Jim Deller
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright. Please go ahead sir
Thank you, Brent, for the financial overview. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the ClearSign 2022 second quarter conference call. I thank you all for joining us and for your interest in ClearSign. I’m going to review each of our product lines and the progress we have made commercializing them in this call. One of the features of this business is the thoroughness and formal review procedures of our customers. And of course, they need to ensure that any changes that they make are done with appropriate diligence. The news that we have been able to release this past few months does not reflect the sales engagements and technology development that has been made. As you will appreciate, the bird needs to be securely in the hand before any news is issued, which while prudent also does not do justice while technology development, project execution or the securing of customers’ orders are in progress. To the extent that I can, I will give color to the projects we are working on and recent developments. I will also give a brief update on developments we have made in our China operations. I will start with process burners. In our last call, we discussed how our process burners are becoming recognized in the industry, whether that be our conferences with subject matter experts within major corporations or to support firms like multi-national engineering firms and heater companies that supply to them. We see this trend continuing and small indicators such as a significant uptick in companies and potential customers that contact us asking us if we can offer an alternative solution give us confidence of our maturing recognition and credibility in the market. For the first time, we have a backlog of scheduled customer visits, a mix of our outreach and incoming requests and also proposals for customers seeking alternative solutions. We all appreciate that the real indicators of purchase orders and revenue but understanding that this is not a transactional industry, and I assume all joining us on this call have a deeper interest in the development of our business. I believe such qualitative indicators of progress are of interest. They are certainly very encouraging to us. We have announced two major projects which are in progress: a 16-unit project for a Midwest refiner and a 20-burner project for a California refinery. The first project has passed the first phase of design, fabrication and testing, and that was successful in all regards. From here, the project is awaiting the next purchase order to move forward. This has been slowed due to an internal review of capital projects within the operator. We look forward to updates from them and hopefully moving into the next phases and completing this project. This project is meaningful and exciting because the project takes advantage of the capability of our technology to improve the throughput of the heaters. In this case, we believe we can reduce a bottleneck in the refinery process increasing overall throughput. The second project, the 20-burner California project now has an accelerated schedule with the delivery date and installation date moving up, compressing the time line. We were notified of this revision during the completion of the engineering phase. This also moves up the burner testing portion of the project in addition to the fabrication, delivery and installation of our burners. Incidentally, the completed first phase of this project has been invoiced and already paid in full. As a result of this project acceleration, we are pleased to announce the receipt of the addition of a multi-burner test and funding for the fabrication of four burners earlier today. As stated in the release, the purchase order is for the purchase of four of the 20 burners, the multi-burner test and other ancillary items. The engineering and computer modeling for this project has already been completed, enabling the remaining time line for this project to be brought forward. As we anticipate an additional purchase order for the manufacture and supply of the remaining 16 burners will be received during the fourth quarter of this year. This marks substantial progress with this project and a significant financial commitment on behalf of our customer and enables us to proceed with the next phase of this project, which we very much appreciate. The acceleration of this project schedule is good news for us for multiple reasons. Most importantly, this project is to provide a sub-five PPM NOx installation in two significant heaters in a major refinery right in the heart of the Los Angeles region, a focused target market. And this acceleration means we should expect to have a fully functioning reference there earlier than previously anticipated. Secondly, in completing the burner test, which is scheduled to be done this year, we will also, again, be able to demonstrate the capabilities of our technology to our customers and partners. This is a highly interrelated industry and use spreads efficiently. And of course, advancing the time line also mean that we should expect cash and ultimately recognize revenue earlier. Of these, cash will typically precede the recognition of revenue. And of course, it is nice to see a project move in our favor from time to time. On the R&D front, back in May, we announced that the company was awarded a government grant through the Small Business Innovative Research, or SBIR, program with the Department of Energy. We are selective about the technology development projects we undertake, whether externally funded or not. So I will give a brief outline of the reasons that this particular program was of interest to us. It is hard to miss discussions of CO2 reductions of the hydrogen economy, whether in government initiatives, corporate ESG reports or technical conferences and publications in the broad energy sector. A significant element of the technology being discussed is the conversion of