what's the word?, page-7

Hibba

Firstly, I am sorry you appear to have copped a caning on CNX after we all copped a caning on CXY.

Secondly, I have a slightly different view on how/why things have panned out.

When the proverbial hit the fan with Cougar, I posted that the Qld Govt had shut down the company most likely achieve commercial success with UCG here in Australia.

CNX and LNC were all about developing a "new" UCG technology and both made their stories sound beguiling ... the market and investors loved it. Both companies talked it up and imo "trials/experiments" were renamed as Stages, and sequentially so. Logic had it that you need Gasifiers 1, 2, 3 etc and then you needed a small prototype powergen project with completely antiquated non turbine plant to "prove" the concept. Well, I say, where is their concept, where is their new technology and where is their syngas?

Imo, CNX have burned a lot of money with a pointless, non commercial, essentially redundant step of proving a flammable gas can power a reciprocating engine to drive a small generator to produce a small amount of electricity.

LNC it seems have churned though almost a half a billion dollars to operate but not report on Gasifier 4, develop and talk about Gasifier 5 and buy a number of seemingly disparate international oil and gas assets that it appears are a long way from proven long term profitable businesses.

I haven't done the sums, but the syngas that Walker/Blinderman produced consistently at Chinchilla with Ergo Exergy technology from 1999 to 2002 by controlled underground gasification of something like 30,000 tonnes of coal would have fired considerably more than CNX's 1.5MW and for a lot longer ... effectively CNX have kind of proven what was already effectively proven 10-13 years ago!

So, Cougar varied a casing design and suffered a glitch at Kingaroy, identied the problem, designed and installed a new casing system, didn't cause any proven contamination and were summarily shut down anyway ... imo, in a glib scheme to garner Greens preferences for Federal Labor in the last Federal election ... no more no less imo.

Cougar wasn't fluffing around with multiple investigative trial burns or antiquated 1.5MW reciprocating engines to run using low/variable quality syngas produced with a "developing" ucg technology, nor were they wasting time with complicated theoretical UCG GTL technology akin to rocket flight before learning to crawl. Cougar was simply trialling a decent scale operation to prove sustainable, controllable syngas quality to meet full scale turbine warranty conditions ahead of a full scale commercial turbine powergen ... Cougar was basically only tweaking the world's only proven scalable UCG technology.

Imo, nothing brought UCG development in Australia to a shuddering halt quicker than shutting down Cougar Energy. The remaining players were imo years off proving a new, workable, commercial UCG technology.

Lets see what astute and justifiable legal action produces.

Dex