How to Scale up Your Cannabis and Hemp Extraction Projects (Part 1)

This summer Maratek is running a series of webinars, looking at how you can scale your cannabis and hemp extraction projects from lab to industrial and the challenges that come with it. 

In this first episode, we will be focusing on an introduction to scaling your operations from lab to industrial, the advantages that come with it, the challenges that also come along with it and its importance as the industry evolves.

We have turned this webinar into a two-part blog to summarize it, but if you would rather watch the full webinar then please find it embedded below:

• The first part of this blog will be an overview of the cannabis and hemp oil production process and the benefits that come with an automated and closed-loop process.
• Part two of the blog will focus on some of the most common challenges that we see when organizations scale up their cannabis and hemp extraction projects.

An overview of the cannabis and hemp oil production process 

The first step is the inbound biomass. You've got to be thinking about how that biomass is being received. Is it super sacks? Is it in barrels? Is it wet and it needs to be dried now? Is it already pre-ground? How are we going to be unloading it and bringing it into the plant? 

That's really the main entry point of the production process. From there we get into extraction. Now, on the extraction side, there's a few different types of solutions regarding the technologies that can be used but the main go-to right now in the industry, we would say, would be ethanol extraction and CO2 extraction. 

From there, we get into filtration, which is really two steps. The first step is filtering out the plant material after the extraction step but also, depending on the type of extraction method that you do, you might be carrying on a lot of fats, waxes and lipids within the oil, so you might need to do a whole filtration and possibly even winterization step to pull those out of the oil. 

Next we get into the recovery stage and decarboxylation stage. Basically, there’s three steps:

1. Bulk recovery, where a lot of people that have smaller scale operations just use rotovaps. As they scale, they look at other lab technologies, like falling film evaporators for the bulk recovery stage – from there possibly going into a rotovap or another system for the residual recovery, for the little bits of ethanol that are left over after the falling film system. 
   
   
2. Then, there’s the decarboxylation step, which is activating the cannabinoids within the oil. 
   
   
3. Then, we have the dewatering, or reproofing stage.

Now, depending on how you're doing your recovery, decarb and extraction steps, you might be carrying a lot of water over from the biomass into your ethanol or other solvents, slowly degrading the effectiveness of your extraction. Depending on that process, we have solutions there to automatically inline reproof. 

Some groups, depending on the recovery process they use, will pull out more colored ethanol with other volatiles. So, reproofing can clean up that ethanol so it can be reused continuously in your extraction process. From there, we go into post processing where we would talk about doing distillate production, isolate production, or whatever other final process you'd like to do, depending on what your final product would be. 

Why automation and closed-loop?

So, the question really is “why automate, and why close-loop?” 

You have your biomass feed in, then from there you have your extraction step, either CO2 or ethanol. The winterization steps are optional. When doing CO2 you end up carrying over a lot of those fats and waxes that I was referring to where you'd winterize to freeze them. This is just like when you put, for example, your soup in a fridge overnight and you collect that fat layer at the top. 

So, to winterize your solution, you basically pull out the fats and waxes after with the filtration step. When doing a cryo-ethanol extraction process you could completely skip the winterization step because you would be pulling all those other things out of the plant, into your oil. 

From there, then we'd go into your bulk recovery step, your residual recovery step and decarboxylation. 

This is where our Maratek OERS three-in-one solution really can take those three steps all at once, automatically, rather than using a falling film, then a rotovap, then a decarb reactor for each stage of the process. 

The benefits of the closed-loop process 

When scaling your operation to just a few hundred pounds a day, or a few thousand pounds a day, you’ve really got to think about the efficiencies that are going to come into play from closed-looping and automating this process. We’ve listed some of the key benefits here:

Navigating ethanol losses: One area that a lot of our clients see a lot of losses on is ethanol losses. When you're dealing with open containers of ethanol, two things: one, you have the ethanol evaporating continuously but also two: ethanol is amorphous so it's absorbing the moisture out of the air and your ethanol grade is actually going to be decreasing just from having open containers. 

Dealing with increased regulations: A lot of issues that the industry is running into are the increasing regulations for having more solvents on-site. One way to help avoid this is by closed-looping long processes, so that way you can have more ethanol on-site and not have to deal with maybe building full C1D1 environments.

Reduced environmental footprint: Reducing your environmental footprint is also important. A big thing is that solvents are not the most environmentally friendly substances, so any chance you can to reduce that - we're a green industry after all - that's a big step. 

Reducing contaminants: The big thing with closed looping and automation also is reducing contaminants. During these extraction processes we're seeing a lot more of the industry pushing more and more towards GMP compliance. Whenever you have an operator dealing with the substance and he's carrying it around, or anything of the sort, there's always an opportunity for operator errors. By automating and closed-looping a process you greatly see a reduction of those issues and also of contamination.

Reduced labor cost: A further benefit is reduced labor cost. Now, instead of having a roomful of falling film systems and rotovaps and different extraction units and so forth, by closed looping and automating that process you basically streamline your operations for more efficient processes. You can take your team, your existing team, and scale and achieve a lot more production value using your existing labor. 

Batch tracking capability: The other big advantage is for those looking at GMP, and especially EUGMP, there is lots of batch tracking capability that'll be really brought along from that whole automated step. You can control every single step along the way, with controlled tracking for each different batch you do. If you ever had to deal with an issue of a recall or anything of the sort it makes it very easy for your team to handle. 

Are you looking for more information on this topic? You can read the second part of this blog, or you can contact our team of experts today with any questions about cannabis and hemp extraction or our innovative automated processes.