wall? what wall?, page-21

Hi Lanek

"Kronos got involved on the basis of recovery/regeneration of iron chlorides, FeCl2. "

Agreed.

"The introduction of mill scale has no application to them and was necessary to make it look even remotely commercially viable."

Not sure what to make of that sentence, it is commercially viable for Kronos without the addition of extra mill scale, which I seem to recall can be up to 10?tonnes per tonne of SPL, which would be the case for a steel mill. Even at $300/tonne for the recovered iron that is then $3k per tonne of SPL. Then there is the capacity with this process to go back and recover all the dumped waste iron chloride sludge and turn it back into metallic iron.

"This whole concept by APG has been around since 1986 and premised on cleaning up mineral sand deposits; nothing to do with mill scale."

I don't think that the whole concept has been around since 1986. Austpac was founded then as a gold explorer. Then a few years later they got involved in mineral sands with a Japanese company. This led the late Earnie Walpole to start developing what is now the current technologies. Earnie's work has been continued by John Winter.
The process had nothing to do with mill scale(which was a later development) other than SPL has Fe Cl2 and ilmanite liquor has FeCl2 and John Winter found a way to recover metallic iron from the synrutile process and applied it to SPL.

"Technically may be a great idea.....but it just won't work out there in the big bad world of industry."

That is what you are trying to demonstrate, but I'd like more evidence than just an assertion that it indeed won't work in industry.
From what I understand, there are other acid regen processes out there but none produce so-called super azeotropic acid like APG's does and none produce metallic iron. Despite those drawbacks they still seem to do OK, so presumably the ability to add 10 or more tonnes of dust to SPL and recover the iron in addition to the FeCl2 can only be a plus.

"Have a look at the economics of the project: the revenue is apprx the same as the "profit". Who pays for the operating costs? The mill scale and the input liquors must come with treatment charges."

Perhaps that is the case, I don't know. As I see it if it is a better process ie. stronger acid regen+metallic iron instead of sludge then there must be a market for it.

"How many steel cos have lined up for a licence for this potential."

Don't know, and don't know how many are in discussions with the company(or not) now or in the future. That said, we didn't know about Kronos till the company decided to announce it either.

"I'm not trying to be nasty....just realistic.
Walk away now."

Why do you care as you are not a shareholder?


cheers

PS. If anyone more technically able than me( which means almost anyone) and/or who was around in the early days please feel free to correct me about the above.