This technology describes a method to pretreat diverse biomass sources at high solid content under consistent conditions using supercritical CO2 - H2O processes.

While it is a common route to obtain monosaccharides from biomass for fuel or other bio-product production, existing process are environmentally intensive, costly, and demand large amounts of energy. This novel method offers substantial advantages over others, since it is capable of pretreating different biomass species at a high solid content using very similar process conditions.

Potential Commercial Applications

• A pretreatment step in the conversion of biomass to ethanol or any other process using biomass-derived sugars as an intermediate.

Potential Advantages

• Overcomes the challenge that many current pre-treatment processes cannot handle, i.e., producing a concentrated solution of monosaccharide from biomass.
• A more environmentally and economically sound way to convert various carbon sources to monosaccharides than by using other processes.
• High glucose yields (70 to 85%) are obtained in this process.

File Number: 5032