On one hand, you denounce your company's lack of follow up on...

On one hand, you denounce your company's lack of follow up on 'bad communication' (meaning you still secretly hope there's unreported progress) and on the other hand take those announcements at face value in spite of a lack of evidence suggesting they are anything but a share price propping mechanism.

Ask yourself what is really delaying funding with your company. What are the critical steps (not necessarily linear) to achieve funding one way or another, in relative importance? Even the company itself has not raised FA as the reason, whilst reporting the lack of progress. Only the wishful thinking of the shareholders latching on it conveniently because it is supposedly outside of the company's control. But shareholders are finally starting to wise up, but still in a state of semi-denial. Before that there was the council approval - reading your forum it looks as if as soon as it is approved the Kwinana plant like a coiled spring is going to build itself. The council approval was not the answer, nor is the formal FA agreement, so no need for you to project your hope on WKT forums, it is not as important as you believe.

Your point about PEK is moot. PEK's situation is more complex due to the in-country processing demanded by Gov of Tanz. Perhaps subconsciously you are sensing the flip that might be coming to the Epanko project, for one it lacks any up to date DFS/BFS to get a cent of funding outside shareholders - a far more pressing issue than any FA on Tanz interest I would think, and given the history of that management may just re-boot the project into some pie in the sky hybrid of mining + beautification to justify some new project economics. The complexity arises form in-country processing does not apply to WKT, which is going to be a very simple mine -> ship out operation.

So as for my comprehension of Epanko as a stand alone project:
It had poor economics even before the Magufuli years - which was why it was packaged together with Kwinana. At the moment the stand alone mine has no usable feasibility data to attract any funding parties, and to address that will be the priority. Any mines targeting the battery grade graphite will be compared with SYR model - it had scale in design but struggled to keep cost down to produce the type of product that's acceptable to the exactly demand of battery grade end users. Keyword is scale aka high capital requirement and execution risk. BKT is modeled on the same, but add in some jumbo grade stuff to dress up the basket price. In reality, a majority of the capital cost of their plant will be used to produce marginal profit whilst hoping the by-products makes the operations afloat. To conjure higher NPVs these mines tries to incorporate bigger outputs to harness economics of scale, and SYR shows exactly what can go wrong with that path.

WKT specifically targets jumbo flake non-battery market, require less cycles through the grinding and washing and owing to the high grade, smaller plant/throughput therefore operational cost. Spid wants to dispute that but even worse case scenario there's plenty of margins unlike the battery grade stuff. The off take with Wogen simplifies the basket of products WKT need to produce therefore helps mine optimisation.