General Discussion AGY, page-21367

This is a good estimate of potential share price in a blue sky scenario. The only major thing which could somewhat realistically make it much better would be a higher commodity price, but given that global production has been able to expand more rapidly than we were expecting a few years ago this is probably unlikely.

One thing which I’m still puzzled about is what the limiting factor on production is. You’ve said here that it’s unlikely to get to absolute nameplate, and suggest 90% is a realistic maximum, but given all the unknowns, I am completely unsure why it has a hypothetical maximum of nameplate. Why not more than nameplate? It’s not like the plant is a production line model with established factory specs where if it all runs perfectly it gets to nameplate. We still have absolutely no idea what it’s capable of, it’s still a prototype, it’s still untested and unfinished, it’s a new design and nothing of this design has ever been made to work before. Why do we assume some limit of 2,000TPA? I have no idea if it’s capable of 500TPA (or less, maybe barely more than the pointless trickle rate achieved so far) or 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000.

I asked JZ about this directly (over a year ago) and he said the permit doesn’t limit them to nameplate, they can produce as much as they want, if the current plant is capable of exceeding nameplate they’re free to run it to whatever capacity is possible. Since they’ve never in any way established what these plants are capable of, we really don’t know what to expect, but 2,200TPA seems about as likely as 1,800TPA, unless JZ lied to me about there being an absence of a specific limiting factor.

With no limiting factor involved in the permits or established specs of the plant/method, I’m not sure exactly what is meant when a permit is issued for a plant of a certain amount of annual production. After JZ told me the permit did not put a cap on the amount they were allowed to produce, I asked what the nameplate figure and the figure in the permit meant, and he couldn’t give me an answer, which I still find puzzling.