How to read a feasibility study before you decide

Start from the assumptions, not the conclusions

Every figure at the end of a study rests on assumptions at the front of it: demand volume, selling price, feedstock cost, utilisation. Move one of them by ten per cent and the conclusion can invert.

Ask for the scenarios

A study that presents one scenario is presenting an opinion, not an analysis. Ask for the conservative case, and see whether the project stays bankable underneath it.

• What happens if commissioning slips by six months?
• What happens if feedstock rises twenty per cent?

Keep technical viability apart from financial viability

A project can be technically possible and financially unviable, and the reverse. Conflating the two is what delays an investment decision more than anything else.