National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Technology Transfer

Economical Biomass Pretreatment Process Available for Licensing

Clean fractionation—an efficient biomass pretreatment process to help lower biorefinery production costs—is available for licensing.

Description

Clean fractionation is a process for upgrading biomass feedstocks for a biorefinery by separating the cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin into pure streams for conversion into value-added products. The technology uses a mixture of an organic solvent and water to cleanly separate these three major components of biomass. Through this solvent fractionation technique, the extraction efficiency is improved, which reduces conversion times and increases yields, allowing the biomass to be processed more economically. It also allows for a wide variety of biomass feedstocks to be used to produce a variety of chemical products for many industries.

Applications and Industries

• Ethanol
• Pulp and paper
• Chemical
• Food processing
• Packaging
• Fuels

Benefits

• Lowers ethanol production costs by significantly reducing fermentation times and increasing yields
• Enables hemicellulose and lignin to be used for production of other value-added chemicals (i.e., Xylitol from hemicellulose)

Development Stage

Prototype for pilot production

Intellectual Property Status

One U.S. patent issued, additional intellectual property

Awards

"Notable Technology Development," Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer, 2005

More Information

See Method of Separating Lignocellulosic Material into Lignin, Cellulose, and Dissolved Sugars.

Fact Sheet

Technology Available for Licensing—Clean Fractionation (PDF 499 KB). Download Adobe Reader.

Contact

Dave Christensen, 303-275-3015