I just got home from being out on a jobsite. I heard the news on the radio about how bad the market tanked. I was almost afraid to look at KNIC, but boy was I surprised to find it had bucked the trend today! What a breath of fresh air.
Also, I have been picking the brain of my Uncle, who is a retired mechanical engineer, and has worked the past thirty years with Rust Engineering in Birmingham, Alabama. He and I have been e-mailing each other quite a bit since he recently discovered the internet. I am including a portion of his comments about "pilot plants". It gives one a basic understanding of what a pilot plant is, how long it takes to construct, problems that can be expected, and for what purpose it is built.
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You asked about pilot plants. Their duration of design and construction could vary from six months to two and a half
years, depending on whether it is a laboratory type development, or
an actual small scale production plant. A small scale
production plant could take from 18 to 30 months to
design, procure equipment, and construct. But then, the
fun really starts. When you push the button to start production
all the worms come out of the wood work. Even in established technology, start up is a very hectic time. In a new technology
you find that some design assumptions on how equipment will
perform the required processes have to go "back to the drawing board." Then the "ripping out and puttin in begins." That is
just the nature of developmental work. Since this is dealing with volatile materials, it would probably be like a petrochemical plant. Hopefully, no explosions occur, or people get maimed or killed in the process. RUST was never big in the petrochem work, but we had some guys working for us who had worked for the "biggies" in Texas and New Orleans. If you don't know what your are doing you can shake hands with Saint Peter real quick. I would think a venture of the kind you mention would realize this, however, and hire
appropriate scientists and engineers to tackle the job.
If I sound a little extreme on the risk of new projects its because of an
experience I had when I was the Lead Project Engineer (and later Project Manager) on a facility we designed and built in Bridgeport, CN. It was a 2250 ton per day refuse to energy plant (burning municipal garbage) which generated about 35 mega watts of electrical power. Ours was an accepted technology whereby we take the garbage as delivered and put it through the incinerators (boilers), tin cans, washing machines, and all. We then separated the metal from the bottom ash (which was sold to a scrap dealer) and land-filled the ash.
In order to build this plant we had to demolish a plant that had been sold to the city under the concept that it was "the cutting edge of technology." I wont say it didn't have some merit. But they were obviously "not there" for a production facility. Their technology
tried to take the garbage and put it through "hogs" (shredders)
after separating out the big stuff by cranes. They then attempted to process the garbage into a highly volatile fuel. The fire department
got to make several trips to the plant, and they never achieved more than 10 or 20% of the design production before the plant was abandoned and the lawyers took over and got fat. The facility
cost about $100 million. We sold the equipment for salvage and
demolished the building to the ground and started over with our design, which cost about $130 million (due to escalating of
equipment and labor and superior instrumentation and control systems). If the previous company had ever built a pilot plant it certainly didn't show in their design of a production facility.
After a pilot plant is built and "debugged" (and that could take a year, or never, as my experience with our competition disclosed) then you take the knowledge from the pilot plant and build the full production facility. Most probably the pilot plant will then be scrapped because it will be so cobbled up they will want to "start all over" in designing a "better mouse trap."
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Hope this sheds some light on the seriousness of Pure Energy's commitment, and some of the hurdles they will have to jump. The fact that they have linked up to Arkenal is definitely a plus since they are already established.
Mike
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