I don't know if this has been brought up already or not, but while hemp is indeed a plant which provides fiber, oil and other uses, its oil content relative to other biofuel crop alternatives, well, sucks.
According to Tickell's From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, a hemp crop can yield oil at about 300kg/hectare. Compared to Rapeseed (nearly 1000) hemp doesn't look too convincing as an oil crop unless both the oil and fiber yields combined outproduce the alternatives. One potential energy plant not investigated since the 1980's that I can tell is Euphorbia Lathyris (aka Mole or Gopher Plant). According to Tickell and other sources, the Mole plant produces more oil (approx. 1200kg/ha) mass/hectare than ANY OTHER plant crop other than trees and bushes such as castor bean. The bean itself is said to yield 50% oil content. It grows like crazy virtually anywhere. Hemp is not as easy to grow and as the literature indicates, produces less than a third the oil of the alternatives. Still, cannabis should be free. It's hypocrital prohibition and enforcement over that of the freely grown common yard plant Papaver Somniferum (Opium Poppy ---also yielding more kg oil/hectare than hemp) will sometime make a hysterically funny movie....oh, yeah, it already exists: Reefer Madness... -Myles Twete, Portland Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
