Biomass Pretreatment With Carbon Dioxide

This chapter presents a literature review of biomass pretreatments that make use of carbon dioxide. Two supercritical technologies are considered: supercritical carbon dioxide explosion and sub/supercritical water hydrolysis with carbon dioxide. The main advantages presented by both techniques are the short time and improved sugar yield. Nonetheless, they are still under development and need further optimization, along with studies on economics, before they can become feasible at the industrial level.