HBR–LITE - Hemp-BioRefineries

Community BioRefineries Website – LITE

The website developed for Community BioRefineries (CBR) and its sister site developed for CBR’s dedicated division, Hemp-BioRefinery (HBR) both contain a wealth of information designed to inform and educate, while also remaining compliant with SEC guidelines as they pertain to an internet-based private offering.

That’s the good news. An unintended effect, however, of providing this wealth of information designed to be clear and understandable to virtually anyone with at least a high school diploma was that we may have provided too much information for some to internalize. Whenever we are arranging for an exchange with an entity looking to partner with us or an investor interested in becoming part of this incredible journey, we always urge them to spend some time with our website(s). The intent is to help the new party get a good handle on what the CBR/HBR is all about and perhaps even help them formulate questions of their own in preparation for the exchange.

But first – What is a “biorefinery”?

Only about three out of ten people actually have any idea of what a biorefinery is designed to do. For most, however, the term ‘biorefinery’ equates only to the place that ethanol comes from…

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The petroleum industry drills below ground to yield a barrel of gooey, black crude oil calculated as a 42-gallon barrel. The barrel of petroleum oil is synonymous with gasoline to fill your car tank for many individuals in a typical conversation. However, many individuals do not know that only 40% of a barrel of oil is used to produce gasoline; the rest is used to create literally thousands of other products—a type of circular Petrochemical Economy. The petroleum industry figured out early on that once the barrel of crude is extracted from below grown, something needs to be done with the "Bottom of the Barrel." The 15% remaining "Other" is used to make over 6,000 products we use every day (like all that plastic we’re trying so hard to minimize and recycle due to its environmental harm).

With today's goal of reducing dependence on oil, scientists, engineers, and The Community BioRefinery look to replace petroleum products with crops grown above ground.

The Community BioRefinery, per the USDA, is the oldest Biofuel R&D Company in the United States. We are a true and original Biobased Circular Economy company. Our mission is to utilize every molecule in the Feedstock and Biomass we process to create a Biobased Economy. A circular economy where fuel, electricity, and food are all produced in our CBR, in essence wasting nothing, for a true all-encompassing biorefinery that fuels and feeds the world.

Now that we have hopefully clarified what a biorefinery is and that CBR is a true biorefinery, we hope you will look more closely at the rest of our website to see how we fulfill our mission for the benefit of consumers, local communities, the environment, and our partners.

Too often, well-intended people take a look at the website and discover it’s not the standard “we’re wonderful and you should be interested in us” type of site. They find there is, in fact, a wealth of information to look through – so they end up reading virtually none of it; or at most, scanning it. This helps the intended reader not at all. To help resolve this situation, we offer this web page we call “HBR Lite”. The tab/page provides the fundamentals of the CBR process which will hopefully motivate readers to look more closely at CBR and its HBR division. We hope everyone will want to look at all of it to see/learn about all the amazing aspects to the CBR process and how it offers so much in terms of health, ecological benefits, economic benefits, sustainability, pure foods, true biofuels, biodegradable plastics, and so very much more.

