Generating Fundamental Thermodynamic Data and Correlations for Canada's newest Cash Crop Industry

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In 2018, Canada will join a growing list of national and sub-national jurisdictions in either legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. It is expected that this move will create an industry with annual sales of over $8B. While Canada will not be the first country to legalize cannabis at a federal level, it will be the first large industrialized nation to do so. Thus, Canada is uniquely poised to develop, and possibly commercialize, technologies and processes that will facilitate a transition towards a zero-emissions cannabis industry. Given that the cannabis industry has been illegal in most of the world for the better part of the last century it has operated outside of the constraints of environmental legislation and, as a result, typical cannabis operations can consume vast quantities of water and electricity while simultaneously producing waste streams that may include unusable plant material, toxic solvents and carbon dioxide. Additionally, processes that are commonly used for extracting the various plant oils and seed oils use a solvent extraction technique with solvents that are toxic, flammable or that require elevated pressure. In order for the emerging cannabis industry to minimize the production of the aforementioned waste streams, chemical engineers need have access to fundamental, relevant phase equilibrium and the chemical equilibrium; currently, this fundamental thermodynamic knowledge does not exist. Thus, the goal of the current NSERC DG application is to generate phase equilibrium and chemical equilibrium data for the emerging cannabis industry. This data will come from three related, but independent, projects. The first project involves the measurement and correlation of phase equilibrium in systems containing cannabis plant oils dissolved in the volatile organic solvents. The focus of the second study will be to evaluate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art "green solvents" for dissolving plant oils. The "green solvents" that will be investigated are known as Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES). The third project targets the production of biodiesel from hempseed oil, which could subsequently provide growers with an onsite source of liquid fuel. In this project, I will conduct uncatalyzed transesterification reactions of hempseed oil at elevated pressure and I will measure thermodynamic equilibrium conversion of the reaction.