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Shell would be the obvious addition to the quadpartite MSC /QED MSAR/ BioMSAR sea trial.
JM said this morning that there is both a global trading company and a terminal operator to add to the QED/MSC trial.
Shell UK used to be called Shell Transport and Trading (Shell T&T) and only changed its name in 2005. JM might be making a causal nod towards Shell when he describes them as a global trading company.
MSC / Shell formal collaboraton on future fuels and low carbon corridors to Singapore already exists.
Vertoro is based in a Shell 'incubator' business park in the Netherlands
Vertoro's CSO was emulsfied into BioMSAR and successfully tested at Aquafuel.
CSO is more plentiful than Glycerine.
If it is Shell then their PR machine has to be fully cranked up to handle the announcement. Anything Shell does is very important to a lot of people.
Only a month to wait for confirmation.
“So the fuel supplier for the actual MSC trial will also be the same global supplier should it go commercial. Has that ever been confirmed before?”.
Sounds good; but from where in the RNS did you make that connection?
MSC tri-partite agreement to be signed within weeks.
Pretty upbeat RNS I’d say. But this time there’s some meat in the form of MSC, OCP and the CSO tie-in with Vertoro, especially when CSO is more abundant than glycerine.
Valkor remains a wild card.
Me too.
Maybe the jaded LTH’s are the only ones left in this share and it’s plus ça change.
I conjured a fantasy Monday morning RNS that involved confirmation that OCP would be supplied by CEPSA starting Q1/24, confirmation that MSC would be supplied by Shell for the trial start in Q1/24 and Valkor had been given the approval by Utah DNR to start drilling their huff n’ puff wells in Q1/24.
Good point.
Saudi Arabia ( Aramco) wants to refine more of its own crude oil into high value petrochemical products and reduce their volume of exported crude that enable others to refine it and make more money per bbl than Aramco currently can. Something Adam Smith called a rentier state, and something the present Saudi leadership is looking to move from.
Risk averse countries / companies fight for second place -especially when innovation is not rewarded and failure can be terminal. See China for details.
Which is why OCP are a surprising first mover; a company 96% owned by the Moroccan state. You’d have never thought they would be first to use BioMSAR. Yet, here we are, on the cusp of a commercial contract. Our first.
And then Maersk to follow MSC. Maersk. How their star has fallen after they backed the wrong low Sulphur horse. I hope QED charge them a premium.
I would expect commercial negotiations have progressed in tandem with the trial, and now those negotiations can conclude after the success of the trial.
I would suggest that the ‘global trading company’ interested in supplying BioMSAR to the MSC trial on board the Leandra will also be interested in supplying BioMSAR to OCP.
The eagerly anticipated news of the MSC trial supplier will-I hope-include the announcement that they will also be the OCP supplier.
Maybe the trial result was the final piece of the jigsaw and news of the supplier to both will follow very soon.
First mover in both marine and industrial markets is an enticing prospect, with just power generation left to complete three huge customer bases.
The global trading company is about to significantly burnish their own green credentials.
The MSC Leandra is heading out the Mediterranean to Sines in Portugal.
Hopefully Sines is a waypoint on her way northwards to Rotterdam/Antwerp to bunker BioMSAR.
Hope springs eternal with Quadrise.
To end the week with a note of optimism…
If you were the ‘global trading company’ involved in the MSC trial, you’d also want the OCP supply as well for your own production economies of scale and to bag marine and industrial use for your new product.
That’s a colossal first mover advantage for the ‘global trading company’.
OCP strike me as a successful company no-one has ever heard of in the Anglosphere.
They must have a plan to use MSAR/BioMSAR beyond the trial. They’re surely not running it as a ‘suck it and see’ after all this time to then put the successful trial results on the shelf.
They’ve got self declared environmental and decarbonisation targets to meet, and they’ve got to get a wriggle-on.
Warming to my theme, the expected RNS could be in conjunction with the ‘global trading company’ as they will be supplying both OCP with their ‘industrial fuel’ and the MSC trial with MSAR and BioMSAR.
Blimey! I’ll never get to sleep now!
It’s not been confirmed in any missives from QED or OCP. But it seems inconceivable to me and fellow Forum members that it’s ever been anyone else other than OCP.
While we wait on news from Morocco , let’s take a look at the client, OCP.
OCP - despairingly described in this Parish as a ‘fantasy client’ is contradicted by OCP’s 2022 sustainability report, all 272 pages of it.
Even if we take the report with some cynicism, OCP nevertheless appear serious when they describe their plans to decarbonise their processes.
Their biggest fuel use is ‘industrial fuels’ at 56% of total energy consumption from non renewable sources. Page 141.
By ‘industrial fuels’ I take that to mean HFO or similar. Diesel and natural gas are separate line items.
If OCP were not serious about MSAR/BioMSAR they would have canned the trial years ago.
That they’ve persevered tells me they’re serious, and they have a goal to reduce emissions like all similar sized corporations.
They list green hydrogen and Green ammonia as 2027 goals.
However, in the meantime 12% of the company’s Carbon footprint comes from drying phosphate and fertiliser using ‘industrial fuel’ and natural gas.
MSAR/BioMSAR is a quick win and a stopgap while they’re waiting for green alternatives.
