At the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) a continuous process for the catalytic hydrothermal gasification of wet biomass to synthetic natural gas (SNG) has been developed. The catalytic reactor is operated at temperatures of 400-450 degrees C and pressures of 25-30 MPa. Salts contained in the biomass and released during the liquefaction step are continuously withdrawn in the supercritical salt separation step and recovered as a concentrated brine upstream of the catalytic reactor. The recovered salts may be recycled as valuable nutrients or fertilizers after a certain work-up. Salt management was identified as critical issue in many different hydrothermal processes such as supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) and in catalyzed or non-catalyzed gasification technologies in near- and supercritical water. In this article we focus on the influence of organics, in this case glycerol and its hydrothermal degradation products, on the continuous salt separation performance. In the presence of organics higher temperatures are needed in the salt separator for an efficient salt separation and recovery due to a higher overall fluid density in the presence of glycerol compared to the density of pure water at the same conditions. Increasing temperatures in the salt separator lead to an increased degradation and, in particular, gasification of the glycerol. The salt studied, i.e. K3PO4, catalyzed the gasification of the glycerol to CO, H-2, CO2, and CH4 as well as the water gas shift reaction. Due to the increased glycerol gasification at 460 degrees C in the salt separator, the fluid mixture density was lowered to similar values of pure water under the same conditions. Hence, at the fluid temperature of 460 degrees C in the salt separator the same salt separation performance was observed for water-K3PO4 and for an aqueous mixture of 20 wt.% glycerol with K3PO4. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.