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Technology Stocks : OILS - OTCBB: bringing stranded natural gas to market -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marc Cernovitch who wrote (33)	7/22/1998 5:29:00 PM
From: Terry Lyon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275

Doesn't sound very good for RNTK, yet RNTK has announced they are close to an agreement with TX - any day now! Also I have read a few posts that I haven't been able to confirm that SLHO process works great in lab but maybe not very well for production.

To: Marc Cernovitch who wrote (33)	7/22/1998 11:28:00 PM
From: John S. Baker	Respond to of 275

For the record.... Tom Cooley's response is not exactly consistent with what is generally accepted to be the facts in RNTK's case ... though I would be hard-pressed to either confirm or deny either version of the story this long after the actual events. RNTK's plant was built as a test site, paid for by the customer, at a garbage dump which the customer believed to be producing sufficient methane to support the process on a continuous basis. After the plant had been built and after it was determined that the gas supply was inadequate, they (dunno whether it was RNTK or the customer) piped in natural gas for a demonstration run in the plant, which worked as anticipated. But buying the feed gas, rather than getting it from the dump for free, was too costly and the demonstration was ended. The plant has been sold to a company in India, has been disassembled and shipped there, and apparently has suffered some delays in reconstruction (though I don't know the nature of these delays.) If memory serves, this plant was intended by its Indian owners to produce "waxes" ( a different purpose?) rather than diesel fuel but I believe this decision was dictated more by the available market for waxes on the Indian subcontinent than by a inability of the plant to produce some other end product. It appears that of late RNTK has focused primarily on its ability to process refinery bottoms, rather than flaring natural gas. To that extent, it may be accurate that RNTK is not really a competitor of SLHO's and eventually of ATNY's, which appear to be focusing on natural gas flaring from wells in areas too remote to use LNG or CNG as a recovery mode. Apparently cobalt-based catalysts can be poisoned prematurely by certain materials present in refinery bottoms (as well as some "dirty" natural gas), thus making RNTK's process favorable for refinery bottoms. In short, there currently appear to be two different markets (or applications) here. I do note that there has been discussion from time to time by RNTK of various methods for improving its efficiency vs cobalt when used with clean natural gas. Much of this has been discussed on RNTK's web site and in various conferences around the world. Disclosure: I have been invested in RNTK for some time. I am not a petroleum process engineer, and apologize in advance if I have misconstrued some technical aspects of the F-T process(es). JSb.