Extraction of lipids with supercritical CO2 and downstream processing from grass-clover products from a green biorefinery demonstration platform

Grass-clover is one of the main biomass crops in northern Europe relevant for green biorefining to produce protein feed ingredients. The present study investigated the unique combination of a green biorefinery platform and supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO₂) to extract lipids and biocompounds besides improving the downstream process from grass-clover leaf protein concentrate (LPC) and grass-clover fibrous press cake (FPC). Grass-clover was harvested and processed on a green biorefinery demonstration platform to yield both LPC and FPC. Then, supercritical CO₂ was used by a design of experiments (DoE) method utilizing two factors (temperature and pressure) for process and optimization to obtain the extracts from LPC.