Cavern Club
posted on
Nov 04, 2021 08:37PM
Being commercialized in multiple applications around the world including plasma torches, Industrial 3D printing powders, aluminum & zinc dross recovery, waste management and defence - 4 US aircraft carriers
The way things are lining up in the existing verticals, and if things keep going they way they are going, I predict PPP is going to be too busy to spend much time here anymore. We here, on this board will be like those people who can say they saw The Beatles perform at the Cavern Club.
I say this as someone who has been sniffing around and trying to invest in the plasma space ever since that fateful day in 2007 when I read "The Prophet of Garbage" in Popular Science. (LINK: https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage/ -- in which Pyrogenesis is name checked as a startup! Haha, wow.)
Oh, I followed them all: Plasco's rise and fall in Ottawa, that whole weird Geoplasma thing in St. Lucie, the NRG / AlterNRG near miss in Somerset, MA, the Coskata plasma deal, how WM teamed up with InEnTec ... and many more. I even made a trip out to Bristol, CT to say hi to the people at Startech Environmental Corporation where I met a lonely VP of sales among a bunch of empty cubicles willing to take a meeting with 2 scruffy fellows off the street (me and my ex’s smart cousin).
After a year or two where it felt like momentum was building for plasma and waste ... Fsssssss! .... it was like dropping a match in a wet kitchen sink. What happened? I'd say a combo of low tipping fees and the rise of fracking killed the emerging plasma waste-destruction industry. All the players in North America were focused on MSW. Just wasn't viable. Also the industry got out-lobbied, I suspect... there was no trade association (still isn't).
Failures all around. Or "learning experiences." So I got out. My losses weren’t too bad. Waited. Watched.
When I came across Pyro a few years ago, the Navy contract was a big deal for me. It spoke to deal making. It spoke to technology, yes. But more importantly it spoke to selling and closing and executing and navigating government red tape. (Now, I don’t care if contract is with Huntington Ingalls or with the Navy itself. MILSPEC is MILSPEC.)
And then all these other verticals emerge! All this other plasma business buys the company and the industry time for people to realize that the waste destruction story is a sleeping giant of a vertical. And once again, PYR wisely applies its efforts to the expensive waste (medical, military, PFAS) that does not require it to battle that fearsome competitor, Mr. Hole-in-the-Ground.
And now the moment appears finally, maybe?, to be at hand: where governments and corporations will think less of waste streams but more of resource recovery streams (many of which, plasma is the secret sauce for unlocking. Like... DROSRITE solves a waste management problem... and then... "hey, this isn't even waste!")
Long term, PYR’s waste management story is incredibly intriguing. (Urban mining! Brownfields into REIT-worthy real estate! Total data destruction and rare earth recovery from e-waste! Soft drink companies begging for a sustainable way to keep using plastic! Just day-dreaming.)
I believe we are going to be sitting on our porches remembering the days before a RIO or a VALE or a WM getting themselves board seat (in order to valorize rare earths or whatever) made the company leadership too busy and the company too big to be hanging out on a small-cap investment site. And then we can say "we were there on Agoracom, chatting up the Plasma Beatles."
/endrant