To: richard badauskas who wrote (34 ) 5/25/2000 5:05:00 AM From: Henrik Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 70
Letter to Shareholders - The Berkeley Pit-The Real Story GEO2 LIMITED 2000-05-25 ASX-SIGNAL-G HOMEX - Melbourne LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS Your company has spent many years developing strategies to penetrate lucrative global markets with its proprietary environmental technologies that are socially aware, ecologically sound and radically cost effective. The management of your company has achieved much progress in this task despite recent criticism to the contrary. So it is with some pleasure we report to you today that the strategic direction your directors have taken on your behalf has been supported by the global financial media. The latest issue of the New York-based Fortune magazine (dated May 15, 2000) indicates quite clearly that your company is on the right track in pursuing its strategy of concentrating on water purification and wastewater management products and processes for the global market in its lead story "The Big Money in Water". I recommend the Fortune article to all shareholders. Some of the salient points it makes are: "Supplying water to people and companies is a (US) $400-billion-a-year industry. That's 40 per cent of the size of the oil sector and a third larger than global pharmaceuticals. And that is just the beginning. The World Bank estimates that one billion people, one-sixth of humanity, have poor access to clean drinking water, and three billion lack sanitary sewerage facilities. Unless governments begin spending much more, the number of people without clean water will rise to 2.5 billion, about one person in three, by the year 2025... "Water is now a (US) $100 billion industry in America and growing fast. Public health, however, isn't the only issue. Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that decides the wealth of nations ... That epic job doesn't stop with drinking water. It also encompasses treating "wastewater, or sewage, an area that is just as big and just as complex," the article says. ACID MINE DRAINAGE Geo2 announced on March 6th, 2000, that it had made considerable progress in developing and commercialising its acid mine drainage (AMD) technology both in Australia and in global markets. Regrettably, another Australian company, Virotec International Ltd, appears to have misstated Geo2's efforts in an attempt to promote its own, as yet untested, AMD remediation process on wastewater from the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana - one of the most contaminated sites in North America and the benchmark for all AMD remediation processes. Following the Geo2 announcement, Virotec posted the following claim on its website (www.virotec.com.au): "As for the demonstrations by Cardia and Geo2, the data shows that they were VERY small scale and that they were not notably successful when compared to the results achieved by Virotec." But how does this claim stack up to the facts already presented to our shareholders and the ASX? Geo2 conducted a number of tests on Berkeley Pit wastewater in 1996 and 1997 using its novel Green Precipitate Process (GPP) to turn the contaminated pitwater into useable resources of clean water and extractable metals. THE GREEN PRECIPITATE PROCESS (GPP) Geo2's Green Precipitate Process is for the remediation of acid mine drainage waters that are contaminated with sulphates and heavy metals. The process turns the pollutants in the contaminated water into insoluble mineral forms, at which point they can be separated from the water and the minerals sold. The cleaned water can then be used for agricultural and industrial purposes. The international mining industry has generally been most unwilling to pay for the remediation of acid mine drainage and to date, no environmental technology company has been able to prove that it can make money from both cleaning and mining acid mine drainage streams. Like Geo2, many companies have developed technology solutions for cleaning and neutralising the water but no one has proved that their process is commercially viable. There will be a "world breakthrough" only when such a process has been designed and demonstrated as viable. Geo2 is conducting its own research into how to best recover marketable metals from both acid mine drainage residues and soils contaminated with heavy metals. As part of its continuing R&D program it is testing an Electrometals Technologies Ltd electro-winning cell with its GPP and soil redemption technologies. This technology has been successfully tested at both the Berkeley Pit and the giant Grassberg mine in Irian Jaya where it is producing high grade copper from the waste stream. Geo2 holds a 7 per cent shareholding in Electrometals Technologies Ltd. THE BERKELEY PIT PILOT PLANT TRIALS In October, 1997, Geo2 Ltd shipped a GPP pilot plant, with a capacity of up to 100 litres per minute, to Butte, Montana for testing on the Berkeley Pit water. The tests were successfully completed in front of representatives of US authorities. This program treated over 4,000 litres of raw acid water in actual continuous flow conditions and was acknowledged as