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JBIIE.OB - JBII.OB one to watch for shorting.

01/04/2010 07:04 PM by avoidthegarbage

Was looking at JBII awhile back when it was around $1 and decided to pass on it going long.
The reasons were many including not thinking this company can do anything close to what many are speculating it can do with plastic to oil financially.
I personally feel their customers could do better financially just selling the plastic to a recycler than convert it to oil. I'll get to that later.

There are many plastic to oil firms already working but I can't find a single one that is self-sufficient highly profitable.
Many of them claim to be able to produce about 1 liter of oil/liquid hydrocarbons from 1 kilogram of plastic. They then look to sell the liquid portion and use the gas portion to feed the energy needs of the facility/processor.

JBII is claiming it can do pretty much the same thing as these nonprofitable companies(produce about 1 liter of oil per kg of plastic).
But JBII is also restricting itself to 'cleaner' plastics in doing so, so I don't see any major advantage they have to unprofitable competition. In fact this IMO is a big disadvantage for JBII's customers since the plastic would have to be sorted beforehand and that's expensive.

There's a catch to P2O in general IMO. There are 'clean' plastics and 'dirty' plastics in the process. the dirty plastics contain elements that may easily react to form acids when plastic is reverted back to more basic polymers (example PVC with chlorine) and/or are lower in efficiency of converting back to liquid hydrocarbons (example PET plastics- liquid hydrocarbon yield is low).
So any kind of plastic to energy using these 'dirty' plastics containing chlorine and/or bromine has to deal with potential high corrosion probs IMO so usually these halogen elements need to be separated out from the finished liquid product for companies using these dirty plastics.

The advantage a plastic to fuel firm has with accepting these 'dirty' plastics is it helps eliminate a very costly step at landfills/places of plastic collection and that is not doing sorting of plastics into difft categories.

If a plastic to oil firm accepts all plastics, there is the big time and cost saving to landfills of not having to manually sort all that plastic.

But JBII is not able to accept all plastics apparently for this so landfills signing up for a JBII processor will still be stuck having to dispose of or recycle much plastic including PET (like beverage bottels), PVC (like for plumbing in houses), and bromium-containig plastics such as household plastic appliances and insulative cover for wiring- (bromium is used as a flame retardant and, like chlorine in PVC, is a halogen so very reactive to form acid compounds such as bromic acid ) IMO.

Not only that, the landfills will have to do the expensive, time-consuming sorting of the plastic to ensure the above plastics do not contaminate the potential liquid hydrocarbon mixture.

So IMO JBII is hitting the landfills negatively in two ways compared to some competition.

One, only certain plastics will be accepted (chemically 'cleaner' plastics like HDPE, LDPE, PS, PP) so landfills will still have much plastic to be disposed of (the 'dirtier' plastics).

Two, sorting still has to happen to ensure the right kind of plastics are used.

JBII has made the choice and said they will not include such plastics as PVC and PET.
So this leads me to wonder what is their advantage over companies that are already proving not to be profitable with similar conversion plastic to liquid hydrocarbon results?

Now let's look at what a landfill might fetch for recycled 'clean' plastic like HDPE.

For instance, check this page:

http://www.polychange....

For HDPE

I saw one of the cheaper buyers at $300/ metric ton. That's $300/2204 lbs.
That's about 13.6 cents a pound.

With 160 kg plastic for 1 barrel oil ( 1 barrel oil = 42 gallons= about 160 liters and per JBII they are doing about 1 liter liquid fuel per 1 kg plastic so 160 liters for 1 barrel oil = about 160 kg plastic per barrel)

we get $.136 cents/lbs x x 2.2 lbs/kg x 160 kg = about $48/bbl

This is a BUYER for plastic not a seller, so considering other buyers were willing to pay more I would think a landfill might be able to fetch more by recycling HDPE.

There were other buyers willing to pay around 20 cents/pound (and more) for used recycled HDPE.

If a landfill can get 20 cents per pound for their sorted HDPE, by just recycling it looks like they could get

20 cents/lbs x 2.2 lbs/kg x 1kg/1 liter liquid fuel x 160 liters liquid fuel /barrel liquid fuel=
$70 equivalent per barrel!

Why would a landfill go thru all the fuss/expense of handling/storing oil (liability?), buying a processor, maintaining the equipment, paying for its operation/upkeep, and paying a royalty to JBII and have all those charges AFTER getting $70/ barrel roughly from a refiner when they could clear $70 just by handing off the plastic to a recycler ?

The landfills doing Plastic to oil after all those charges would likely only clear a fraction of the $70 IMO... Plus it was stated that it costs about 410/barrel to process.
So in this example the landfill would start at $60/barrel then deduct upkeep expense, payment for processor and chemicals, pay for royalty, payment for temporary storage of fuel and pay potential liability costs associated with keeping fuel on property.

What would the landfill pocket after all these costs? $30/ barrel? $20? I don't know.
But $70 per barrel asound way better than 430 per barrel. Especially considering how
easy selling recycled plastic would be compared to trying to convert plastic to oil.

But I do know that in this example it would make a lot of sense to avoid plastic to oil altogether and stick with the money from recycling.


All that expense just to get a refiner to pay them about the same a plastic recycler would pay upfront in this example?

And if sorted into color (shows the value in sorting) a plastic recycler would be willing to pay over 30 cents/pound, a 50%+ markup for the extra step of sorting by color.

Now this is just all my opinion and I have personally never shorted an individual stock. I am not short nor long JBII but when it moves to the AMEX I think it might be the first company I short.

The risks to shorting it are IMO- it has a lot of momentum and rules now broker can make you cover your short at any time as I understand.
The 'technology' although I don't think it is worth much, green tech has a lot of momo to it and there may be some dumb money that buys up the technology.

All just IMO only and I'm a rather unsophisticated investor so take it for what you want out of it plus do your own DD to verify or refute anything I've mentioned.
Good luck.



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  • 01/06/2010 02:00 PM by Stock_Assassin

    avoidthegarbage, JBII looks like an OTC hype job by what you say. You gonna short it?.

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