This is very odd.
Today's Southland Times reports that Solid Energy's 'deal' with Australian company Ignite has failed.
'Lignite deal gets canned' the headline ran.
At the recent Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Gore, lignite conversion manager Greg Visser hailed trials of New Vale lignite at Ignite's New South Wales pilot plant a success and described, with graphs and statistics, how vastly superior, in terms of environmental effects, the Ignite system was to any other.
Now it seems, they'll have to revert to 'something else'. Wonder what that will be!This looks to be a major blow to the project.
Greg will be spitting. Everything had been going spiffingly til now.
However, they've not thrown in the towel just yet. The article finishes:
"Solid Energy has not completely turned its back on the technology and would undertake a further stage of work to investigate its potential for the conversion of low energy lignite into synthetic crude oils that can be upgraded to transport fuel."
Don't give up just yet Transport Companies of Gore!
* Update: Sonia Gerkin writes:
"One of the beauties of the new technology(ed. offered by Ignite, now stalled/lost) over the mega-expensive proven Fisher-Tropp process of converting lignite to liquid, is that a plant can be developed in modular trains. This will avoid the big bang effect where everything happens at once, as well as being more cost effective."
They will be fuming (pun intended).
2 comments:
This news was a surprise to me too. It would would be interesting to know whether this represents a temporary falling-out among thieves (so to speak) or whether it's a more serious blow to Solid Energy's plans.
If in fact the deal has been lost, Solid Energy will be in a very much weakened position in a lot of ways.
The process offered by Ignite was to have been the panacea to the environmentalists, the community and the financial backers.
This looks very bad for them.
Maybe this is just manouvering for profit from the Ignite side but SE have lost from the release of the news imho.
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