combustion equipment to run on hydrogen gas as a fuel. Of course, hydrogen gas burns to create water only, where, of course, hydrocarbons create water and carbon dioxide. There are many proposed sources of hydrogen with different merits and challenges, and these have been labeled with a range of colors, which may be confusing but hydrogen produced is all the same. From a toxic pollution perspective, burning hydrogen increases the formation of NOx in typical industrial burners. This is a consequence of increasing flame temperature that results compared to a normal natural gas or typical mixed refinery fuel gas flame. So while there is a drive to reduce CO2, there’s also a need to control toxic gas emissions like NOx. Hence, the government initiative enacted by the Department of Energy grant to prompt the development of such burner technology in the market. And of course, we were delighted to be the only company and only technology selected for this award. The project funding are in phases. The initial funding amount is approximately $250,000 and the project will last six months starting from the end of June. If needed, and upon completion of the Phase I work, we will be able to submit a follow-up proposal to continue the development work with a Phase II grant, which can be up to $1.6 million for a two-year duration. As some of you may remember, we have previously demonstrated our current ClearSign Core burner technology operating at full scale with gases ranging from natural gas blends to blends with over 80% hydrogen content. Some of you may have noticed that we did announce on LinkedIn that we have successfully completed an initial run at 100% hydrogen improving the capability of our technology as we anticipated. This does not mean the project was completed. As of our overall product commercialization strategy, we recognize the need to provide products that are easy to install and easy to operate and provide the same functionality to our customers that the existing further technology provides and what they are used to. It is worthy of note that we have received attention from customers, including the global and national refiners following just the announcement of this award. One final detail, and this is just to elaborate a little on what Brent said earlier. For those who followed our burner technology validation project with ExxonMobil in 2020 and early 2021. At the time, we announced that the burners met the extensive ExxonMobil requirement in fall in the multi-burner testing. We have now received payment in full for the successful completion of that performance and service for ExxonMobil. Switching to boiler burners. On our last call, we laid out what we believe to be the catalysts and drivers for our sub-2.5 PPM NOx boiler burners in the San Joaquin Valley. Frankly, we are a bit disappointed that we haven’t seen initial sales as of yet. Despite the delays we have encountered, we still firmly believe that this will be a meaningful business segment. I was recently out in California with our partner, California Boiler. And what I’m hearing is that while there are dates to be compliant, the penalties are not so severe or painful that operators are taking their time before deciding what to do. While we would certainly like to see an immediate short-term need for our technology and believe that we are ready, taking a long-term view of this gives us time to get more of an installed base in place and they like to give customers confidence to use our technology before many of them make decisions of what technology I – basically, ClearSign or SCRs to install. We and again, I include the sales management team at California Boiler as we have a robust pipeline of proposals and are talking to operators on a daily basis. We are also seeking to deploy rental boilers in California fitted with ClearSign technology. In fact, the 500-horsepower burner and ClearSign – the ClearSign burner that was used to demonstrate our technology to customers in the region last November is one of these. The value of this strategy is not only that it provides an immediate need for new ClearSign burners but that it provides an alternative path to get our technology out into the hands of our customers where they can get some real-life operating experience and to generally build our confidence that our technology offers a reliable and highly efficient solution to the need to meet new NOx emission levels in the industry. Many of you have seen the announcement we put out on August 23 regarding the sale of a ClearSign Core and closed oxidizer to a Canadian-based hydrogen technology company. The technology and equipment making up an oxidizer and the flare is essentially the same in the smaller sizes. To the extent that at ClearSign, we group the applications together for convenience and efficiency. The oxidizer will be installed as part of a pilot scale hydrogen production plant. This is a new technology to produce clean hydrogen and converting the carbon from natural gas to solid carbon and is also expected to be low cost, so a very exciting new application for us. We have not talked much about a flare or thermal oxide as a technology recently, primarily because of the dominance of the process burner and boiler burner technologies in our business plans and envisioned revenue stream. We do have this technology developed and that addition have four play units operating in the Los Angeles region installed and commissioned by California Boiler. We are monitoring needs for this technology as regulations change to require measurement of NOx in flue gases and low NOx emissions in new regions. I will now turn to China. COVID has significantly slowed down our developments in China and the restrictions on visas and travel within China are still ongoing. However, and at last, we do have some good news that our President of ClearSign Asia has been authorized to receive a visa and is at the Chinese consulate as I speak. Assuming everything goes to plan, our expectation is that Mr. