HemPower Contact

HemPower  ·  Renewable solid fuel

Grown,not mined.

We grow industrial hemp on generational family farms in Ecuador and Colombia, and press it into pellets that displace coal and wood in the boilers already burning today. No new power plants. No waiting for a forest.

Talk to sales Read the case
Industrial hemp growing in an Andean valley at sunset
Andean highlandsEcuador & Colombia
≈1.42t
Fossil CO₂ displaced per tonne of pellets
~0.05%
Fuel sulfur — about 25× lower than coal
240–246GJ
Energy potential per hectare, per year
150+
Biomass co-firing installations worldwide

Carbon balance

Two fuels.
Two kinds of carbon.

Fossil carbon

Coal releases carbon that has been locked underground for millions of years. Every tonne burned is net-new CO₂ in the atmosphere.

  • Geologic origin
  • Net-new atmospheric CO₂
  • Finite & non-renewable

Renewable carbon

Hemp pulls CO₂ out of the air as it grows and gives it back when it burns. The carbon was already in circulation — we are only borrowing it.

  • Biogenic origin
  • Roughly closed cycle
  • Replanted every year
Wood pellets

The other pellet

Wood is renewable too.
It just takes decades.

The biomass already burning in power stations today is overwhelmingly wood — more than 53 million tonnes of pellets produced in 2025 alone. Hemp and wood are both plant carbon. The only thing that separates them is how long the atmosphere waits to get that carbon back.

Industrial hempPlanting to harvest
60–90Days
Southern pineUS South — pellet feedstock
24–40Years
Norway spruceNordic forestry
55+Years
Scots pineNordic forestry
70–100Years
PlantingTime to harvest →100 years
The difference

Every tonne of wood pellets is drawn against a carbon stock that takes decades to rebuild. Every tonne of hemp pellets is drawn against a stock rebuilt in a single season.

Carbon payback

5–104 yrs

The published range for wood pellets displacing coal — around five years for mill residues on fast-growing plantations, and forty-four to a hundred and four years after a clearcut. Where natural forest is converted to plantation, the debt is never repaid. Hemp's cycle closes inside one year.

At the stack

112,000

Kilograms of CO₂ per terajoule for wood, against 94,600 for bituminous coal — wood emits roughly 18% more per unit of energy at the point of combustion. That is only acceptable if the forest grows back fast enough to reabsorb it. It is the whole question with wood, and hemp answers it in a season.

What hemp changes

  • No standing stock to draw down — the crop is the harvest
  • No rotation to wait out — annual, contracted supply
  • No forest converted to plantation to feed a boiler
  • Grown on farmland, not taken from woodland

What wood carries

  • Decades of carbon debt before the ledger balances
  • Rotation-length supply risk in every catchment
  • Contested feedstock — thinnings, residues or whole trees
  • Land that cannot be replanted and cropped the same year
Fuel spec

Fuel spec

The numbers
that matter

Hemp pellets are not a compromise fuel. They sit alongside wood pellets on energy density and fuel sulfur, run far cleaner than coal — and they regenerate on a twelve-month cycle instead of a forest rotation or a geologic era.

Typical properties — hemp pellets vs. wood pellets vs. bituminous coal
PropertyHemp pelletsWood pelletsCoal (bituminous)
Energy — net calorific value16 – 17.5 MJ/kg≥ 16.5 MJ/kg, ISO min~22 MJ/kg
Sulfur content~0.05 %≤ 0.05 %~1.27 %
Carbon sourceRenewable biogenicRenewable biogenicFossil geologic
RegenerationOne crop cycle annual24 – 100 years rotationMillions of years non-renewable
Ash content3 – 6 %≤ 1 – 3 %8 – 15 %
Moisture, typical8 – 12 %≤ 10 %5 – 10 %
Bulk density, typical~650 – 700 kg/m³≥ 600 kg/m³~800 – 850 kg/m³
The takeaway

Against coal, hemp's advantage is what it doesn't carry — roughly 25× less fuel sulfur, less ash, less corrosion, and no fossil carbon. Against wood, the advantage is time: a hemp crop replaces itself in a single season, where a pellet forest takes decades.

Competitive

75–80%

Of coal's energy per kilogram, from a crop that regrows every season.

Cleaner burn

~25×

Lower fuel sulfur means reduced emissions and less boiler corrosion.

