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Hemp is increasingly being utilised in several vital and emerging industries, and offers many benefits over traditional materials due to its carbon sequestration and soil rejuvenation properties, alongside its rapid growth cycle.
The global hempcrete market, for example, was estimated to be worth nearly $26bn last year and is forecast to maintain an annual growth rate of 5% from 2025 to 2030.
However, new and unlikely use cases for hemp are still being discovered and developed, including bioplastics and fuel. Henry Ford famously constructed a car partially made from hemp-derived plastics, which ran on hemp fuel.
A more recent discovery, and one that places hemp on the cutting edge of modern technological advancements, is hemp-derived graphene.
Graphene and hemp-derived graphene
In the early 2000s, graphene was touted as the new wonder material, set to revolutionise a myriad of industries thanks to its extreme strength, flexibility, and ultra-light weight.
One million times thinner than a sheet of paper, 20 times as strong as steel and the most conductive substance known to man, the hype surrounding this new ‘wonder-material’ is understandable, but twenty years later graphene is far from being the ubiquitous game-changer we were promised.
In large part, this is due to the difficulty in mass-producing graphene. Traditional graphene is often produced either by exfoliating mined graphite or by depositing carbon atoms via high-tech processes like chemical vapour deposition (CVD). While these methods yield very pure, thin graphene, they are complex and expensive.
This is where hemp-derived graphene comes in. This type of graphene uses the bast and inner bark fibres of industrial hemp, parts of the plant which are usually considered waste.
By ‘cooking’ these fibres through a chemical and thermal process, the resulting product forms a porous, partially graphitic carbon closely resembling graphene in both form and function.
While it doesn’t produce a pristine carbon sheet like traditional methods, this structure is actually advantageous in certain applications due to its ‘ultra-high’ surface area.
Crucially, producing hemp-derived graphene is ‘about 1000 times cheaper’ than traditional methods. Estimates put the production cost of hemp-based graphene at only $500–$1000 per ton, versus thousands of dollars per gram for high-grade conventional graphene.
Premier Graphene
One company leading the charge in this space is California’s Premier Graphene, which produces industrial hemp-derived green graphene, developed in partnership with HGI Industrial Technologies.
Its President, Pedro Mendez, explained to Business of Cannabis that its partnership with Santa Rosa Green Seeds in Mexico, will allow it to cultivate three to four growth cycles per year.
Having worked in the cannabis industry for over 30 years, starting in California’s early recreational market, Mendez eventually shifted his focus to industrial hemp, which he described as a ‘disruptive industry’.
“We started out with Hempcrete, making small bricks. At the time, I was working at a research centre in Southern California, and that’s really where things began to take shape.
“We started working on bioplastics, and that led us to experiment with graphene. I began doing some research and development in that area, and we ended up creating a prototype.”
Mendez has been showcasing his prototype to various industries, including global military contractors, construction firms and battery manufacturers, an area he believes graphene could play a transformative role in over the coming years.
“There are already companies producing batteries made from graphene, and now Mexico is beginning to invest in a program for advanced supercomputer chips. People are still focused on lithium, but graphene batteries are significantly more efficient. It’s just a matter of time before the shift happens.
“This is going to be a really important strategic material for the US and globally. China has already started cutting back on exports of key raw materials, which are critical for things like computers, batteries, and military hardware.
“That’s why I see such huge potential. If I can set up operations in Mexico, and if the US starts growing more hemp domestically to produce graphene, we could really fill part of that void.”
Energy storage is the flagship application for hemp graphene currently, and research has shown that hemp-based supercapacitor electrodes have energy densities around two or three times higher than the current commercial supercapacitors, and can operate at a broad temperature range without performance loss.
Sustainable cutting-edge technology
Alongside the otherworldly properties of graphene, hemp-derived graphene also introduces a level of sustainability seldom found in such industries.
“It’s affordable, renewable, and you can harvest it every three to five months,” Mendez continued.
“When I was working at a research center, we were dealing with a lot of leftover plant waste after each crop cycle. Disposing of it, just picking it up and hauling it to the dump, was actually costing us money. So we started asking ourselves: what else can we do with this material?
“That’s when the light bulb went off. We started experimenting with all the possible ways to repurpose hemp waste, and that’s really what sparked this whole journey.”
Premier Graphene is now searching for investment to scale up its graphene production operation, with the aim of eventually being able to produce up to a tonne a day, and do so sustainably.
“}]] Producing hemp-derived graphene is ‘about 1000 times cheaper’ than traditional methods. Estimates put the production cost of hemp-based graphene at only $500–$1000 per ton, versus thousands of dollars per gram for high-grade conventional graphene. Read More
