You know that comment is crap and is part of an assessment process - you don't commit to a pilot plant if you think your design cannot be scaled to a commercial scale, full stop. When you are proposing to move to an area that has new technology you develop a pilot to iron out potential issues as your economic study is based on various input parameters and technical considerations in the development phase and therefore for the record when you commit to a pilot plant you start of with a plus 30% assumption that the commercial plant will cost that much more because of the need to fix errors. In other words if don't see feasibility with the plus 30% assumption you don't commit to development of a pilot as well. Most majors now do it when venturing onto new areas. I'll just post my reply of earlier today on this issue.
Post #: 23990295
Some companies learn't the hard from not doing pilot projects and ultimately the cost of their commercial development was to great to make the design changes at that level - Anaconda Murrin Murrin project comes to mind (as first plant set up concerning laterite nickel deposits), Beenup (BHPB) installed wrong technology for their greenfields project, BHPB again (HBI - technical problems on tech) etc etc.
All IMO
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