Hemp as a Sustainable Fuel Source

and poured something that looked like cooking oil into a small diesel tractor.

The engine turned over on the first try, no hesitation, no cough, no black smoke.

I stood there for 15 minutes waiting for it to stall. It never did. And when I

asked him where he bought the fuel, he looked at me like I had asked the

dumbest question in Lancaster County. He pointed to a field behind the barn.

I grew it, he said. That was the moment everything changed for me. The plant is

hemp, industrial hemp, cannabis sativa. And I need to be clear about something

right now, because the confusion between hemp and marijuana was manufactured on

purpose. Industrial hemp contains less than three tenths of 1% THC. That is

the psychoactive compound. You could smoke an entire bale of industrial hemp

and feel nothing but a sore throat. The 2018 farm bill made it federally legal

to grow, process, transport and sell industrial hemp anywhere in the United

States. It is as legal as corn, as legal as soybeans, as legal as wheat. But for

80 years before that federal bill, hemp was treated the same as a narcotic, and

the reason had absolutely nothing to do with anyone getting high. It had

everything to do with fuel and money. And for men who had more of both than

anyone else in America, let me start with what one plant actually does, because

once you understand this, the rest of the story will make you angry. Hemp seeds

contain roughly 30 to 35% oil by weight. That oil can be extracted with a simple

cold press, the same kind of press people use for olive oil or sunflower oil. Once

you have the oil, it can be converted into biodiesel through a basic chemical

process called transesterification. You mix the hemp seed oil with methanol and

a small amount of lye, which acts as a catalyst. The mixture reacts, it

separates into two layers. The top layer is raw biodiesel. The bottom layer is

glycerin, which you can use to make soap. You wash the biodiesel with water, let

it dry, and it is ready to pour into any diesel engine ever manufactured. Not a

modified engine, not a special engine, any diesel engine. Because the diesel

engine was never designed to run on petroleum in the first place, Rudolf

Diesel built his engine in the 1890s in Germany. He filed his patent on the 28th

of February 1892. His paper was titled Theory and Construction of a Rational

Heat Engine to Replace the Steam Engine. He called it a compression ignition

engine. The fuel he envisioned was plant oil.