Cosmo Specialty Fibers, Inc. (CSF) is an affiliate of The Gores Group and was created to restore, restart and operate Weyerhaeuser’s former specialty cellulose mill in Cosmopolis, Washington. This facility currently produces a high-quality dissolving wood pulp. The residual process streams generated from this operation could be converted into sugars for fuels and chemical production.
As a NARA member organization, CSF will explore available markets for the simple sugars that could be derived from their residual streams. Parallel to these efforts, CSF will begin to develop a pretreatment and hydrolysis process to produce simple sugars which will be compared to the simple sugars produced from the Mild Bisulfite and SPORL pretreatment hydrolysate optimized by NARA members Catchlight Energyand the USFS Forest Products Laboratory. The reason for singling out CFS’s residual process streams is that they are commercially available and represents an inexpensive feedstock that could be used to generate large sugar samples for extensive evaluation in downstream processes.