Launch Event: Industrial Fuel Switch
The UK Government launched Phase 2 of a £55 million Small Business Research Initiative on Monday.
We were honoured to be invited to speak at the Launch Event held by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), and be part of the movement for industry to switch to lower carbon fuels.
The focus on hydrogen, electrification and biomass/waste for industrial applications aligns with our focus of scaling the UK hemp industry and providing lower carbon alternatives to energy generation.
As set out in BEIS’ Biomass Policy Statement, the UK economy is looking for more sustainable sources of biomass and have already identified scaling of UK crop production from tens of thousands of hectares to approximately 730,000 hectares by 2050 as one of the best ways of doing that.
Hemp has been demonstrated through research by the Agriculture and Food Development Authority of Ireland and Bangor University as a more sustainable energy crop than alternative perennial or traditional annual energy crops (including miscanthus, short rotation coppice, OSR and sugar beet).
An average hemp crop grown has a net supply chain sequestration impact of 11 t/CO2 eq./ha/year after subtracting all of the supply chain emissions to grow and manufacture an energy pellet.
In addition to being more sustainable than alternative biomass sources, hemp can be grown locally, has an annual carbon payback and is a waste material from a food crop.
This year we ran trials with UK farming partners to collect data on the various stages of farming industrial hemp in the UK - from licensing, all the way to processing into an energy pellet for combustion trials. Our focus now is on developing full scale commercialisation of our alternative drop in replacement as a fuel switch.
In addition, we are developing software to manage the data from the full supply chain to enable us to have the greatest environmental impact while providing a cost viable solution to our buyers. We are also developing methodologies for carbon credits that can be traded on established Voluntary Carbon Credit markets.
A scaled UK hemp industry would enable us to impact energy by producing pellets, but also turn that hemp through additional research and commercialisation into more sustainable wind turbine blades, photovoltaic panels, green hydrogen, biofuels and even an electric battery.