...clear figures in announcements put out by the company. Feel free to read them.
There has been a reasonable increase in the amount of time they've been able to keep continuous production happening (eg per month).
There hasn't been a dramatic increase in the rate of production during time production is actually in progress (see next paragraph before arguing).
For example, if in a 30 month they are in down time for maintenance, repairs, etc, for a total of 24 days, they've had continuous production occurring for 6 days. That's the amount of time production has been occurring. They've been able to increase this significantly, which is a good thing. They haven't made drastic improvements in the rate of production. Even if they managed to doubled it, it would still be low (double something tiny is still tiny - when something is that small you need a significant increase relative to the target, not the previous quantity, and this hasn't happened for AGY in the best part of a decade), and hypothetically, even if they doubled the production rate as of the last update and managed to achieve absolute continuous production with zero downtime (24/7, 365, which in reality is impossible), they'd still be nowhere near economically viable.
The take home message for you here is probably that the bulk of the increase in amount of product produced was from an increase in the amount of time the system was running, not an increase in the rate of production while it was running. That's still progress, it's the first time they'd demonstrated technical progress in quite a few years, but even if that progress goes beyond what's physically possible (it can never run for more than 24 hours per day), it's not enough to do what's needed. Production rate needs to increase many fold, and we haven't even seen any proposals for anything they might try to make this happen. They already trialled the new filter cloths suggested by the external consultants, and that marginal improvement has already been observed, so it won't continue to produce more improvements. Perhaps they can tweak things to squeeze a tiny bit of extra efficiency out, but that's not going to give the drastic multiples in production rate they need.
This technical challenge has dragged out for many years (back to the pilot plant where it was never solved). There's no reason to see it being fixed in the imminent future. Repairing a cooling system and continuing with the same filter cloths isn't a magical fix.
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