The Suprabio process concept starts by pretreatment of biomass by the technology developed by BioGasol. BioGasol is specialized in biomass pretreatment and will administer the optimization of biomass pretreatment toward production of biofuels (e.g. ethanol/butanol), acids, additives, health products, chemical structural components etc. The pretreatment process required is dependent on each desired Suprabio product. Thus, parameters such as temperature, retention time and chemical additive need to be optimized for each product.
To optimize the pretreatment with regard to the various products, statistical design modeling was used. The results obtained from the statistical design enables the processing to be directed towards maximal release of desired biomass constituents. Furthermore, when choosing the optimal pretreatment conditions, production of degradations products inhibitory for downstream processing, must be taken into consideration. The choice of process parameters is thus dependent on both release and degradation.