April 6, 2012

Sweetwater Energy and BioGasol Announce Partnership

Sweetwater Energy, Inc., a Rochester, NY-based cellulosic sugar manufacturer, and BioGasol ApS, a Danish biotechnology company, announced today that they have entered into a strategic partnership.

Sweetwater will use BioGasol’s pretreatment technology – Carbofrac® – as part of its overall solution to maximize the amount of sugar that can be extracted from plant-based feedstocks.

“We’re very excited about this partnership,” said Arunas Chesonis, Chair and CEO of Sweetwater Energy. “The combination of BioGasol’s pretreatment technology merges so well with the advances we’ve made in hydrolysis and inhibitor reduction that the relationship almost seemed inevitable.”

“Our two companies have remarkably similar philosophies in that we both believe smaller, decentralized pretreatment and hydrolysis facilities are the key at this stage to making cellulosic biofuels and biochemicals work,” said Anders Weber, CEO of BioGasol. “Sweetwater has the business model and technology that fits perfectly with BioGasol’s high yield and flexible pretreatment equipment. We couldn’t be more enthusiastic about this partnership.”

Sweetwater Energy uses a unique technology to produce low-cost sugars from non-food plant materials. The company’s sugar solution is sold to refineries, which use this feedstock to produce biofuels, biochemicals, and bioplastics. Unlike petroleum-based technologies, Sweetwater Energy’s process uses renewable plant materials and crop residues, which have little or no impact on food agriculture, and which can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the spring of 2011, Sweetwater Energy’s team of scientists, led by one of the world’s most renowned leaders in bio-conversion technology, Dr. Sarad Parekh, Ph.D., devised a way to dramatically increase the efficiency of the extraction and fermentability of extracted sugarsfrom a variety of biomass types. The technology generates separate and concentrated individual streams of C5 and C6 sugars. This groundbreaking technology with the Sweetwater decentralized business model allows refineries to dramatically improve their profitability by stabilizing and lowering their costs while bridging the refinery into cellulosic markets.

BioGasol ApS is a Danish biotechnology company founded in January 2006 as a spinout from the Technical University of Denmark, DTU. Among other biological renewable energy technologies, the company develops, manufactures and licenses pretreatment solutions – the Carbofrac® series – now at a commercial stage. The Carbofrac® process is based upon extensive research and development work at DTU since 1994. Today Biogasol has just over 30 employees and has since 2006 demonstrated its equipment in a series of successfully up-scaled pilot and demo plants. Its sister company, C5 Labs ApS, has among others developed proprietary high-yield pentose/hexose co-fermentation technology.