MAYFIELD — A few entrepreneurs and Lackawanna College are building a throne for the emerging hemp industry on the bones of long-dead King Coal.

Running in tandem with marijuana policy, both for medical use and the still-debated recreational side, federal and state governments are clearing the way for hemp to return.

Scientists with Mayfield-based AgriHemp Industries and Lackawanna College found at least one seed strain, shared from Penn State's hemp research program, that grows well in culm, the mine waste piled in fields scattered throughout Northeast Pennsylvania.

"We've set up a for-profit company that will be a vertically integrated hemp company to do research, to grow and process the oils, to creating final end products," said AgriHemp partner Daniel Summa.

The scientists nurture seedlings with detoxified water from the 70-billion-gallon underground mine void that runs from Carbondale to Jermyn.

Summa is also executive director of U.S. Ecological Advanced Research & Conservation Hub (USEARCH) and the founder of Keystone Pure Water Tech, a company that developed systems to clean water used in hydraulic fracturing and other industries.

Last year, the state Department of Agriculture gave USEARCH and the college a permit to research hemp.

"We grew it out on about an acre in the growing season… we just wanted to prove that we could grow it," Summa said. "This year, we're hoping to grow 25 acres on the culm side."

They will start seedlings, up to 100,000 at a time, in a greenhouse attached to the NEET Center, the Mayfield business incubator and tech center that Summa and his colleagues, former Lackawanna College President Ray Angeli and businessman Karl Pfeiffenberger, started a few years ago.

The NEET Center is almost fully occupied with health and tech companies. Summa and Angeli said hemp winds together the diverse strands of their original vision for the place.

They have proprietary technology, and are now outfitting existing, multi-million-dollar laboratories last used by Pennsylvania American Water, to remove lipids and other unwanted compounds from hemp and refine it down to pharmaceutical-grade CBD.

Quick science lesson

Cannabidiol, or CBD, is a cannabinoid.

Cannabis plants, including hemp, produce a host of cannabinoids, including the most well-known one, Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which, unlike CBD, makes people high.

Hemp plants produce negligible amounts of THC, but harvestable amounts of CBD and other cannabinoids.

CBD is in vogue right now.

Aside from the risky, likely mislabeled products gas stations hawk at the checkout counter, legitimate companies are putting it in hand creams, doughnuts, even alcohol.

Other cannabinoids and aromatic oils from cannabis plants called terpenes have their own medicinal properties that the AgriHemp partners see gaining traction soon among major pharmaceutical companies.

When that happens, manufacturers, especially pharmaceutical companies, will want the highest level of quality and consistency — which partners at the NEET Center say has not been done yet when it comes to hemp.

"Who do you think they're going to come to? People who have been doing it for a long time," said Ryan Hedrick, a partner who spouts encyclopedic knowledge of cannabis and its properties, knowledge borne of his work in Colorado and the Pennsylvania's fledgling cannabis industry.

Jobs, worker pipeline

Seated around a conference table inside the NEET Center last week, the partners laid out their plan to create high tech and agriculture jobs in Northeast Pennsylvania — and a worker pipeline to feed them.

"The college kind of formed to help the breaker boys get off the breakers and into the front offices of the coal industry," said Lackawanna College President Mark Volk. "Here, you're taking the natural extension. You're taking that by-product left from the coal industry … in a way that helps to drive the economic development in the region."

In December, the federal Agriculture Improvement Act removed hemp from the Controlled Substance Act, which means it is no longer illegal.

When it comes to CBD, the Food and Drug Administration retains tight control when it goes into food, supplements, drugs and cosmetics.

The state agriculture department awarded 84 industrial hemp research permits, and is now accepting applications for the 2019 growing season.

Following hemp's removal from the Controlled Substances Act, Harrisburg lifted the 100-acre cap on hemp fields, giving growers greater incentive to enter what analysts say could become a multi-billion-dollar CBD industry.

Two years ago, the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council and Lehigh University tried planting hemp on mine waste in Plymouth Twp. under a research permit.

Their efforts were largely unsuccessful, said Erica Stark, executive director of both the American Hemp Association and Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council.

"It germinated in a lot of areas, and a lot of it got washed away because we had really heavy rains right after we planted," she said. "Some of them got to be two feet high, which was the biggest any of them got."

They are working with Penn State University and plan to try again this year.

While the state research program opened up the science component, removing hemp from the illegal substances registry created a clearer path to making hemp viable with markets that stretch across state and national borders.

CBD has its own medicinal qualities. It is calming and already used in a new FDA-approved prescription, Epidiolex, for seizures. There also is research to show it soothes joint pain and helps ease users to sleep.

However, Michael Pappalardo, AgriHemp's chief science officer, said CBD is better as a catalyst.

It gives greater efficacy to other medicines. For example, it improves how lidocaine abates back pain or how arginine improves circulation in people with diabetes.

"It's synergistic," he said.

Hemp and its fibrous stalks have history as a cash crop in Pennsylvania long before President Richard Nixon blacklisted all cannabis plants in 1970 by signing the Controlled Substances Act.

The stalk material can be used to make concrete and textiles. Advocates count up an eye-popping 25,000 goods in which it can be used.

For now, the scientists at AgriHemp and Lackawanna College will focus on the medicinal and consumer goods side of hemp. That is where the market is, Summa said.

However, "if some enterprising student wants to come along and say, ‘Hey, let's do something,'" he's ready to listen.

Contact the writer:

joconnell@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9131; @jon_oc