Hemp may be the ticket to our energy future

We all know that hemp has many practical uses, including paper, textiles, construction, health food, and fuel. But in the past few years, scientists have been working on a new way to use the plant. Using perfectly legal hemp fibers, which contain no THC at all, these badasses were able to create cheap, high-performance supercapacitors "better than graphene."

"Graphene, an atomically strong material that is 100 times stronger than steel, and conducts electricity at higher efficiency rates than copper, can be applied to transform everyday electronics and machines. The problem is, the carbon monolayer is expensive to produce, which severely limits its adoption in industrial sectors (it cost roughly $2,000 per gram). By comparison, using converted hemp fibers as an alternative for graphene costs less than $500 per ton to manufacture.

The process of turning hemp into a superior nanomaterial involves 'cooking' the leftover bark until it turns into carbon nanosheets, a technical process called hydrothermal synthesis."

Read Is Hemp the Next Graphene? at the MassRoots blog.

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