Article from THE LAND Clean coal powers gainTHE Punter can’t...

Article from THE LAND


Clean coal powers gain
THE Punter can’t remember when he last made a decent profit, but it happened this week.

Not huge, but respectable, and with a small whoop of joy he has grabbed the money and run.

The gambling chip in this case was a bunch of options to buy shares in Environmental Clean Technologies (ASX code ESI) for 2c each any time before the middle of January 2014.

ESI in the lunatic days of 2007 were once about 25c each, but haven’t been as high as 2c since June last year.

The Punter’s options (ASX code ESIO) are therefore not “in the money” and their only value is hope.

It is true the ESI price has tripled since the beginning of February, but the Punter doesn’t find the apparent reasons for that terribly convincing.

ECT is a company which is hoping eventually to commercialise technology which aims to turn cheap and dirty brown coal into dry expensive black pellets, which can be used to fire a power station without producing as much carbon as real black coal.

It is based in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley and has been boosted in part by the Victorian Government’s decision to seek tenders for more of the state’s brown coal reserves.

However, ESI’s Coldry process is still a long way from commercialisation.

It is only at the stage of designing the first full-scale plant, and it came perilously close to running out of money before it did even that.

The other boost to the share price is that it has found a new cornerstone investor who is pumping in $4 million to get the design work completed, and there are hints it might also be prepared to fund at least part of the next stage.

Had the investor been a heavyweight in the coal or electricity business, the Punter would have been impressed, but in this case it is Monash Capital, a group known mainly for property investing and consulting services.

It may do those things well, but it doesn’t have much of a track record in investing in technology start-ups.

So with his profit nudging $1000, the Punter has decided not to let it run and has sold his ESIO holding.

The Punter has no financial qualifications and no links to the financial services industry. He owns shares in a number of companies featured in this column