clinton = $3,000,000,000?, page-8

It will cost at least a billion to build this, and it was pretty obvious SYS was never going to be able to raise that kind of money alone.

But they did the right thing in turning to China, the only place that was realistically ever going to have both the ability and the willingness to fund it.

Other than the funding which was their biggest weakness (and maybe some questions over management but I'm willing to let them prove themselves) this company seems to have a lot of positives.

The non-food biomass is a great addition and should keep SYS safe from any carbon tax, and depending on the scale of it, they might even be able to sell carbon credits to coal-fired power plants etc.

The tech is all proven and off-the-shelf. Massive plus. The coal is there, it's JORCed, it's shallow and there is a lot of it.

Demand for oil is unlikely go away. These projects in the past have only been really profitable when subsidised by governments (eg SASOL) but oil prices were much more uncertain back then. If you funded a 20-year project there was a decent risk that your operation would be loss making for some of that time. Seems unlikely now - even at the height of the GFC oil didn't drop into loss-making territory for Clinton.

So add in the possibility of funding it from China and this project seems to have great potential.

But it's important to remember that any return on this is five years away at least.