New cellulosic sugar facility gets designer

Sweetwater Energy has confirmed its first commercial-scale, cellulosic sugar-production facility project is moving forward with the appointment of a design company.

Merrick and Company has been charged with the facility’s creation process from front-end engineering through to detailed design. Sweetwater eventual aim is to produce low-cost sugars from non-food plant materials and sell them to biofuels, biochemical, and bioplastics production companies.

‘We needed an engineering design firm understood the nature of how we’re trying to replace petroleum with renewable sugars,’ says Sweetwater chief development officer Ron Boillat, chief deployment officer at Sweetwater. ‘Something as simple as a pump can pose difficulty when you’re dealing with biomass, so we needed a company that knew bioprocessing inside and out.’

Merrick has been operating in the energy industry for almost 60 years.