totally successful in establishing that the company's GPP process was able to remove the metals from the water to meet US EPA regulations. These bulk tests were able to meet and even exceed the bench scale tests funded by the US EPA and the US Department of Energy. The tests were conducted at MSE Technology Applications Inc, a contractor to the US EPA and US DoE. The tests were carried out under strict conditions and monitored by their scientists. The tests culminated in an open day attended by some 35 people representing most of the authorities with an interest in the remediation of the waters of the Berkeley Pit. By contrast with Geo2's excellent results attained by continual testing of some 4,000 litres of contaminated Berkeley pitwater at Butte, Montana, Virotech announced (with great fanfare) on May 22 that a 57 litres (15 US gallons) sample from Berkeley had just arrived for testing at a laboratory in Lismore, NSW. Geo2 Ltd wishes Virotec International well with its tests on the tiny wastewater sample it has just obtained from the Berkeley Pit. We have already been there and done that. But the directors of Geo2 Ltd would be remiss in their fiduciary duty if they did not protect the integrity of the company's proprietary products and processes from claims about their inferiority as against the untested alternative. We merely point out that the above claims made on the Virotec website are unfounded and misleading in respect of Geo2's technology. The only possible present comparison that can be made between Virotec's and Geo2's processes is the comparison of the two companies' precipitation performance from Virotec at Mt Carrington in Australia and Geo2 at Butte, Montana, in the US. The attached table compares the efficiency of precipitation from the waters for the elements listed. It should be noted that the concentrations in the Berkeley Pit are considerably greater (4 to 2,000 times) than those of the Mt Carrington water. ELEMENT BEFORE AFTER PERCENTAGE REMOVAL TESTING TESTING REMAINING EFFICIENCY ppm ppm ALUMINUM Berkeley Pit 277.000 7.44 2.686% 97.31% Mt Carrington 11.752 0.0468 0.398% 99.60% CADMIUM Berkeley Pit 2.247 0.003 0.134% 99.87% Mt Carrington 0.476 0.0002 0.042% 99.96% CHROME Berkeley Pit 0.230 0.006 2.609% 97.39% Mt Carrington COPPER Berkeley Pit 188.000 0.021 0.011% 99.99% Mt Carrington 10.433 0.0031 0.030% 99.97% IRON Berkeley Pit 733.000 0.001 0.000% 100.00% Mt Carrington 0.303 0.0001 0.033% 99.97% MANGANESE Berkeley Pit 204.000 0.135 0.066% 99.93% Mt Carrington NICKEL Berkeley Pit 1.269 0.008 0.630% 99.37% Mt Carrington 0.040 0.0095 23.632% 76.37% ZINC Berkeley Pit 612.000 0.005 0.001% 100.00% Mt Carrington 20.844 0.0080 0.038% 99.96% pH LEVEL Berkeley Pit 2.85 8.6 Mt Carrington 4.3 8.4 Metal recovery such as with the Geo2 GPP is considered necessary by the US EPA to defray the costs of remediation. Geo2 treats the water externally, so filtration of the precipitate and separate metal recovery is possible. The Virotec process precipitates the metals in the dam so separate recovery of the metals does not seem to be possible at this stage although Virotec have stated that this will be an area for future research. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT WORK A significant development from these tests was the potential for further reducing the process time of producing clean water from the Berkeley Pit and adapting the process for in-line continuous remediation of other similar environmental disasters. This has led to the development of the Geo2 Cycloslaker and research into the most efficient means of recovering metals from the precipitate so that they may be re-used by industry. A major Australian pulp and paper mill has recently purchased and installed the new Geo2 Cycloslaker. Two of the biggest lime suppliers in the USA have indicated they will order trial units to demonstrate the company's new technology to their customers - an exciting breakthrough. Cycloslakers use lime in a cyclonic mixing/dosing system to make up a milk of lime slurry used in the treatment of a wide variety of various process steams, in particular potable water treatment. Lime neutralisation times are reduced to minutes rather than hours - doing away with expensive, outmoded and often troublesome mixing and slaking machinery. There is no need for large reaction vessels. This system negates the lime slurry makeup step by dosing the lime directly into a process stream. A multistage cyclomixer neutralisation reactor has also been developed, tested and patent application lodged. The novel Green Precipitate first tested at the Berkeley Pit can now be formed and fully reacted in less than one minute, compared to the 30 minutes taken in the Berkeley Pit trials in Butte in 1997. Importantly the pH control is fast and accurate due to the short residence time with high shear reaction mixing. The company is confident that the new Cycloslakers and Cyclomixers will add substantially to the effort to develop the world's first truly economical, effective and complete AMD treatment process. As any serious analyst will appreciate AMD is only a small part the Geo2 range of technologies. C Laycock EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN