Emotional wellbeing is just as important as financial well-being. To those who have decided to hold we're going to have to look at whatever positives we can while still being realists.
Seems like Pablo's expertise in chemical engineering is making it battery grade, not in designing a plant to do it successfully at scale beyond 20 tonnes a month using this exact brine. But that's fine experience can be gained and has in fact been gained.
The 50t plant (supposed to be 500t) helped him affirm the battery grade capability.
The 2000t plant was built using an entirely different engineering layout because it had to be done at scale. When you do anything in life that you've never done before (i.e. design a plant using that exact brine) mistakes will be made. That's life. Experience is king... And unless you have experience of mistakes 90% of the time you're not going to get it right.
So, he failed, that sucks ass, everyone has the big sad inc me.
But, rather than call it there and be like well we're f*ed....
Im sure Pablo knows exactly where the plant went wrong, which design components were deficient, and what new design elements would have it running smoothly. I think they couldn't get the 2,000 tonne plant beyond 12.5% because what needed to be changed was probably so fundamentally different the overhaul would be quite extensive.
It's been common knowledge that the 10,000 plant will consist of 5 x 2,000 plants, so the learning are directly attributable.
If I were a battery maker wanting to invest in a 10,000 plant would I invest in an AGY competitor who hasn't done it before? Or would I invest in AGY who has done the 2,000 plant, knows exactly what went wrong and has more first hand experience. I would therefore ironically consider the risk-averse option to be AGY.
This is why the 2,000 plant was made in the first place. We originally wanted to go 500t straight to 10,000 tonnes, and strategic partners actually said well... That's too big a risk, maybe if you went with a 2,000 plant first then we'd consider it.
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