Comet Biorefining constructing cellulosic sugar toll facility in Ontario

In Canada, Comet Biorefining announced that it has begun fabrication of a cellulosic sugar toll processing plant to be located in Southwestern Ontario.

This facility will produce cellulosic sugar on a tolling basis for current and potential Comet customers and licensees. The Comet Cellulosic Sugar Process is feedstock flexible and produces low cost cellulosic sugar using a cost effective modular process.

Comet Biorefining Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Andrew Richard, commented, “We continue to focus on driving down the cost of cellulosic sugar. One aspect of this is providing our customers with access to semi‐commercial quantities of cellulosic sugar on a cost effective basis for their scale up needs using their chosen biomass feedstock. Our low capital cost process allows us to offer this tolling solution at a reasonable scale without the need for large capital outlays. At the same time, this facility will demonstrate our cellulosic sugar technology to potential customers and licensees.”

Comet expects that the toll facility will be available for customer runs in the second quarter of 2012. The system will be capable of producing drum quantities of cellulosic sugar syrup using a wide range of biomass feedstocks.

Dr. Richard added, “A key step in the development of the cellulosic sugar industry is to provide commercially relevant quantities of low cost sugar to downstream users for their evaluation and for development of their applications. Every application is different, and we have the flexibility of choosing different feedstocks and different process conditions to optimize sugars for a given application.”