He asked me when I thought commmercial testing "at a coal fired power plant" might go commercial. That is the question I answered.
It would need to pass the pilot plant stage first. Then go commercial. If you read the latest PRs, and if you had listened to the latest conference call you would know that CABN is waiting until Sept 2011, just to get lab test data on their latest catalyst. IF, the data is good enough, Byron has said that their JV pilot plant (Not commercial, but pilot plant) target will be a natural gas well that has CO2 and CH4, with too much CO2 to be profitable to produce the CH4, and not a coal fired power plant. The natural gas well will already have the CO2 and CH4, in a previously worthless hole in the ground owned by the JV partner. No need to build and capture a CO2 capture facility. No need to buy natural gas at the coal fired power plant.
They will clean up the gas feed (remove, other gases, water, HS, H2S....) and then feed the clean CO2 & CH4 mix to a pilot plant that needs to be designed and built, and then tested for another 6 months. Then if that works, they would go commercial at the well site. There is no mention in that latest plan to JV with a coal fired power plant.
That entire process could take 16-24 months alone, before the commercial plant at the well is built, tested and proven to be commercially viable. IF that all happens, then they might be able to sell a coal fired power plant a pilot plant JV deal. Then you are looking at another 12 months to 18 months before it could be up and running as a commercial plant.
Current Lab test of catalyt: 6 months
Pilot plant deal, construction and testing: 3+6=9 conservative months
Commercial plant (well source, not coal) Construction: 6 months
Commercial plant trials to debug and prove: 6 months
Then if all goes well close a coal fired power plant PILOT plant deal (not commercial): 27 months
sum of the above is 27 months
I paid .30 for my first shares in CABN over 2 years ago. They are now selling for .07, which is a 75% loss for me. The problem is dilution. They sell shares to pay their bills ( a neccessary evil to survive). As the stock OS climbs the stock price falls because the market cap (set by the market, total value of the company, stock price times the total shares issued)) tends to stay the same as long as there is still no revenue. I am hearing the same promise here from Byron that I hear 2 years ago. The engineer has changed, the patent has changed, and the feed stock has changed in that 2 years, the process and catalyst has changed.
I am just trying to be honest with people here. And trying to keep a civil, polite board. If you check back, you will find that when some one has posted un-factual (a nice way to phrase it) information, trying to take the stock price down, I have been the one that proved them wrong with facts, because I work in and am trained in the field of Chemical engineering.
As far as Byron goes, he has not answered my last emails or phone calls since Thanksgiving, so I stopped trying, as he seems to be too busy. He has set up a single guy on the Yahoo board (their MOD), who runs an email list for collecting questions, and then once about every 3 months he has a conference call, with preselected questions he answers in scripted phone set up. He did that about 4-6 weeks ago. That seems to be his way of answering the hoards of retail investor questions currently.
By the way, I have a question for you? With all the hundreds of billions of dollars the US DOE has passed out to fund CO2 CCS and CCR conversion to products, why was CABN not been able to get one of those grants in the prior 18 months?
I have another question for you. Do you understand what commercial operation and testing is?
New technology goes through stages. First is theory, then lab trials, then pilot plant trials, then a small scale commercial trial plant, then full blown full sized commercial plants. 12-16 months ago Byron was saying they were ready to go full blown commercial, and skip all the middle steps, with the original organic enzyme technology they now seem to have abandoned? Now we are doing stage 2 of a lab trial on a new to them, licensed from an outside source, raw catalyst 12-16 months later!
Like I said, I am vested, I still have shares, but I will not add here, today, at this price.
I almost forget. The promised product is gasoline. The above process just gets us to the syn gas stage. Then the syn gas needs to be proven usable in a Fisher Tropsch process, which may need fine tuning!!!!
