recent exergen comments & mnm

http://m.theage.com.au/victoria/mining-companies-prepare-brown-coal-bids-20120320-1vi2v.html

'Exergen head Trevor Bourne told The Age the company had been talking with the offices of Premier Ted Baillieu and Mr O'Brien about its plans.

He said Exergen would use technology to remove moisture from brown coal, lowering its carbon emissions and making it more suitable for export. It had backing from Indian energy company Tata Power and Itochu Corporation of Japan.

He said Exergen also wanted to build a 7 to 10 megawatt $20 million demonstration power plant, backed by Australian firms Thiess and Sedgman.'

So the demo plant exergen plan to build at the LV if they get an allocation is a POWER plant. Presumably it is intended to demonstrate how the DICE technology can be applied to reduce C02 emissions compared to the current brown coal burning plants in the LV.

But no mention was made by Bourne of a demo scale CHTD plant to create the BCE in the first place in the LV?

Why? How can exergen run a $20 million demo scale DICE power plant without significant volumes of CHTD BCE product to feed it? The answer is they can't.

A CHTD demo scale plant has to be built by exergen BEFORE the proposed LV demo power plant for 2 reasons:

1. to prove that CHTD can be produced on a commercial scale using Vic lignite in the first place; and

2. to provide the BCE feedstock the planned $20 million DICE demo POWER plant in the LV will be running on.

The inference from Bourne's comments this week about the LV allocation is that a CHTD demo plant is going in, as planned, at BM. If not, exergen would have talked about a CHTD demo scale plant at the LV. They didn't.

It is also arguably confirmation or Vertigo's thesis that exergen's initial plan in the LV is to produce CHTD BCE to feed DICE driven power plants.

This suggests that BM is exergen's preferred BCE export hub until such time as the infrastructure is available to export BCE from the LV (probably 2018 at the earliest).

DYOR