Less residue

3–6%

Ash content against coal's 8–15% — less handling, less slagging, less downtime.

Renewable by design

1 yr

Replenished on an annual crop cycle — not the decades a pellet forest needs, or the millions of years coal took.

Displacement

Displacement

One tonne,
measured

This is not an offset, a credit, or a promise about 2050. It is fossil carbon that does not enter the atmosphere because a boiler burned something we grew instead.

01 — Feedstock
1
Tonne of hemp pellets

Densified, dried and specified for industrial combustion.

02 — Energy
≈16.1
GJ renewable energy

Based on a hemp pellet net calorific value of 16.074 GJ per tonne.

03 — Result
≈1.42
Tonnes fossil CO₂ displaced

Calculated against the bituminous coal emission factor of 88.37 kg CO₂ per GJ.

1.42t CO₂

displaced for every tonne of hemp pellets burned in place of coal. Real, measurable, and available now — without waiting for new infrastructure.

Supply

Supply

Can we grow
enough? Yes.

Hemp is one of the most productive energy crops on earth. It grows fast, on marginal ground, with modest inputs — and it does it again the following year.

A study of industrial hemp biomass in Ecuador's Carchi province measured 13.7 tonnes per hectare per year and an energy potential of 246 GJ per hectare per year. Global yields run 8–15 tonnes per hectare, across a wide range of climates and soils — which is precisely why hemp supports local energy security rather than another import dependency.

Forested Andean hillside at sunrise
Regenerative cultivation — Andean corridor, Ecuador

Energy potential

240–246

GJ per hectare per year, dry basis.

Biomass yield

10–13

Tonnes per hectare per year, dry basis.

Carchi study, Ecuador

13.7

Tonnes per hectare per year measured in-country, at 246 GJ/ha/yr.

Global yield range

8–15

Tonnes per hectare per year across climates and soils.

The opportunity

At just 10,000 hectares, hemp delivers roughly 2.4–2.5 million GJ of renewable energy per year — enough to displace a meaningful share of coal in thermal power generation.

Deployment

Deployment

We don't need to reinvent the power plant

Hemp pellets can be co-fired in existing coal plants today, and drop into the same handling that already moves wood pellets. Biomass co-firing is established, operational technology — proven in more than 150 installations across Europe, Asia and North America.

You start low and scale up. Existing boilers, existing fuel handling, existing grid reliability and dispatchability. The transition begins with the plant you already own.

Thermal power station at dusk
Co-firing pathway — existing thermal generation
5%
Hemp

Minimal changes to the plant. Low operational risk. A place to start.

10%
Hemp

Operationally proven in many plants already running biomass blends.

20%
Hemp

Significant fossil fuel displacement without replacing generation assets.

↑
Higher substitution

Greater emissions reduction potential as handling and blending mature.

Why co-firing works

  • Existing boilers and infrastructure carry the fuel
  • Current fuel handling systems are leveraged, not replaced
  • Grid reliability and dispatchability are maintained
  • Scalable from low to high substitution over time

Technical considerations

  • Ash behavior and slagging characteristics
  • Corrosion and material compatibility
  • Fuel handling and on-site storage
  • Boiler performance testing and tuning
Operations

Operations

Seed to silo

HemPower is vertically integrated by design. We control the genetics, the growers, the mill and the fuel spec — because a power plant does not buy a story, it buys a consistent tonne.

01

Genetics

Proprietary industrial hemp varieties selected over multiple generations for biomass volume, energy density and a fast field cycle — bred for the boiler, not for the dispensary.

02

Generational farms

We plant on family land in Ecuador and Colombia — farms that have been in the same hands for generations and, in many cases, out of viable production for years. Growers keep their land and gain a contracted annual crop.

03

Harvest & drying

An annual crop cycle, harvested and field-dried down to pellet moisture specification before it ever reaches the mill.

04

The mill

Our own pellet factory sits with the farms. Biomass in, specified fuel out, minimal haul distance — which keeps embedded transport emissions and landed cost low.

05

Delivered fuel

Bulk and bagged pellets for industrial boilers, co-firing programs and thermal offtakers, supplied against a consistent published specification.

About us

About HemPower

A green energy company with hemp in its hands

HemPower is a renewable energy company. We got here through the hemp plant, and we know it better than almost anyone.

HemPower Biofuel's founder, Ariel Maman, spent fifteen years building the legal hemp and cannabis economy — usually before the framework for doing so existed. He negotiated the first agreement that let hemp products ship nationally through UPS, opening interstate commerce for the entire American industry.

