Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE) 2026 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Hello, and welcome everyone joining today’s Clean Energy Fuels second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this call is being recorded. We are standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Thomas Driscoll. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Earlier this afternoon, Clean Energy released financial results for the second quarter ending June 30, 2026. If you did not receive the release, it is available on the investor relations section of the company’s website, where the call is also being webcast. There will be a replay available on the website for 30 days.

Before we begin, we’d like to remind you that some of the information contained in the news release and on this conference call contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict.

Such forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance, and the company’s actual results could differ materially from those contained in such statements. Several factors that could cause or contribute to such differences are described in detail in the Risk Factors section of Clean Energy’s Form 10-Q filed today.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements or supply new information regarding the circumstances after the date of this release.

The company’s non-GAAP EPS and adjusted EBITDA will be reviewed on the call and exclude certain expenses that the company’s management does not believe are indicative of the company’s core business operating results. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to results prepared in accordance with GAAP and should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to GAAP results.

The directly comparable GAAP information, reasons why management uses non-GAAP information, the definition of non-GAAP EPS and adjusted EBITDA, and a reconciliation between these non-GAAP and GAAP figures is provided in the company’s press release, which has been furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K today.

With that, I will turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Clay Corbus.

Thank you, Tom. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, we reported solid results for the second quarter. $106 million of revenue, $63 million of RNG sold, and $16 million of adjusted EBITDA. These results were in line with our expectations and keep us on track for our annual financial outlook, which we are maintaining. We kept our balance sheet strong and finished the quarter with $138 million in cash and short-term investments.

Our upstream RNG production business saw improvement in the second quarter, helped by better weather compared to the first quarter, and continued ramp-up at our two largest projects, South Fork in Texas and East Valley in Idaho. There is still more work to be done as we ramp production and improve operations across our portfolio, and we expect continued improvement in the second half of the year.

In addition to our eight operating RNG projects, we have three projects under construction through our joint venture with Maas Energy Works. We continue to make good progress and expect two projects to come online later this year, with the final project finishing up next year. The Section 45Z clean fuel production credit is an important value driver for our RNG projects.

We continue to await Treasury’s finalization of the 45Z rules and credit values, which is now expected in the fourth quarter. We believe the finalized rule and updated GREET model, once released, will positively impact our upstream results in 2026 and the years ahead. Our RNG fuel volume from heavy-duty trucking held steady during the quarter. We are seeing a handful of fleets add small numbers of trucks equipped with the X15N.

With the uncertainty surrounding the final 2027 emission standards recently released by the EPA, there has been a large pre-buy of legacy diesel trucks. At the same time, we and others remain deeply engaged with many fleets that continue to show strong interest in RNG, particularly with higher diesel prices. Over the past four to five months, we increased our advertising to target the trucking industry, emphasizing RNG’s low, stable price compared to diesel. That effort has generated measurable interest and leads with potential new customers.

I also hope you saw the press release we distributed earlier this week about the growing natural gas heavy-duty truck market in Canada. We recently completed two additional stations, including a critical node in British Columbia, just outside Vancouver, that completes a Western Canadian natural gas fueling network.

Canada has extremely high taxes on diesel and high truck mileage, which makes the cost comparison with natural gas all that much more attractive. And with the Cummins X15N arriving in the Canadian market, fleets that use a lot of fuel are responding very positively.

As I mentioned on our last call, our legacy markets in transit and refuse continue to provide a solid foundation for us. 25 years after the first CNG buses rolled into cities, the transit market continues to be strong with new opportunities and new wins.

In fact, just last week, the Federal Transit Administration announced that their funding will prioritize low-emission solutions like CNG over zero-emission buses. Our fueling expertise also creates opportunities beyond RNG.

Clean Energy has been awarded more contracts than any other company to build hydrogen fueling stations for transit agencies that are expanding with fuel cell buses, reinforcing our leadership in alternative fuel infrastructure.

