poor cousin gip, page-4

Thanks, TPG, your rambling and wide-ranging post hit the nail on the head for me. I could feel my bloodpressure rising as I read it.
I have been there every step of the way and good as I am at taking punishment (!) occasionally the awful truth rises to the surface, years come and go and the memory fades but when one is confronted, as I was when I saw your post, then a surge of anger is the only response.
There are a couple of conflicting ideas out there about the offtake and the finance. Transmeta has written, almost certainly correctly, that there is no point in going anywhere near kfw for finance until all loose ends are tied up, others have suggested that delays in getting approvals from Egypt are partly responsible, still others have said that HCS won't sign off because they didn't want the SynCon in the first place.
Can we all agree (probably not) that there are many issues all interconnecting, which have to come together before the project can get the nod, not just technical issues although those too, BUT the number one thing, the 'sine qua non', is the revised, finalized, offtake agreement? Possibly, only HCS has the capacity to sign a credible long term offtake and they are baulking at something, or is it Gippsland baulking? I suspect, given how the landscape has changed in the years following the original agreement, that the current price is so far removed from what was initally negotiated that the price 'escalation clause', which we were never privy to, has been unable to handle such a sharp increase in price and now there is horse-trading and it's like putting The Louisville Lip in the ring with your Granny, with predictable results, a bit like entering Phar Lap in a Donkey Derby or the Gippsland donkey in the Derby, but enough of sporting analogies.
Suffice to say that no revised long term offtake with HCS, probably spells the end for Gippsland's hopes, if that's how it ends up. Obviously, none of the other negotiations with alternative refiners, that have been hinted at in recent years, have come to anything - probably because of the large capital costs involved.
I've been wondering, recently, whether Abu Dabbab is just too big. The commitment required is too big for smaller refiners and should AD get the nod there would be major implications for the whole industry, good for us but not for anyone else, which might be why the stock is ignored. What a lesson this has been, not that I want any more lessons. At my age I'd like a lesson in how something can pay off after over a decade of struggle. No more failures, please.