis is the technique of applying high heat to organic matter
(lignocellulosic materials) in the absence of air or in reduced air. The
process can produce charcoal, condensable organic liquids (pyrolytic
fuel oil), non-condensable gasses, acetic acid, acetone, and methanol.
The process can be adjusted to favor charcoal, pyrolytic oil, gas, or
methanol production with a 95.556 fuel-to-feed efficiency."
Think of pyrolysis as a wood "still".
Just like you take a maybe forty litre barrel of water and corn, let it rot, and run it through a distillation process to make 4 litres of whiskey, the same thing is going to happen to our hemp. A bunch of raw hemp goes into the still, but only X percent, maybe 23-30% of that weight comes out as the "Hemp Black" charcoal we need. The rest is pyrolytic oil, gas, or methanol. They may or may not be capturing that.
They should be in order to be as "green" as possible. THAT would make a great blog article!
So it might take 2-3 kilos of raw hemp stalk that sequestered 170-190% of the carbon in the raw stalk itself, and the leaves and roots we've left behind, some of that carbon is our product, charcoal, some is in gaseous or liquid by products which can be used as fuel, in order to obtain 1 kilo of Hemp Black.
Here's a mind blower: Hemp is just carbohydrates. Petroleum is "hydrocarbons". Get it?
Literally "Same s#!t, different day". By "different day" I mean that reason all this hemp stuff is more "sustainable" than using petroleum based products is, we grew this hemp yesterday, and sequestered recently produced carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere.
When we use "petroleum" for ANYTHING, we are using PLANTS THAT SEQUESTERED CARBON DIOXIDE FROM THE ATMOSPHERE 100 MILLION YEARS AGO AND WHEN WE BURN IT WE ARE RELEASING 100 MILLION YEAR OLD CARBON INTO THE AIR.
THIS is the mess we've made. 100 million year old carbon BAD. Freshly generated carbon and sequestering some of that old carbon GOOD.
Carbohydrates=Hydrocarbons, more or less, if you do your chemistry and pyrolysis correctly.
To sum up, we probably grow 3 or 4 kilos of hemp to make 1 kilo of Hemp Black. Hemp Black is the "whiskey" that comes out of the "wood still" that is the pyrolysis machine.
Hope that is clear enough and helpful.
Armchair HempBioChemist signing off.
I can try to answer questions. But I'm going off old notes.
