I was fortunate enough to spend the afternoon with Ziggy, and get a tour of the Pilot Plant where I met Sean and Ralph (the awesome German who built the plant).
I'll post some images with accompanying text, and a summary at the end;
1. Bags of Flyash ready to be put through the kiln - all ready to go for when the kiln is fired up ...
2. Flyash in it's raw form - for anyone who is interested
3. The research lab where they look at the proppants on site - keep in mind these are "green" proppants, they haven't been treated in the kiln
4. Managed to snap a pic of the proppants through the microscope
5. A shot of the facility. This is where it starts to get interesting ... you can see the kiln on the right hand side (with the yellow stairs leading up to it)
6. A close up of the ever important kiln (not sure if you can see something special ... that being the LIGHTS ARE ON)
7. And what we have all been waiting on, and dreaming of ...
Correct; the kiln has been started and is in the process of "warming up".
Clearly the atmosphere at the plant was electric.
From what I understand, the process from here is to wait for the kiln to "warm up" which is a process of a few days, after which they can start producing the fly ash proppant.
This will then be sent off to the lab for analysis to prove scale up.
The team are super bullish, and from what I can understand it's all a matter of time now - waiting on the results to come back from the lab.
Saying that, it's also my understanding that this industry runs off spec sheets, because it's almost a given that down hole testing works once it's been proven in the lab.
Was really lucky to spend the afternoon with Ziggy and Sean - and if I was bullish on LWP prior to this, I'm the definition of super bullish now.
They are exceptionally busy all over the world, and everything is waiting on scale up to be proven - once this is proven, it will open the gates (obviously this is all IMO based on what I have seen and deduced).
Happy to answer any questions - thanks!