That work carried into Latin America. What it produced was not just a crop: it was generational family farmland brought back into production, and farming families given a contracted reason to keep working land they had begun to lose.

Now we are pointing all of it at energy. The same agronomy, the same genetics, the same farms — growing biomass instead of extract, and pressing it into a solid fuel that industrial boilers can burn in place of coal. It is the highest-volume, highest-impact thing this plant can do, and it is where we intend to spend the next decade.

Close-up of pressed industrial hemp fuel pellets
Densified hemp fuel pellets — industrial grade
The future of energy isn't buried in the earth. It's grown on the surface.
The team

Leadership

Fifteen years
in this plant

HemPower did not arrive at hemp — it came out of the industry hemp built. The people running it have been growing this crop in Latin America since long before anyone called it energy.

Ariel Maman

Founder, HemPower Biofuel Founder, Bionoid Inc. & Bionoid Latin America Co-Founder & Chairman, Next Gen Cannabis Advisors Founding member, Ecuadorian Cannabis Cluster
Since 2009Supply chainInterstate logisticsBiofuels
Industry first — 2016 The man who opened national hemp logistics

Ariel was the first person to successfully negotiate with UPS to permit national shipment of hemp products across the United States. Before that, hemp businesses had no viable path to move product across state lines through a major carrier. That single regulatory breakthrough built the infrastructure now carrying billions of dollars in legal hemp every year.

A foundational architect of the American hemp industry, Ariel studied English with an emphasis on Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2009 he founded Birdsong Organics — one of the first legal cannabis supply companies in the United States. His cultivation and consulting operation, Flora, expanded to six states and became the first company in the industry to achieve a verified 30%+ THCa concentration in cannabis flower, confirmed by lab testing in Massachusetts in 2014.

Recognizing the ceiling that state-by-state THC regulation imposed, he moved to hemp and CBD in 2016, founding Derivatives USA — later restructured as Industrial Hemp Partners (IHP Holdings, LLC), which generated $50 million in revenue in five years and established itself as a serious supplier in the CBD industry. Today he is founder of Bionoid Inc. and Bionoid Latin America, a multinational hemp supply and service company built on capital efficiency and rapid growth, focused on ecologically sustainable large-scale cultivation through farming partnerships and pharmaceutical-grade processing.

In August 2022 he signed a $20 million Letter of Intent with Atlantic Biomass to produce commercial quantities of Sustainable Aviation Fuel from residual hemp biomass — sourcing up to 190,000 tons of annual residual biomass from Ecuadorian farms, with the University of Maryland, Ohio State University and Hood College developing the low-GHG jet fuel.

His thesis has never been cannabinoids. It is hemp as a multi-vertical global commodity — from pharmaceuticals to biofuels. He founded HemPower Biofuel to build the fuel half of it.

Juan García

Director of Operations — Ecuador & Colombia Bionoid Latin America Managing Partner, Next Gen Cannabis Advisors Founding member, Ecuadorian Cannabis Cluster
Ecuador & ColombiaGovernment relationsGrower relationships

Juan manages the company on the ground in Ecuador and Colombia. He runs the relationships the whole operation depends on — between HP Biofuel LLC, the governments of both countries, and the farmers who grow our biomass.

That is the part of this business that cannot be done from an office.

The founding team

Agronomy · Genetics · Processing Ecuador & Colombia
Plant geneticsField agronomyPellet processingPartner growers

Behind the leadership is a working team of agronomists, plant geneticists, processing engineers and partner farmers across Ecuador and Colombia. They run the breeding trials that make a variety worth planting, the field programs that get it harvested on spec, and the mill that turns it into fuel.

Several have been with this group since the hemp and CBD years — which is why the farms trust us, and why the spec holds.

Contact

Contact

Let's talk
tonnes

Whether you are an offtaker sizing a co-firing program, a landowner with acreage, or an investor looking at the supply side — we would like to hear from you.

General inquiries

Partnerships, press, growers, and everything that isn't a purchase order.

ariel@hpbiofuel.com 508 · 332 · 2629

Sales

Pellet supply, specifications, volumes, pricing and delivery terms.

sales@hpbiofuel.com 508 · 332 · 2629

Routed to sales@hpbiofuel.com or ariel@hpbiofuel.com based on your selection.