20 trillion oil in sa, page-34

rath: You ask me questions about myself, unrelated to AEB, then tell me not to discuss things not related to AEB. Make up your mind! :P

Strider: If you give crap answers I'm not going to be satisfied with them! ;) "Haven't you ever heard of a breakthrough?" is hardly a decent answer/argument ;)

Sorry, which questions did I miss ('dodge')?

I agree, sometimes oil companies, (or companies in all industries) pull scams. Strange you point that out to me immediately after I pointed it out to you! If you want to make the comparison, if an oil company claimed that they had found a multi gazillion dollar resource in land which had been surveyed by several large, experienced oil companies and found to be worthless, and they were some piddly little underresourced company I had no reason to think could survey better than anyone else, I wouldn't put my money anywhere near them. If they then said they had some magical way of extracting oil which no one else including the massive oil companies had ever worked out, I would think the same until they'd actually demonstrated that they could do it (and you'd be an idiot to take them seriously beforehand, because only once in a million does a claim like that turn out to be genuine).

AEB doesn't even claim to have any revolutionary magical new piece of technology. They haven't even said "Hey! We're multiple times better than the others in this game because we developed a new algae mutation" or anything like that. What magic do they claim to have if they say they can make their product for a small fraction of the cost anyone else can? If they said they could do it for 10-20% less I'd be sceptical but willing to take them seriously, but when it's more like a fifth of the production price you have to ask how they can even hope anyone to take that claim seriously, at least until they've actually substantiated it.

Yes, you're right, once established, it's less 'risky' than extremely risky oil prospecting where you're just drilling at random and hoping for the best. With a model like AEB you'll know your next algae module will behave very much like the last one, and so on. In the same way, it's less 'risky' for me to burn my money in a fire than to invest in blue chip stocks, because the next money fire I make will burn just like the last while holding stocks has an undetermined outcome. Risk isn't necessarily bad and a known outcome is only good if the outcome is a good one. We haven't seen that yet with AEB, and I will gladly make a bet with you at 9:10 odds that the cost of production turns out to be over the $40 (or $50 or so, or half the price of WTI) they claimed.