[PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit

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No. 20-11266 ____________________

MIDAMERICA C2L INCORPORATED, a Nevada corporation, Plaintiff- Counter Defendant- Appellant, SECURE ENERGY, INC., a Nevada Corporation, Plaintiff-Appellant, versus SIEMENS ENERGY INC., a Delaware corporation, USCA11 Case: 20-11266 Date Filed: 02/15/2022 Page: 2 of 47

2 Opinion of the Court 20-11266

Defendant- Counter Claimant- Appellee.

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 6:17-cv-00171-PGB-LRH ____________________

Before NEWSOM, BRANCH, and LAGOA, Circuit Judges. LAGOA, Circuit Judge: This case is about a business relationship gone bad. In 2006, Secure Energy, Inc.—with the intention of opening a coal gasifica- tion plant in Illinois—approached Siemens Energy, Inc., about pur- chasing some gasifiers and other related equipment. By 2007, the parties had entered into a formal contract, under which Secure would buy the equipment on a payment plan and Siemens would continue to provide updates and repairs to the gasification reactors. Two problems quickly arose. First, the price of natural gas fell in 2009. As a result, Secure had to change its business plan mul- tiple times and could not keep up with its payments to Siemens. Second, Siemens’s gasification equipment began having problems, USCA11 Case: 20-11266 Date Filed: 02/15/2022 Page: 3 of 47

20-11266 Opinion of the Court 3 as discovered by one of Siemens’s other clients in 2010. By 2012, Siemens began implementing several substantial modifications to its gasifiers in order to get them working properly, but, because Secure had never gotten its plant up and running, Siemens left Se- cure out of the loop. In 2015, Siemens decided to exit the gasifica- tion market entirely, but promised to continue supporting its exist- ing projects, including Secure’s. These problems created the perfect storm for litigation. Se- cure—never having opened, let alone used, its gasification equip- ment—was commercially failing. Secure still owed Siemens mil- lions of dollars for the equipment and had just become aware that the equipment it purchased years earlier had issues. In 2016, after Siemens decided to leave the gasification market, Secure and its subsidiary MidAmerica C2L Incorporated 1 sued Siemens, bringing various fraud- and contract-based claims. Siemens—which was still owed some thirteen million dollars under the contract and which had given Secure multiple payment extensions on that amount— filed a counterclaim against Secure for breach of contract. Years into the litigation, Secure sought leave to amend its complaint, which the district court denied due to its untimeliness. Later, the district court excluded Secure’s expert witness, Dr. Her- bert Kosstrin, for relying on an unreliable methodology, and granted summary judgment in Siemens’s favor on each of Secure’s

1 Forpurposes of this opinion, we refer to MidAmerica as Secure unless oth- erwise expressly noted. USCA11 Case: 20-11266 Date Filed: 02/15/2022 Page: 4 of 47

4 Opinion of the Court 20-11266 affirmative claims. T