Last week, we announced the latest and largest hydrogen project to date, a $27 million contract with Orange County Transportation Authority to design and build a new private station. This station will support OCTA’s existing fleet of 10 fuel cell buses plus the 40 buses the agency plans to add, demonstrating both the strength of our customer relationships and scalability and flexibility of our platform.

With nearly 30 years operating in the natural gas sector, our in-house capabilities also extend beyond vehicle fueling and RNG production. As we all know, the country is experiencing a rapidly evolving energy market, and power grids are overtaxed.

Because of this we see emerging opportunities for Clean Energy and our ability to serve independent power solutions. Today, no one has nationwide compression capabilities that we do. And as CNG doesn’t have to go into a vehicle tank, large volumes can be put into tube trailers and transported to facilities that need power but may have issues hooking up with a local grid or are not proximate to a natural gas pipeline. We can solve that problem.

We currently serve customers across a range of natural gas solutions. And as demand for reliable, cleaner energy grows, customers are increasingly looking to us for these solutions. So let me share a few examples. As many of you know, we deliver LNG marine bunker fuel to Pasha at the Port of Long Beach and have been doing this for the past three years.

We produce the LNG at our plant in Boron, California, transport it to the port using our fleet of LNG cryogenic tanker trucks, and provide fueling services that enable Pasha’s container ships to continually operate on cleaner-burning LNG. Our LNG team has experience that includes designing and building LNG systems for gas to power applications.

As an example, we were recently awarded contracts for two projects in Puerto Rico that will provide energy security and resiliency for a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility owned by a global healthcare provider and another one for a 6 megawatt power plant.

For customers that would rather operate their facilities with cleaner, less expensive natural gas versus fuel oil or cannot get enough electric power, we deliver compressed natural gas through our fleet of CNG tube trailers to commercial and industrial customers that do not have pipeline access.

We have long-standing relationships with large volume customers, but we are also discovering new customers and new markets. Just recently, we signed a contract to supply CNG to a large fulfillment center in California that needs a bridge fuel solution for its power generation while it indefinitely awaits a utility connection.

Clean Energy is uniquely positioned to provide natural gas solutions to customers across multiple fuel types, multiple applications, and multiple regions in the US and Canada. We have room to grow here, and we are excited about it.

Finally, I want to recognize Bart Frabotta, who we recently appointed as our Chief Operating Officer. Improving execution and operation performance and driving technology throughout the company is a top priority for us. Bart is the right leader for that work. Over his 15 years at Clean Energy, he has been central to building and running our company. I look forward to what his leadership will help us accomplish.

And with that, it’s Rob’s turn.

Okay. Thank you, Clay. Good afternoon to everyone. Overall, our second quarter performance was in line with our expectations from both the financial performance and fuel volume standpoint. Maintaining our full year guidance assumes improved financial performance in the second half of 2026, which is consistent with our original expectations. Thus far in 2026, fuel pricing, including RIN and LCFS credit values, has been favorable. Operating expenses remain on plan, and fuel volumes are meeting expectations.

Our outlook for 2026 also assumes that final guidance on the GREET model for the 45Z production tax credit will be issued before year-end, and that could provide up to $5 million of incremental adjusted EBITDA. If the guidance is delayed or provides minimal benefit over the current production tax credit values, adjusted EBITDA would come in below our $70 million to $75 million range.

Turning to volumes. Second quarter fuel volumes increased by 7% year-over-year to 81.8 million gallons. Approximately 2/3 of the growth came from conventional natural gas, driven by additional fueling locations for large fleet customers, for which we also provide maintenance services.

RNG volumes increased 3% year-over-year to 63.2 million gallons, reflecting normal variations across customer sectors. As noted on our first quarter earnings call, RNG volumes declined sequentially because the first quarter included incremental deliveries to customers outside our station network. Through June, RNG volumes remained ahead of our plan.

