'so if Exergen walk away from the BM JV because they get a coal allocation in the LV, what other technologies are there available to MNM for them to beneficiate the in ground brown coal?'
below is a summary of a dozen or so currently active in Victoria. There are probably another 100+ brown coal drying techs out there globally.
there is no shortage of coal drying hopefuls that will pursue MNM's BM AND LV brown coal tenements if exergen fall away.
Nathan Tinkler and AEC are also known to be on the hunt for a significant Victorian brown coal resource.
an interesting point about this BCIA summary is the minimal coverage of coldry compared to global scale players RWE and Exergen.
perhaps this is because ESI's coldry process is 23 years old and widely considered to be out of date and unsophisticated compared to the other cutting edge coal upgrade techniques outlined in the summary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldry_Process
'Origin
The Coldry Process evolved from theoretical and test work in the Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Melbourne, Victoria, in collaboration with CRA Advanced Technical Development, Melbourne in 1989.[2] This work was based on earlier theoretical work around Densified coal undertaken by the Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Melbourne in 1980-81.'
here's that useful summary of the range of technologies that MNM will have to choose from once the 'brown coal pilbara' takes off (assuming exergen elect to pass on MNM's multi billion tonne BM resource with immediate export capacity from the port of Geelong - not sure why they would though Macca, especially as TATA want 8 million tonnes of BCE product per annum from 2014 onwards, and there will be no export capacity from the LV for at least a decade):
