The things to be concerned about in my opinion aren't so related...

The things to be concerned about in my opinion aren't so related to getting the process to work at the current 5 bpd scale. Actually I'd be surprised if they couldn't given the time spent so far and the steps taken already.

Unfortunately at 5bpd you don't make much cash at all. Basically you lose money while trying to demonstrate the technology. Nothing new or wrong with that.

But to make real cash you need a much bigger facility - that costs big dollars but it also requires lots of technical know-how about UCG and GtL steps. How reliability can you make syngas at the required scale? How optimum is your conversion process for the FT steps?? I have some doubts about Linc capability here. One curios choice is to use air gasification which means that the syngas has about 50% nitrogen, which means that at large scale you have equipment that is twice as big as required for the conversion process itself - nitrogen is inert in the GtL step. So that's already looking like a disadvantage. One can argue you save capital of an oxygen plant, which is true. However, no one is using gasification with air to make liquid fuels at commercial scale at the moment. Does Linc know something, everybody else has missed?