Rossi on Restricted Access to the E-Cat Customer's Production Facility

One of the interesting pieces of information to come out from Mats Lewan’s recent article following his meeting with Andrea Rossi was that no one from Industrial Heat had access to the production unit that was using the heat generated by the 1 MW E-Cat plant. The plant and the enclosed production unit were housed in the same warehouse in Doral, Florida where the 1 year test took place.

Today on the Journal of Nuclear Physics, Andrea Rossi was asked why Tom Darden was not allowed to go inside the customer’s production facility. Rossi responded:

Andrea Rossi
May 20, 2016 at 5:07 PM
Sebastian:
In the agreement signed between IH and the Customer it had been agreed by the parties that nobody of IH was allowed to enter in JM area and nobody of JM was allowed to enter the area in which the plant was in operation. This had been agreed upon to defend the IP of both. This agreement has been signed by IH and JM, plus also me.
The text of the agreement has been written by IH and accepted by JM.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

To me, this indicates that JM (the customer) was involved in some very sensitive production process that took advantage of the low-cost heat that the E-Cat plant provided. Probably this was a pilot project that the customer wanted to test out to see if it was a profitable endeavor — and according to Andrea Rossi, they were satisfied enough to order three more plants from him once the test was over. Mats Lewan has reported that visitors to the plant met someone from JM. Mats wrote here:

Ok, so people I have talked to, who visited the plant, got a presentation from someone supposedly being the ‘Director of Engineering’ at JM Products Inc, that supposedly produced metal sponges for catalytic applications. The Director of Engineering told them that they were very satisfied since the yield per amount of electric energy consumed was significantly larger than in the company’s other production sites, maybe 10x or 20x (figure uncertain). Someone got a glimpse though a door and saw what seemed to be production activity.

This production is at the crux of the whole story surrounding the 1MW plant test. If the customer was satisfied with the energy received and were able to produce products at much less cost than they could do otherwise, the E-Cat is a success — regardless of how it works. If you are producer in a competitive industry and want to maintain an advantage over your competitor you might not want to alert them about a new source of energy that allows you to produce items far more cheaply, and still be profitable. You might not want word to get out what you are doing, and so perhaps that would explain the reasons for them wanting to keep their work so secret.

I wish the customer would be more public, however. It would be very interesting to hear them go on record about what they were doing, and what they thought of the E-Cat. Maybe we will hear from them in the court case if it goes to trial, as their role in the whole story is a critical one.