It's very simple. The pilot plant did not work. Any attempt to say otherwise is completely transparent nonsense, whether it's from a deliberate liar or a deluded person.
You don't call a plant a 500TPA plant if you have no intention of producing at a rate of 500TPA. Over a period of years it didn't produce more than about 30T. That's significantly less than what it should have produced in one month during operation. It clearly did not work as intended.
If they genuinely only wanted to produce a few dozen tonnes of product to show the method worked to that extent, they would not have called it a 500TPA plant. In absolutely no sense did it ever produce 500TPA. It absolutely did not work. It was literally called "500TPA", not a 'conceptual demonstration plant' or something similar.
All these years later, the 4x scaled up version produces about 4x what the original did. Clearly there has been no progress.
Whether or not they could simply scale things up 4x to make the current plant worked if the original did work is largely irrelevant because it did not work at the 500TPA scale anyway - the filtration system used in the 2,000TPA plant probably is essentially just a scaled up version of the pilot plant's, and is working just as well as the original. Assuming they are being honest with us (which is not an assumption I'm making), the filtration was probably the weakest link in the process chain in the pilot plant as well and they never solved it, but realistically, it may be multiple things. If it really is the filtration which is the main issue, they failed to fix it several years ago then didn't even bother working on it for years then tried again with the 2,000TPA plant and have so far failed. If this is the case, while it may be solved at some stage, when something has already taken several years with zero sign of progress, it doesn't make sense to assume it is just about to be solved, and mathematically, it's probably going to take years longer.
If you are still having any faith in the story that the 500TPA plant actually did its job and was successful (worked), consider that even without scaling anything up at all, they could simply place the exact same filtration system from the pilot plant into the commercial plant and run it at capacity which would give a rate of 500TPA. After years of effort now, they can't get it operating at even 10% of that rate even for a brief trial batch, let alone 10% of the 2,000TPA plant's nameplate rate, let alone anywhere near the actual supposed capacity.
...and we're only taking them at their word/implication that the filtration system is the only issue to be concerned about. They haven't even tried to claim that the rest of the system is working nicely.
Funds will run dry this year without production ramping up quite soon and sales commencing imminently, which looks extremely unlikely. They're probably hoping they get the expansion permit imminently so they can get some excitement to raise some capital off and use the 'it's to build the expansion plant' line rather than 'We're out of money, have no income and need your money to keep the lights on and continued attempts to get this thing working going', but if that doesn't happen (or perhaps even if it does), they're probably going to have to run a CR next quarter without it (they would have enough money to run into the third or maybe even fourth quarter but won't want to leave it to the last minute because it'll reek of desperation, the picture will be very bleak and dilution will be extreme). That trading halt could come any time now, but I expect it will be in April or May.
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