The personnel being on-boarded by Lilac & Lake are painting the sort of picture of what would be required not just for mini-commercialization of a trial technology, but they are hiring people who've backgrounds in mega-projects. People with very long histories within companies who specialise in the very things that a large scale commercialization of DLE will require.
The competitiveness of the oil & gas EPCM sector is not just who can do the job the cheapest.
It is who can do the job fastest, with the highest quality as we don't want it to catch fire or blow up or fail acceptance testing or produce a contaminated product or fail to get approved by regulators & also who can do it the cheapest.
IMO, a lot of the competitive edge is company systems & people & with it comes experience in meeting the above requirements.
FLSmidth - mineral & chemical processing equipment
Fluor - major EPCM contractor
Solvay - Specialist chemicals, reagents for production
McDermott - major EPCM contractor
Between Lake & Lilac they are employing some of the most experienced people who've built careers with these companies. I don't know that people like this would just up & leave after 15, 20, 30 years at a company to see if the grass is greener on the other side. They already made that decision to pursue career progression from within these organisations.
So considering this, if the calibre of people are anything to go by, something big is brewing.
Bit by bit, what this looks like is almost an in-company version of launching from Stealth mode.
WHAT IS A STEALTH MODE STARTUP?
A stealth mode startup, as its name indicates, is a fledgling business (a startup) working to bring a new product or service to market under a temporary state of secrecy (stealth mode).
At the most basic, there are two types of stealth mode:
Total stealth mode
In-company stealth mode
In-company stealth mode is when an existing business tries to keep a new project or idea as secret as possible until it’s time for release. Microsoft, for example, has a long history of assigning codenames to various projects — Windows 95 was Chicago, Windows Vista was Longhorn — in order to keep scrutiny at a minimum.This secrecy often extends beyond just the public eye. In-company stealth mode keeps internal and external stakeholders at bay and often prevents premature dismissal of a concept or idea. A business operating under in-company stealth mode may do many things to keep their activities under cover, including:
Covert testing
Building a cover story
Freeing up extra resources in order to maintain secrecy
Engaging informal sponsors (Pro's edit : FLSmidth, McDermott, Fluor, Solvay?)
Requiring project employees to sign another non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
If you’re an entrepreneur just getting your startup off the ground, you likely won’t need this type of stealth mode until much later, when your company starts working on its next offering.
Maybe doesn't quite fit the bill as LKE have at least made an effort to publicize their development pathway, but certainly without digging a little into what Lilac are doing simultaneously, the big picture is maybe a little harder to decipher.
