It will be interesting to see if VADXX admits that their $20M plant isn't commercially viable.
Liberation Capital, which paid for VADXX' plant, simply flushed their money down the toilet. Liberation could have saved their money and all they would have had to do was look at the price of scrap plastic and the price of oil/gasoline/diesel and see the futility of thermally breaking down plastic into oil or fuel. Additionally, the stoichiometry shows that a couple of hydrogen atoms are needed at every cleaving of a polymer to make alkanes, which means the process has a further theoretical limit of about 90%, depending what type of fuel is targeted. The economics wouldn't work even if the cost to run the plant were zero.
In the May 18th, 2016 article, the CEO said, "We'll be making our first commercial oil production in June, and we'll have our first diesel and naphtha sales probably in August," Garrett said. "Those will be limited volumes. We'll be running at maybe 25 percent capacity. Then we'll ramp it up to 100 percent capacity as of the first of the year."
- resource-recycling.com
Now the middle of October, the CEO hasn't said they're producing anything commercially and hasn't announced any sales...at least not as far as I can see by searching online.
My guess is that VADXX is now planning their next move. I don't know if VADXX management is dishonest or if they really thought they could make plastic pyrolysis commercially viable but by now they certainly have a good idea that the process can't make money...they just haven't told anyone yet.
VADXX can't claim the process is environmentally friendly either because plastic recycling companies will pay for scrap plastic and recycling is more green. The household plastic which is routinely thrown into the garbage--that plastic will continue to be prohibitively expensive to sort out of the waste stream and, if it is sorted out, then the scrap plastic is, again, worth more to recyclers.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe VADXX will downgrade their commercial facility to a 'test' facility and ask for more money or maybe they'll fold. VADXX could definitely add value by publishing the reason for their future failure so future investors can save their money on these money-losing plastic-to-oil ventures. |
