Tommie Flannery Baskis, Director and CEO of Draconis Extraction Technologies, Max LePera, Vice President of Draconis Extraction Technologies, and Paul Thomas Baskis, Scientist and Inventor, sat down with the editorial team at Cannabis Tech to discuss how their all-natural, alcohol extraction process is scalable for producing product for producers in the cottage industry all the way up to commercial and industrial scale systems.
Draconis Extraction Technologies is a patented hemp and cannabis processing system that offers around 90 percent efficiency in the extraction of cannabinoids from cannabis biomass. This technology was developed by Draconis Extraction Technologies. Because this method has an emphasis on broad spectrum extraction, it is able to maintain the plant’s naturally occurring terpenes and cannabinoids, thereby providing the most potent form of the plant.
An Alternative Method of Oil Extraction Technology
Draconis enters the cannabis sector with a specific focus in big scale extraction, which is a necessary method as the market need continues to rise. While there are different forms of extraction technologies available on the market today, Draconis enters the industry with this particular focus.
Not only is their method completely unique, but each member of the team brings something special to the table in terms of their history and the experience they bring to Draconis. Paul Thomas Baskis, the scientist on our team, is an innovator who is recognized both nationally and globally. He has a number of patents and applications pending in the fields of waste to energy conversion, waste treatment, and waste minimization. It is common knowledge that he is the “man behind the machine” due to his more than three decades of experience in the design and development of technologies for use in industrial and commercial-scale processes.
Tommie said, “Our turn-key company concept and demonstrating our support for our Military Veterans are so essential to us.” He said this with a sense of pride in their operation. Draconis provides a comprehensive range of cannabis business services, including the planning, construction, and management of the cannabis facility, as well as the use of security services provided by former members of special forces.
Why Is Production on an Industrial Scale So Crucial?
Due to the fact that the cannabis industry has been functioning at the magnitude of a cottage industry up until this point, CBD oil has been extremely pricey and out of reach for many people. Draconis has every intention of altering this. In light of the fact that the primary market for cannabis in the foreseeable future will be mass production (i.e., the food and beverage industry), the extraction process will need to shift toward large-scale industrial processing. In comparison to small-scale procedures, which only generate about 200 pounds of cannabis per day, mass production is more effective and has the potential to make cannabis available to more people who have a medical need for it. The completely automated facilities that are used in the industrial scale extraction technology of Draconis are also less expensive and need less labor than traditional alternatives.
Max also stated an additional aspect of efficiency and cheap cost in the design of the Draconis process, and that was the fact that “we are able to recover more than 95 percent of the alcohol utilized in the process.”
Despite this, there is no guarantee that extraction technologies on a smaller scale will become obsolete once industrial-scale techniques are used. In point of fact, the situation is just the contrary. As a result of the fact that the methods developed by Draconis create winterized high-grade crude, this material can subsequently be put to use to more effectively produce isolates from C02 and other more compact extraction systems.
Environmental Responsibility
When it comes to the cannabis sector in particular, the importance of sustainability is growing by leaps and bounds with each new day that passes. Draconis takes this to heart, thereby exemplifying what a circular economy should be all about.
Their fundamental technology is modeled after natural processes. It is a sustainable platform that provides a paradigm that is clean, safe, and favorable to the environment. There will be biomass leftover after the production of CBD oil. This can either be utilized to produce clean electrical energy for off-grid living or to build fixed organic carbon, which can then be returned to the soil. Both of these applications are viable uses for the resource. Even the team’s earth to earth emblem, which is now in the process of being trademarked, was brought up for discussion. However, broad-spectrum CBD oil constitutes only a small part of the whole effort. Now that the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 has been signed into law, they have their sights set on hemp.
The industrial scale technology developed by Draconis will encourage the growth of hemp, and it will do so while maintaining a focus on environmental responsibility. By doing so, you can help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use less water than you would for comparable consumer crops, and offer higher quantities of pulp and yield that can be used to produce plastic alternatives and microcrystalline cellulose. All of these benefits can be realized through these actions.
The Path Forward for Draconis
We talked a little bit about what’s in store for the future of Draconis and what their ideal customer looks like – it featured bits from multiple different consumer profiles — similar to the way that other cannabis businesses are looking ahead to the future.
Farmer cooperatives have taken an interest in Draconis’s technology, which comes as no surprise given the company’s commitment to social and environmental responsibility as well as to the principles of sustainability. When farmers gather together and want to invest, Draconis sees that as a situation where everyone benefits. They will be able to harvest the results of their labor, they will own a piece of an extraction plant, and product distributions will come back to them if they take this course of action.
Major retailers of CBD oil are looking to integrate and increase their return on investment in a vertical fashion, thus their large-scale operations have drawn the attention of various CBD oil merchants. CBD oil retailers can manage the techniques, practices, and standards of their supply chain by performing their own extraction. This allows them to keep control over their supply chain. After then, vertical integration can be leveraged to take use of the surplus capacity to feed additional revenue sources.
In the cannabis sector, there is not another company quite like Draconis Extraction Technologies. Large enterprises, grower cooperatives, and general investors can all enter this market with a low requirement for specialized knowledge if they use technologies that are designed for industrial scale production.