Mark,
That totally cracked me up. Your chemical engineering degree was not conferred by Washington State University, was it?
A chemical engineer, is a chemical engineer, is a chemical engineer. I would assume that most people with quality chemical engineering degrees would be able to decipher information available on patents, as Solv-Ex's was. To ask where one has the "right" to draw an opinion, is inane. Certainly there were a lot of conflicting opinions, otherwise the stock would have never gone up, or it would have never crashed. Certainly, from the complete lack of results from the "pilot scale testing" done last Spring, it should be blatantly obvious that the process was a complete and utter failure in that form. And the fact that $110M was spent, should tell anyone, let alone a chemical engineer, that perhaps another look at the feasibility should be done.
I would be willing to bet that Shell, or any other company trying to do a similar process (definitely not the same), would not proclaim the grandoise statements that Mr. Rendall gleefully crowed. I, as a long, expected crude oil to be flowing at the flowrates claimed, by late 1997. Clearly, this did not happen. I could have used their product to give someone a colon clensing, which someone unfortunately needs very badly so their brain begins to actually function (Cough, haven't seen $0.02).
I asked the reciprocal question to any longs last month, and nobody answered. What defense do you have, Mark? I sold my shares on the bump back to 4+ after SOLVQ came back on the OTC, and it had nothing to do with the folks who were playing games with the stock (as they must have). The complete lack of data told me that this process was a hoax. Surely Shell and anyone else will be working on a much smaller scale, and with substantial process changes than the one I read on the patent.
And if you were diligent in monitoring this stock in 1995-1996, you would know that Maxwell was proclaiming this stock to be "the growth stock of a generation". If someone did not believe the process would be viable, they had every right to thrash it, like Barron's did--truthfully and with facts.
Where do you question others' opinions when yours has no evidence to lend merit?
Please, before you ask where someone has the "right" to offer expert opinions, at least provide us with some technical reasons why you refute their takes. What do you have?
Regards,
G |
