Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Citi are acting as joint book-runners, and Baird, Cowen and Piper Jaffray are acting as co-managers for the proposed offering.
PetroAlgae grows and harvests micro-crops and uses them as feedstocks for fuel. These micro-crops, which include micro-algae, diatoms and micro-angiosperms, make maximum use of land, water and energy and can be harvested on a daily basis.
Siemens has conducted trials using PetroAlgae's fuel in a pilot plant-scale pulverised coal burner. The trial results show that the biocrude/coal fuel mixture burned well, and produced 20% lower nitric oxide (NOx) emissions than coal alone.
PetroAlgae has signed a non-binding offtake agreement with Korean renewable energy developer Eco-Frontier, which will try to establish a market for PetroAlgae’s fuels. The deal gives Eco-Frontier the right to purchase from PetroAlgae's licensees up to 850,000 metric tons of biocrude over a three year period starting in 2012. However, this assumes that end-user customers can be developed.
PetroAlgae has added to its board by appointing David P. Szostak as chief financial officer, Gregory W. Haskell as executive vice president for strategy, Fred G. Tennant as executive vice president for business development and Heinrich Gugger as executive vice president for technology.
Szostak is a former director at XL TechGroup, which started up PetroAlgae. XL Tech ran out of money and was forced to restructure and cancel its quotation on London’s Alternative Investment Market in the summer of 2008. As part of the restructuring of XL, the Laurus/Valens Family of Funds received assets pledged as security for the debt and these included 91.3% of PetroAlgae. This stake has been diluted since that time.
Laurus Capital Management is the investment manager of PSource Structured Debt. At the end of June 2010, the debt and 100 million shares owned in PetroAlgae represented nearly two-thirds of PSource’s portfolio valuation of $125.5 million. The shares are held through a holding company called PetroTech Holdings.
PSource’s net asset value (NAV) was $1.89 per share, equivalent to 119p per share, at the end of June 2010. At 39p a share, PSource is valued at £23.2 million and is trading at a 67% discount to NAV before any potential uplift from the PetroAlgae flotation. Of course, the flotation may depend on the strength of the US stockmarket, which has been weak recently.
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