When Did We Go Wrong?

POTENTIAL OF HEMPSEED OIL AS FUEL

With hindsight being 20-20 and we are approaching an energy crisis, with a major reliance on foreign countries for fuel; we are all left with our hands on your heads in confusion of how we allowed the most powerful country in the world become so vulnerable on foreign aid.    Some experts would look back just over a hundred years ago and find some fascinating information as America was about to start mass production of the Model T.  In 1894, Rudolph Diesel invented the combustion engine and it was planned to run off hempseed oil and various other vegetable oils.  The intentions were to provide an engine that could run off of fuel that was locally accessible and renewable.  It wasn’t till a few years later that petroleum blew up within the US as its main fuel source; this was the decline of hemp as a bio-fuel and the use of industrial hemp.  Hemp used to be considered as the ‘new billion-dollar cash crop’ until the plant’s legal status virtually wiped it out of production and the history books.    Hemp was used heavily in past history and American history in particular and provided goods and services to various growing industries. 

Current diesel engines can run on bio-diesel or waste vegetable oil with a few modifications to the tubing, but leaving the engine as-is.  There are two ways to produce fuel with hempseed oil, the first just by using the oil itself or converting it to bio-diesel and ethanol can also be created from the cellulose of the biomass.   Part of what makes hemp such an attractive bio-fuel is its multiple benefits to society and various industries, we could turn a lot of industries ‘greener’ with benefits and application of industrial hemp to replace current methods.  In fact, over a hundred years later the automotive industries turn back to hemp to help create more bio-gradable vehicles and accessories.  However, this seems like a great new idea, but in reality this was the initial way cars and their accessories were designed using resin stiffened hemp fibers by Henry Ford himself, in his Hemp Fiber car that was made of stiffened resin from hemp fibers and it ran on ethanol from hempseed oil. 

It is difficult to swallow the fact that we made have had the answers to major environmental problems already answered correctly the first time we tackled them.  But in today’s society and America’s cut-throat capitalist lifestyle, money talks and back then Dupont Chemical company and petroleum entrepreneurs made sure to shut down competing industries and has led to the illegalization of hemp and prevented options that could just be the answer to today’s energy crisis.