Melbourne, Nov 18, 2008 (ABN Newswire) - Environmental Clean Technologies (ASX:ESI) has today received back a signed Letter of Intent from Vietnamese based coal brokers, Victoria Capital, to supply 20M tonnes of Coldry to the company over the next 20 years.

ECT Chief Executive Kos Galtos said this was a major milestone in the company's history and he would work with Victoria Capital to finalise the contract by month's end.

"We have a strategy already in place to ensure this order is fulfilled," he said.

"The first step is to build our 150,000 tpa production plant and work towards up-scaling this plant in increments over the next eight years."

The construction process of the production plant will start in 2009 with completion expected by the end of 2010.

"The work our strategic partners Arup (design) and McConnell Dowell (pricing and construction) have done in order to provide us with a +/-10% feasibility report for the 150,000 tpa plant gives us great confidence that the plant is commercially viable and will be delivered within the anticipated time frame," he said.

Finance partner Phillip Capital will lead the preparation of an Information Memorandum to raise capital for the plant. The Information Memorandum will be supported by ECT's strategic partners.

Victoria Capital, a Vietnamese based company that currently sells 120M tpa of thermal coal in China, has been offered the right to provide equity into the project vehicle of the plant. Negotiations on this point are continuing.

ECT plans to upscale the amount of Coldry it produces quickly by building a second, 2.5M tpa, plant by the end of 2012.

"After this, we will increase our capacity in 5M tpa chunks until production reaches 20M tpa by around 2016," Mr Galtos said.

"The challenge for ECT will be securing enough lignite locally; however, discussions to date indicate we could source lignite from overseas in order to keep our strategic growth objectives on track."

Further clarification to this important announcement will be made over the next few days.