The Mississippi Ethanol Project is a comprehensive, multi-departmental effort to develop an economical conversion of biomass (in the form of sawdust) to ethanol. This project is a continuation of a pilot scale research project for the conversion of biomass to methanol, located in Winona, MS. In order to study the system more fully, a 1/10 scale pre-pilot plant was built at Mississippi State University's Institute for Clean Energy Technology (formerly D.I.A.L.). The project utilizes a novel gasification unit, and, as such, presents a unique problem in the area of particulate and condensable hydrocarbon removal. Since the producer gas is to be treated biologically, the large quantities of these contaminants produced in the reaction must be removed almost entirely before final conversion can be performed. This paper outlines the steps that were taken to characterize these residual compounds, the potential removal technologies to be evaluated in the pre-pilot system, and the problems that have been encountered thus far in our research.