Doc II thanks for the response and yes I agree with you. I have just not seen the 10 year supply contract mentioned anywhere recently. With Phoenix part of a recent merger involving the familiar 110 million number (coincidence?) was just wondering if they still had a supply contract and planned source of coal for the plant(s)?
Plant Cost - I have seen numbers that range from 300-400 million per plant. In Maland’s pitch in June he discussed the advantages of a smaller local serving plants as these ones are and how much would be saved by duplicating the same design over and over. The question I have here is do they mean the first plant alone will cost 300-400 or after they have built 6 the average cost per unit will be 300-400. A very big difference as the first will obviously be significantly more expensive than the followons. 400 million is certainly a monumental amount of money to have committed regardless of the source but hopefully a little more attainable than the 7 Billion dollar numbers I have seen thrown around for some of those other larger plants.
CO2 - I have posted questions on this before but I would like to bring it up again as it is important. The CO2 factor with CTL is a big deal and the primary ammunition for the criticizers of CTL. There are all kinds of studies going on and money being spent about sequestering CO2 in underground caverns and other related methods to deal with CO2 emissions. FFI has made strong statements concerning their plant and CO2. In Maland’s June pitch he stated they would inject the CO2 back into the process to create more diesel and then went on to say how every other byproduct of the plant had a commercial use and would be recycled. As recently as May 2008 Jack Young was quoted as saying “"There is no problem in the emissions from this plant," he said. "This is going to be cleaner than ... a 7-11 store."” IMO they are making very strong statements concerning their CO2 process. I also keep reading how people are focused on the fact the company has no relevant patents for the path forward they have chosen. Just because something is not patented it should not be assumed that there are not potential trade secrets or proprietary information involved. Coco Cola doesn’t have a patent on their formula because than they would need to disclose it for filing. Perhaps a similar situations exist? On the other hand if FFI did hold something that good I would think they would be making a bigger deal about, not necessarily the details but just that they had.
The thing I keep asking and why I continue to accumulate instead of selling this stock is what do they have that put them on the map. They are a small company with an army of consultants that have never produced any marketable item to date, have a list of unfulfilled PRs and burning through money like there is no tomorrow. Why have local governments pledged to provide grant money, why are they on current US Department of Energy laboratory (NETL) charts. Why have other companies made attempts for purchase, granted a failed attempt but I do not believe it was a scam. I have dumped stock on companies appearing far better than this one but this one has just too many things that do not make sense at this time.
One last thing, that just bugs me is that website. They have got to do something with that god awful website that has not been touched in nearly 5 years. UPDATE IT! Pay a college student $500 to work on it for a week to update and fix it and they will have something 100 times better than they have now. The biggest PR and the first place people go when they want to learn something about the company is the website. No wonder they cant attract any new investors and the ones they do have like us sit around guessing about what’s going on. These days a 10 year old can do web page design; it doesn’t take much or much money or much upkeep. It means a lot more than they obviously realize.
What started as a few questions turned into more than I intended sorry for the blabbering and thanks for listening. Just a few points to discuss positives and negatives on