RNG production volume from our dairy projects was 2.1 million gallons for the second quarter of 2026, well above the prior year period as our RNG upstream portfolio continues to ramp. Consequently, we saw a notable improvement in the operating results of our RNG upstream business in the second quarter compared to the first quarter.

This improvement was contemplated in our plan and guidance. Second quarter revenue was $106.4 million, up from $102.6 million in the prior year period. Higher station construction revenue and increased RIN and LCFS credit values more than offset lower commodity prices and customer pricing.

As expected, revenue declined sequentially from the first quarter, primarily due to lower natural gas prices and reduced gas trading volatility consistent with normal seasonal patterns. Fuel margins, including RIN and LCFS credits, were largely in line with our plan for the second quarter of 2026.

Fuel and customer mix variations modestly reduced margins during the quarter, which is normal and factored into our outlook for 2026. Our cash and investments of $138 million at the end of June were up from $126 million at the end of March. And through June, we contributed $24 million to our Maas Energy Works Dairy joint venture, followed by an additional $12 million in July. Less than $5 million remains to be contributed before the projects are placed in service.

And with that, operator, please open the call to questions.

(Operator Instructions)

Eric Stine, Craig-Hallum.

Hi, Clay and Rob.

Hey, Eric.

Hi. So maybe if we could just start with the X-15N. I mean, I know that we all know that it has been slower on the uptake, certainly slower than Cummins, people in the industry, et cetera. But could you maybe talk about what you’re seeing in terms of the incremental cost? Because for some time, that was one of the areas of pushback.

I know you mentioned that it’s heavy diesel pre-buy. I know it’s also a tough environment for fleets given what has happened to diesel prices. But just curious if at least the incremental cost piece you’re hearing that has normalized to an extent.

Well, I think as we think about the incremental cost, one thing that has once again, I think confused the market is that the delay on the certification for the 2027 engines and what that’s meant for the diesel boys, because to a certain extent, they had already -- Cummins and all the other OEMs had already invested all the money into the technology, which was going to increase the price of the diesel engine, which would decrease the incremental cost. And with that sort of in disarray, it’s sort of unclear then what’s going to happen there.

I think what we hear from what I think is public that we got from the Cummins earnings call is that they’re just going to sort of roll it out during the rest of 2027. So that they’re still going to roll it out, but it’s not all going to happen in January. It’s going to happen over the year.

But ultimately, you still are going to have that incremental cost or that the incremental cost decrease because diesels are getting more expensive. I think when you subtract that away, we still work with our other partners in the industry, whether it’s with the fuel tank providers, whether it’s with the dealers, whether it’s with the OEMs or the OEM manufacturers as well, to see what we can do to try to get that price down.

I don’t think we’ve seen real movement in the sort of actual price. It’s just movement around how each one of the different participants can chip in a little bit to help bring that price down, so that the incremental payback period can get down to a reasonable level.

I would say, though, that what’s important about that is it’s not just the incremental price, it’s how much they’re saving on fuel. And that’s where the high price of diesel, and I think everything you read is that the price of diesel is going to stay high for a while. Even if it doesn’t stay high, that volatility does help us. And that’s why we poured a lot more money into advertising to highlight that in the trades this past quarter, which impacted our results.

We think it was an absolutely good investment in the long term because it has resulted in a lot more appointments, a lot more discussions. It’s the type of investment that we want to make in order to drive future growth.

Got it. That’s helpful commentary. And then maybe one just for Rob. You mentioned that your EBITDA guide, you talked about $5 million incremental there depending on the outcome of the 45Z guidance. But to me, incremental would mean that it’s above and beyond where your guidance is. But at the end, you talked about that if it were not to come to bear, that that would mean downside to your guidance. So maybe just talk through some of the puts and takes as we think about that and we see if that occurs.

Yeah, when we issued our guidance at the beginning of the year, we were and still believe that when the guidance comes out on the 45Z, the GREET model, it will have an improved value for the production tax credits.