I can’t believe the current trial will conclude and a hiatus will follow while results are analysed and commercial deals are agreed and supplies are secured.
Surely, surely, for OCP to achieve their stated goals, the successful trial will immediately transfer into an already agreed and ready to sign commercial deal to supply and use.
History tell us that JM tells us what he thinks some of us can manage, being such febrile individuals forever clutching at our Pearls.
If he’d said December or January last June some of us would have howled in anguish and questioned why it was taking so long from the first announcement to the start of the actual trial.
We don’t know that MSC have been waiting on QED to fulfil their side of the agreement.
My thoughts are that both are working to a timetable drafted when the agreement was signed and updated as the project terms of reference and objectives evolved- as is always the case.
The third party manufacture/blending/ bunkering inclusion into the tri--partite agreement can’t have been without its issues. The same can be said with all the involved regulatory agencies and seeking their approvals.
The only party with experience of bringing a new fuel to trial is QED ( Maersk and CEPSA) so QED would have had their work cut out replicating the process with MSC and the new supplier.
I do believe that the timetable drawn up when MSC and QED signed the agreement covered a risked @18 month critical path timeline through all the concurrent and consecutive tasks.
18 months from 27 June 2022 takes us to 19 December. This ties in with the MSC trial start slated for 1Q 2024.
We have been strung along with regular ‘next quarter, Rodney’ announcements as the BoD view- incorrect in my view- was the market and LTH's would not be able to handle such a long time line from the MSC announcement to the start of the trail.
When one considers all the moving parts required to source feedstocks, negotiate and place contracts, manufacture, blend and bunker a new bio fuel prior to trial, and maintain a supply during the trial , a long timeline makes sense.
I think 25,000 MT each of BioMSAR and MSAR are scheduled to be used in the trial.
I believe MSC are taking the long view and the trial is a precursor to full adoption of the fuel.
The supply chain and associated assurance integrity of the feedstocks, notably the consistent supply of QA/QC’d Glycerine from a standing start has most probably taken the longest time to put in place.
Factor in the manufacture/ blending and bunkering, and pilot testing of every step, and the full pilot test from ‘well to wake’ of BioMSAR, all under the regulatory gaze of class societies, national HSE’s, port authorities and each companies own internal controls and you can see how long it will take to get from agreement signature to trial start and a segue to continued use post-trial.
I believe- sorry to sound like Rev. Martin Luther King- that the trial will next Q1 2024, and we will be told the day it starts.
It’s an impressive take home salary. But it’s not that impressive when compared to other petro-chemical wage packets at middle/upper management / global specialist levels. JM would be pretty senior at Shell /BP, and he’d have a final salary pension to look forward to. In fact, he’d be maxxed out by now and he’d be on a salary uplift instead.
QED gives JM the opportunity to be more than comfortably well off. I think that’s one factor that’s driving him. Peer respect is another. All his fellow 1986 graduate intake cohorts who stayed the distance at BP will be retiring now. He’d like to join them; and wave from his Sandbanks balcony.
The screen was jumping around with all the pop-up ads and the post posted itself before I could edit it.
Sorry.
JM spent 200 plus days in saudi. It was a personal blow to him that the deal fell through. But he bounced back - only for Maersk to pull the plug the follwing year. He bounced back again with BioMSAR. JM is resilient and I think he wants QED to succeeed so he can retire a very, very rich man.
The Forum has been the font of informed debate for years. There's' the full spectrum of informed posters from different backgrounds and professions. You don't have to agree with every post; but the Forum shows you can disagree without descending to playground behaviour. I can't recmmend it enough. Had it not been for the wise heads posting on the Forum I would have lost my nerve and cashed in at a huge loss before now.
The ad-hominem attacks on JM's reputation and character are unfounded and unwelcome. He's no saint, and he's no sinner either. We wshould be grateful taht he has stayed the course. I think it was back in 2017 that he spent 200 plus fayus in one year in Saudi -
I have read the sustainability report and there’s some interesting technical information regards Quadrise’s product line-up and how it dovetails with the move towards the decarbonisation of industrial and transportation sectors.
No mention of burning MSAR etc. for electricity generation though.
The MSC trial is scheduled for Q1 2024. Assuming that date doesn’t slip, we will hear news of the tri-partite arrangement prior to its start.
Will that be a month or two before the Leandra is bunkered? Or when it is physically bunkered and the Leandra is on its way?
If it’s the latter we can expect MSC news next February or March.
Time to hibernate.
The BOD are inured to criticism so frustrated LTH’s will remain just that; frustrated LTH’s.
Last year I asked JM why it was Deja-vu all over again. This year I could ask JM why it’s Deja-vu all over again-again. And I’ll get the same answer as last year; ‘bear with us’.
The AGM as a milestone does not dictate progress or announcements of progress other than an emollient ‘bear with us, good news is imminent’ RNS a few days before.
Morooco, Utah and MSC news will be announced as and when; but not to tie in with the AGM.
I hope her role with QED is to help
broker and manage the tri-partite deal between Shell Trading, MSC and QED. MSC and Shell are already collaborating on future fuels and shipping fuel decarbonisation.
I’d like a firework-esque mad spike up to…pluck a figure out of the air…48p.
Yes, mad spikes will do me just fine, so I can at least recoup some of the money I’ve invested in Quadrise since 2013.