Florida-based alternative energy firm Magnegas Corporation (MNGA) was the second-best performing stock on Wall Street ahead of Monday’s closing bell, and on volume that was upwards of 35 times greater than the company’s three-month average as nearly 17 million shares changed hands.
The activity follows on last Friday’s 22 percent leap, also thickly-traded, and appears to be the ongoing response to the announcement that CEO Ermanno Santilli would moderate a panel discussion at the upcoming 7th Annual International Biomass Conference & Expo, where the company also promised a “major industry announcement to unveil its liquid biomass technology solution.”
For three days between March 24 and 26, Orlando, Florida will host the event, North America’s largest industry gathering for producers/inventors of experimental but extremely forward-thinking and renewable fuel technologies. Magnegas, for its part, has been working on a process by which liquid waste can be converted into a substantially cleaner-burning hydrogen-based fuel, and Santilli has promised the 1,500 expected attendees that his company’s new product will “Reset the way we view and deal with liquid waste.”
The intrepid biofuel tech producer was founded in Florida in 2007, and has focused primarily on developing its flagship natural gas alternative MagneGas, which can also be used for metalworking, cooking, heating, and automobile biofuel.
Despite the confidence with which Santilli has promised the green-tech breakthrough, his company has been forced to produce fuel out of ethylene glycol rather than waste, as it has yet to obtain the permits that would allow it to process industrial, agricultural, military and municipal runoff liquids.
What Magnegas lacks in the way of permits, however, it makes up for in confidence. It’s twitter feed contains a wealth of links to some of the most compelling developments to emerge from the cutting edge of the nascent biofuel technology space, as well as a number of posts denouncing the fracking/natgas industry as unsustainable and dangerous.
It is also noteworthy that the company, with it’s diminutive market-cap of just over $24 million, and bite-sized per-share price of $1.45, has managed to get itself listed as a vertically integrated oil and gas outfit alongside some of the world’s largest carbon-emitting corporations such as ExxonMobil (XOM) .
Still, if Magnegas’s product turns out to be as advertised, the implications could be revolutionary. It could also provide yet another illustration of how misguided was the panic-stricken merger and acquisition frenzy that gripped big oil near the end of the last millenium, a frenzy that probably had a great deal to do with how supermajors missed out the lion’s share of the US shale boom.
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