General Discussion AGY, page-17161

I was unsure about this a while ago since I wasn't aware of a specific announcement informing us of what was going on so I asked Jerko directly.

The pilot plant has been mothballed/abandoned for a long time.

His exact words to the best of my recollection were "The pilot plant did its job in showing us the method was viable and was then closed down"

I asked him about whether it would be economically viable to run the pilot plant, he dodged the question (he often does this, either because he's too busy or not wanting to answer). I can only assume the pilot plant would not have been economically viable to run so was only useful for research purposes. This completely makes sense since the production plant is designed to be a production plant and the prototype was only designed to demonstrate and confirm the process.

Honestly I was a bit disappointed that the pilot plant was disused so quickly, I'd like it to have been taken to production of over 1 tonne per day to show it was possible, even if it wasn't cost effective. That would have further derisked us and probably identified this filtration issue (and others which have been and are inevitable in developing a complex procedure like this). I'm not an engineer or chemist though, so I'm not especially critical and I assume they are doing things in the most efficient way they can.