I've done consulting projects too and had to follow the scope of what the client wanted. For example a project was to cut capital and operating costs out of a plant. If my team would have said that we need to charge extra because we wanted to also look at their customer base to see if they were pricing correctly, we would certainly have gotten kicked to the curb.

I guess none of us really know exactly what transpired with SAIC and those assumptions nor why PTOI five months later said that those assumptions shouldn't be relied upon.

However it should be a question as to why Mr. Bordynuik needed to "validate" the commercial viability of his process when he already had been in operation for two and a half years at that point and knew exactly how well the processor worked to transform plastic into something else. At that point he already knew everything from the costs to how much someone might pay for the 'fuel'.