General Discussion AGY, page-23263

Literally not correct.

That's like saying if I take one of gcar's Lambos which has a maximum speed of 355km/hr but burns out after three hours of driving at that speed and requires down time in the workshop, and I tinker with it in the garage so that it can run for longer without burning out, it now goes faster, despite the fact that it still only goes at 355km/hr.

I haven't increased the rate at which it moves, just the amount of time it can move at that rate.

This should let you understand the conceptual difference between the rate of something happening and the amount of time with that thing happening.

Now, unlike gcar's supercars, the AGY plant is not fictional and people actually are tinkering with it. Unlike a typical Lambo with an impressive speed of 355km/hr, the 10,000TPA plant is a prototype which doesn't work, a scaled up version of a prototype which didn't work. One of the problems with the 500TPA prototype is that the production rate (and we now understand what that means) was a tiny fraction of what it was supposed to be (that wasn't the only problem and shamefully they told us that it did what it was supposed to do, despite unambiguously failing some of its clearly stated goals such as being used to produce and generate income to fund the expansion).

The 10,000TPA plant was constructed and didn't function any better than a scaled up version of the original failed plant. Delays are forgivable and expected, but after commissioning had gone on for many times longer than expected with basically zero improvement beyond the performance of the original failed plant, especially given that it quickly got to the level of the failed 500TPA plant *then* saw progress halt, it was clear that there was at least one serious technical hurdle which they'd encountered years earlier and were still unable to get over, or around, or through. That was when I started talking about my concerns (you may remember me changing my tune from 'hey, delays are expected, there's no indication of problems' to 'hang on, progress has stalled at the same level as the old crappy level, the story of the pilot plant working fine is looking very sus, I'm very concerned', you certainly read my posts at the time. You among others said I was stupid, not much later I started selling, and when things were obviously dire I looked for an exit and was happy to jump out in the mid to high teens).

As of recent updates they have managed to increase the amount of time the plant can operate. This is genuine progress, it's good, it was the first tangible demonstration of technical progress in the best part of a decade (literally!), but most of the progress was in increasing the amount of time the plant operates (reducing downtime), not production rate (equivalent to driving speed). So it's like producing a car (or truck or train) which is supposed to travel close to 24/7 at a speed of 1,00KM/hr, but has an actual performance of a maximum speed of only about 5km/hr. Even if you have it operating at 24 hours per day, it's not worth running. They need to increase production rate, and there has been very little improvement there, with no new modifications to improve production rate proposed recently. JZ described this situation to me as 'frustrating' a few days ago.

I don't know how much more improvement they can make in terms of eliminating downtime, but I do know that it is completely impossible to reduce it to zero, and even if they reduced it to zero (impossible), it would currently be like driving your prototype vehicle at less than 10km/hour 24/7 while it consumes far more fuel than its performance is worth. What they really need is to increase the speed at which it drives (or the rate of production per unit of time in operation), which doesn't seem to be happening at all since the marginal improvement after changes already implemented.

In our car analogy, the new filter cloths were like changing the fuel injection system or maybe the exhaust or the the cylinder firing order. We've already seen that change made, it has been tested, we've seen the result - the system ran for longer, slightly improved performance, and the cooling system broke which may or may not have been related (I'm guessing not). So, you fix the car's radiator (or plant's cooling system) and hope it doesn't break down again (and if it does you need to upgrade it). Continuing to drive the car with the new specs won't continue to produce incremental improvements, but you're hoping to learn something along the way, somehow (this has been an ongoing process for quite some years now with only marginal results and no sign of sudden dramatic improvement). We need to see new modifications made in order to see further improvement. The most important improvement we need to see is maximum speed (production rate), which they are making close to no progress with.

The company can say 'we're happy with progress' or 'we're optimistic about meeting our goals' or 'we plan to use the 500TPA plant to fund expansion' or 'we look forward to capitalising on the next cycle of high lithium prices' all they want, and sure, it might look enough like a juicy carrot to fool the market and increase the price, but actual tangible substance isn't any more evident than the existence of gcar's garage full of various supercars.