*Hempitecture’s Idaho facility. Photo courtesy of Hempitecture, Inc.*

By Jean Lotus

An $8.4 million award from the US Department of Energy is back-on-track for Idaho’s Hempitecture, Inc., the company said. Things got complicated after the fourth quarter of 2024, when the company was told they won the award, administered through DOE's Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains (MESC), to build a hemp processing facility in eastern Tennessee.

A change in presidential administrations in January 2025 and the blanket cancellation of federal grants caused delays and meant the company had to basically re-apply last summer, co-founder Mattie Mead told HempBuild Magazine.

“The process review request had a huge amount of huge data collection, budget requests, updated narratives, documents,” Mead said. “Between [co-founder] Tommy [Gibbons] and I, we probably turned out like 50 pages of documentation in about a month.”

But the company’s persistence bore fruit. A meeting between Hempitecture and DOE officials in May, 2026 confirmed the project's status and cleared the way for the company to begin moving forward again.

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The MESC program targets communities in census tracts identified as economically disadvantaged by the closure of coal mining and related manufacturing, including large portions of central Appalachia, where the proposed facility would be located.

Mead said the original proposal envisioned a vertically integrated operation in eastern Tennessee, growing industrial hemp, decorticating the fiber, and manufacturing nonwoven building materials on site, extending the supply chain and manufacturing model the company has built at its Idaho operations.

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*Hempitecture co founders Tommy Gibbons (L) and Mattie Mead (R). Photo courtesy of Hempitecture.*

Rescoping the project

DOE is now working with awardees to finalize updated agreements on an expedited basis, Mead said.

The underlying goal of the award, additional manufacturing capacity for bio-based, hemp-based building materials and related products, remains unchanged, but the timeline and scope of the eastern Tennessee facility may be adjusted. Costs have risen for energy, raw materials, and international freight and transportation that weren't in the 2024 proposal.

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A mixed year

Mead described the pause as a mixed outcome for the company. With the award's status uncertain, Hempitecture's ability to raise the matching private capital required under the grant's terms, and to pursue related investment conversations, was effectively frozen.

But, at the same time, the company used the period to strengthen core operations in Idaho, and work on ICC-ES certification of the company’s new Plant Panel product.

“The year bought us some time to really think about and work on our business,” Mead said.

*A team member moves bales of hemp fiber at the Hempitecture factory in Jerome, ID. Photo courtesy of Hempitecture*

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The project's three-year performance period under the DOE award runs from 2027 through 2030.

Mead said the company seeks a financial or corporate partner to help carry the project forward. He said that could take the form of debt, equity, or venture financing, or a corporate partner already established in conventional building materials and looking to expand into bio-based products.

He framed the federal award as a way for such a partner to build comparable manufacturing capacity at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise require, citing roughly $16 million as a rough estimate of what unsubsidized capacity of that scale might cost to build independently, against the $8.4 million in DOE support already committed to the project.

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Mead remains cautiously optimistic about the project's outlook, while acknowledging the scale of the undertaking: standing up a new manufacturing facility on the opposite side of the country from Hempitecture's existing Idaho operations.

He said DOE has been collaborative throughout the renewed process and that the agency appears motivated to move the remaining awards forward.

“[DOE] is in a ‘say yes’ mood and telling us to move this along,” Mead said.