So we factored up to about $5 million in our guidance. And we are just -- that was also -- we were also expecting that that guidance would come out sooner than it has. And as that has slipped, okay, now we’re moving that closer to year end, and if something happens there, then let’s have some transparency on what that could mean to our number.

We think that it’ll be positive, so we’re not saying it’s not going to be at all. And I guess the binary choice would be if they moved the approval across into 2027, then you wouldn’t get that it wouldn’t happen for us in 2026. Other than that, maybe the value could be different, but we think it’ll be positive to us.

Okay. So in your mind, it’s more about timing. It’s whether it gets acted on in time for you to impact results rather than necessarily just thinking about what the potential outcomes might be.

Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks, Eric.

Rob Brown, Lake Street Capital Markets.

Hi, Clay. Hi, Rob.

Hey, Rob.

I just wanted to follow up on your comments about the interest level increasing with the diesel fuel prices. I guess you’re advertising. You said you had more sort of activity, but given the diesel price change and the spread now, what’s your sort of view on fleet adoption and thinking in the industry kind of changing toward natural gas?

Well, I don’t think it’s changed. I think we're still -- we’re ever optimistic. I think it's because we do see -- as you get -- as the engine gets more -- to be frank, when the engine first came out, those alpha and some of the testing didn’t go as anybody had hoped, and it just took a little while to work out the kinks. And so I think as you get more use cases out there and the improvement increases, you get better, you adjust the engine more for the use type, so you get the right transmission in there, you get your mileage penalty reduced a little bit.

You continue to see improvement in the performance of the engine for what the fleets need. When you combine that with the price of diesel, it makes a pretty compelling case. But again, when you have all this uncertainty that’s going on with the regulatory environment the market just says, huh, okay. We like this. We’ll keep talking about it, but we’re just going to sort of wait to see how things settle out here before we make a big commitment.

I think what we do see and what we like is we sell 10 here. If you look like for instance, that Canadian release, you look at that, we got 35 X15Ns up there. It’s not one fleet. It’s spread out amongst seven or eight fleets. And that’s exactly what you’d like to see. It means that people are out there testing it. They’re running it hard. They’re putting the miles on it. And from there, we anticipate and hope they have good experiences and that the adoption starts to pick up.

Okay, great. Thanks for the color. And then on the RNG upstream business, it was close to breakeven EBITDA in the quarter. Sounds like it’s crossing into positive. How do you sort of see that trend line and how much more to go in terms of the maturity of those units that are running or installations that are running?

Well -- we see a lot of opportunity for those to improve. There’s always a story with every plant whether you have too much heat or too much cold, how the cows are producing everything. But we see the trend line absolutely going in the right direction. We have enough manure at a number of the facilities. We have the process improvements that we put in place.

We see two of the Maas projects coming online this fall, and as we mentioned, the third coming online early next year. So I think we see that trend line absolutely continuing. It will be the -- the second half of the year will be much better than the first half of the year.

So we’re optimistic. And then if you layer on top of that what could happen if you get 45Z across it, then financially you start to see a much better impact as well. For us, it’s great because it’s like much of our business. The more volume you get across it, the more easier you cover your overhead and the more that drops to the bottom line. And that’s what we’re seeing with our plants as well. So I’d say overall, we are optimistic.

Excellent. Thank you. I’ll turn it over.

Great. Thanks.

Nate Pendleton, Texas Capital.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions.

Hi, Nate. How you doing?

Doing well. Regarding the opportunities to support power generation that you highlighted in your prepared remarks, how large is the pipeline of opportunities that you’re assessing? And if you could frame for us how much investment would be needed to meet any incremental demand there?

Well, Nate, we’ve had a subsidiary for a number of years called NG Advantage that’s based in the Northeast that really has been working with off-pipeline customers for a long time. And they’ve had an established good business, and it’s been really interesting for us. We’ve got 102 trailers. We got some large compression capacity up there.

