Evening all,

GNX - Good exposure for most peoples portfolios into both solar and hydro. The twist here is that the hydro isn't a base load producer, its aim is to be used as a peaker plant, e.g. only kick on when electricity prices are high. Its arguably one of the best growth clean technology stocks on the ASX at the moment. There advantage for the hydro comes from not having to build a dam or do any major earthworks. The advantage for the solar is that currently there is the initial infrastructure already in place (given the site used to be a mine). The disadvantage is not know what the company will do regarding funding. The QLD government seems to be on board with recent announcements, but its not going to be a cheap project.

HZR - effectively this is a process for stripping carbon out of natural gas thus emitting hydrogen. Scientifically its called the thermal decomposition of methane. This is reasonably studied and has been known for quite a long time - the process of making methanol starts with the thermal decomposition of methane (steam reformation) into hydrogen and carbon monoxide before it is catalysed into methanol. The Hazer Process is different as it can capture the carbon in a useful form, which is usually not done. The process is not that far removed from current hydrogen production methods, with their only advantage being a lower cost catalyst and the appearance of them being carbon friendly (e.g. emitting no CO2). My main concern is around the saleability of the graphite, and as above, funding for their full scale production facility.

EMC - EMC is very interesting in terms of taking a different approach to an incumbent method. Take hydroworks, the company that raised money recently on SnowBall Effect. They made it possible to extract energy from micro, small, and medium scale hydro which is everywhere. This is similar to what EMC is trying to achieve in that in the past it was perceived that making a larger singe point facility is better than lots of smaller ones. I think, as we expand as a society, this can be incredibly inefficient. Water is a volume game, e.g. its incompressible so your costs a closely paired with the volumes you are handling. Therefore a single production facility means that in a big city you have to transport large volumes big distances. This equals greater cost. This was usually completed because there was no solution that could be rolled out at the origin. Now there is, and it has the potential to be a game changer. My only concern with this is that there is already large amounts of sunken costs by governments etc into current waste water treatment methods, so they are unlikely, in the near term, to start transitioning to a better solution if their current systems are doing just fine.

Just my thoughts, appreciate yours!