In short, the Community BioRefinery process allows the introduction of virtually anything that grows, breaking it down (in a matter of minutes) into micron sized particles. No heat or chemicals are used anywhere in the process. (A micron is one-millionth of a meter.) Cold water is all that is used to move the particles along. After breaking it down, all the components of the plant material are still present and intact – undamaged and pristine – all swimming around together.
This ‘slurry’ enters a special device invented by the USDA (for a totally unrelated function) in which the plant components are separated and recovered – intact. Feed stocks (like corn, soy, rice, barely, and even hemp seed) contain very high quality protein which we isolate and recover to create protein isolates. 90%+ purity… Likewise, many feed stocks contain very high quality high oleic oils which are very important to the human diet – recovered intact and undisrupted. Any fibers present are isolated and recovered as well, which we’ll talk about later.
The remaining “waste water” has mostly sugars of one sort or another. This sugar water goes into a special fermenter. Biomass (corn stover, sweet cane sorghum, hemp waste, etc. having little or no human food value) comes out of the special mill as fiber and sugar water. The fibers are recovered and the remaining sugar water likewise goes into the special fermenter.
Magic also happens inside the fermenter. The sugar water enters the bottom of the device and percolates up through a dense filler material that has been inoculated with special micro-organisms. After a few hours, ethanol is produced – however, we have little interest in producing ethanol. A few hours later, something far more valuable comes out in the form of bio-butanol. Bio-butanol has a molecular structure very close to that of gasoline but without the fumes. Bio-butanol is also considered the basis of the Next Generation of Biofuels. With bio-butanol, we can make actual biodiesel fuel (no petroleum used); bio-avgas; bio-jet fuel and more.
From the fermenter come the only “waste” products of the process. First, PLA and PHA are naturally occurring bio-chemicals resulting from the fermentation process. Traditional ethanol plants merely dump their waste water into the local lakes, rivers and streams – much to the dismay of the EPA. These chemicals bond with the oxygen in the water, effectively killing all aquatic and plant life present. The CBR process recovers the PLA and PHA and combines them with the fibers recovered at the beginning of the process. Fibers from biomass become biodegradable plastics; fibers from feed stocks become fish feed for use in aquaculture. Again, nothing is wasted.
The second “waste product” from the fermenter is hydrogen – which is captured and used to operate hydrogen fuel cells that create all the electricity needed for the production facility. In fact, there is a significant excess available to create added electricity to put back onto the grid; to power a local requirement; to be stored as fertilizer;’ or, applied to the creation of bio-jet fuel as necessary.
Finally, the remaining water is purified and recycled back to the beginning of the process..
See process diagram below:

The process has undergone a complete independent third-party engineering review which concluded the process does what we say it will do, and creates the products we claim it will. Additionally, we have employed independent accounting firms to create our financial models (one for the “food side” and one for the “fermentation side”. The results of those two reports were then provided to the USDA which collated the reports through a proprietary modeling program which determined that a nominal CBR facility should create a net revenue of approximately $30M+ per year when fully operational. It should be noted that the net revenues can be skewed based upon which source materials are used and which end-items are produced.

Throughout the process, every molecule of the source material is used for some positive purpose. Zero waste; zero pollution. No heat; no chemicals used.

Why does this process seem so “busy”? It was by pure dumb luck. Our late founder was the original inventor of biodiesel fuel (100% from fermentation). He even trademarked the term “biodiesel” – which has since become generic, much like Kleenex. In 1983, it cost over $17/gallon to make his biodiesel – a prohibitive cost even now. He continued his R&D to discover more efficient ways to produce it and/or to discover potential value-added products from the process to make the whole thing economically sustainable. Through it all, he learned of a thousand ways how NOT to do it but eventually hit upon the process we have today, which does far more than he ever envisioned.

We’ve been asked if we can just make the food products or only make the fuels, or only bioplastics, etc. The easy answer is ‘yes’; however, all the economics go out the window. To make only fuels: where will the sugar supply come from? It has to be purchased at a substantial cost. To make food only: how do we deal with the resulting waste stream? We have to pay substantial tipping fees to haul it away for disposal. Economic sustainability goes right into the ditch. Our process pays for its own feed stocks, provides the sugars for “free”, and cleans up its own waste stream via the resulting products. Why would anyone want to pull the wings off the bug?

The potential for CBR and all it can do for shareholders and local economies – and eventually the world - is limitless. We invite everyone to thoroughly study all the website information for the “rest of the story”.

*PLA/PHA combined with waste fibers to create biodegradable plastics or fish feed for aquaculture, depending on source of fiber.
NOTE 1: Waste from aquaculture operation used for hydroponics.
NOTE 2: This sequence essentially represents a “clean as you go” waste treatment process, particularly the waste from the fermentation phase, in accordance with EPA mandates.