And it’s been really interesting for us that as you have these sort of messy middle with getting power to a lot of facilities, everything from EV charging to fulfillment to centers. Data centers is a pretty large load. But we find that we are starting to get a lot of phone calls asking us if we can sort of service this. Can we do -- sometimes it’s a short-term opportunity. Others are looking for much longer-term opportunities. And as we think about it, we do have compression capacity across the entire United States.

We have it reserved, and it’s typically used for trucking, but it is underutilized. And then we also have excess tube trailers. In order to test this market, we don’t have to spend anything. We can just use the existing assets and existing infrastructure we have.

And so I think that’s where we stand. This would be a use case if, as we are doing it, and as we see more of these come along, depending on the returns profile, we’ll determine whether it ends up taking up any investment. But this is not like a $200 million dairy project in Idaho. This is small, incremental, justified by contracts that we’d have in place. But we do think -- we do see there’s a lot of growth potential here. And again, it’s enabled by the fact that we’ve got 600 fueling stations across the country that have excess compression capacity.

Got it. It sounds like a great opportunity. If I may --

It is.

Can you talk about the potential size and cadence of opportunities on the hydrogen side of the house following the recent announcement with Orange County that you discussed?

Yeah. The way that we’ve gone about hydrogen is not to use our own capital. We used our model in the transit agencies world, which is where a transit agency puts out an RFP. You win the RFP based on your experience and your cost, and then you get the contract, and it’s usually a cost-plus contract.

And then in this case, we also have an operation and maintenance agreement to go along with it, as well as a hydrogen fuel supply to go along with it. So in all these cases, it’s something where it’s not putting our capital at risk or we’re taking commodity risk on anything here. It’s really a service that we provide.

And I think we see that, well, I know we see that as the model going forward. We’re happy to see OCTA go after this. We think that hydrogen is a tough commercial. To do hydrogen independently is pretty tough commercially. But I think when it’s going through a transit agency, and it’s supported by the state or by the locality or by the feds to help promote the industry and get it to a point where it can grow, we’re there to be a service provider for that, but not to take risk with our own capital to see where that market is going to unfold.

Understood. Thanks for taking my questions.

You’re welcome. Thank you, Nate.

Matthew Blair, TPH.

Thank you, and good afternoon. I wanted to ask about the California LCFS market, just in light of the recent supply-demand data that shows a growing quarterly shortage. Can you remind us where do you stand on pathways? Is it still just Del Rio that has the LCFS pathway? And then I know it’s not in your hands, but do you have an estimate of a reasonable timeline of when you would receive future California LCFS pathways? Thank you.

And Matthew, when you say Del Rio, that is a provisional pathway.

Right. And then we have --

The others have temporary.

We have temporary pathways on the seven others.

Yeah.

We expect -- probably on our -- next year, we expect in our joint venture with BP, the five of them, we expect to get the provisional next year. And then I think in our big one up in Idaho, on both South Fork and East Valley, it’s probably -- yeah, probably 2028. It’s really hard.

This is one where it’s entirely dependent on CARB. Whenever we gave a date out on Del Rio, we were ultimately frustrated every quarter and saying, well, we thought it was going to be this quarter, but it’s next quarter or so. Right now, we’d hope the end of 2027 and 2028, but we’re not putting anything in our forecast to move from temporary to provisional.

We’re monetizing at the temporary.

Right

-- [level].

Sounds good. And then could you talk a little bit more about the moving parts in your outlook for fuel distribution in the back half of the year? If I’m doing my math right here, it looks like your guidance implies that H2 would be a little bit lower than H1. Is that just a typical seasonal pattern, or are there any other moving parts that would help explain that? Thank you.

No. I don’t think it’ll be lower. It should be relatively consistent, maybe some improvement for the distribution.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And at this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Clay Corbus for closing comments.

Well, thank you, everybody, for being on the call. I know late on a Thursday afternoon in the beginning of August, there’s probably things you’d rather be doing, so we appreciate your time and interest in Clean Energy. Thanks very much.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today’s meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.