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SCOTT TUDMAN: So hello, everyone. My name's Scott Tudman, chief technology officer at Sweetwater Energy. I'd like to give you a brief introduction to our Sunburst Pretreatment Technology and show you how it can really serve as the driving force behind a true biorefinery. So I'll just start out with a little known. There's an abundance of really good science out there. A lot done right here at MIT actually.

It shows that biomass fractions can be used to create or enhance materials that we use every day. And by biomass fractions, I'm referring to nano-fibrillated and microcrystalline cellulose as well as lignin and cellulosic sugars, the main components of a biomass material. One of the issues with developing that and really pushing it forward into commercialization is that the current fractionation technologies aren't efficient enough to extract those components in a cost-effective manner. It just costs too much to really get them into widespread use in commodity markets.

A lot of times you get fairly low yields. So you might be lucky to get 50% of that starting biomass converted into some of these products. And what's really needed is a scalable pretreatment system that's fast and efficient and gets high yields. So what you want is that whole barrel approach to biorefining that you see in the petroleum industry. It's mandatory in the petroleum industry.

It has to be applied to biorefining to make it economically viable. So we've been spending a good amount of time developing that solution. And the solution is our Sunburst Pretreatment System. And it's an elegant solution. So real quick, it's based on twin screw extrusion. For those of you that aren't familiar, twin screw extruders are industrial pieces of equipment used across many industries.

We simply modify it to suit our needs. So if you can picture biomass going in-- and we can process a wide variety of different biomass materials. But you can picture wood chips coming into the feed zone on that extruder. We look to do three things as it passes through that extruder.

Fibrillate, so mechanically downsize that biomass. We impart dilute acid hydrolysis, a chemical reaction. And then as it comes out, there's a steam explosion. So in 20 seconds or less, you go from wood chips to a very well deconstructed delicious-looking chocolate pudding-looking material. Right?

And well, it's coming up to lunch, right? So it is delicious looking. And that allows us to very quickly and efficiently further fractionate that into our main product groups. As mentioned, there's a microcrystalline and nano-fibrillated cellulose. They have some unique qualities compared to what other people are making out there.

Really clean non-sulfonated lignin. So it's differentiated from lignans that are typically derived from the pulp and paper process. And cellulosic sugars. So they're relatively clean and highly fermentable.

So you plug that Sunburst system at the front end of that biorefinery. And we can make various flavors of those three main product groups. Right? And the key here is that utilizing that effective pretreatment, we can convert 90% or more of that starting biomass into these intermediate products.

Right? So it's really getting to that whole barrel approach. And if we use our nano-fibrillated cellulose as an example, first of all, when we produce it we have a very low energy pathway to produce that material. So it's a very efficient low energy pathway. So we're already at an advantage to most people out there in the industry.

But then the sale of the lignin and the sugar products effectively subsidize the production of that material. So we can produce and sell our NFC at a fraction of the cost of what others can. And I will just mention that we have built and commissioned a Sunburst system at what we term our commercial scale. So in the EU, there's a grant program called Sweetwoods where we recently commissioned at 80 dry metric tonnes per day, excuse me, of throughput. So we're pretty excited about that.

So we can make these materials. What can you do with them? That's really the big question, right? So just a real quick use case study. We partnered with a group that was looking to include our specialty cellulose into a mortar and cement application and found that a very small amount of NFC, nano-fibrillated cellulose, added into a mortar mix-- actually it applied for our MCC as well, was able to double tensile strength while still increasing the bending and compressive strengths.

So one tenth of 1% addition into a material of our bio-based cellulose can really improve things that we use every day. And that's what we're looking to do. And that's just one case of many. And I guess that brings us to why we're here. I'm running out of time. But we really focus on making these materials as efficiently and reliably as possible.

We're looking for partners to take those materials and put them into your end products and into your processes. So I've listed a few areas here that we've looked at ourselves or with partners and highlighted some that are more applicable to this conference. But if anyone listening has any interest whatsoever in these materials and think there might be some overlap, we'd love to have conversations. And I'll be in the lunchroom. So thank you for your time.

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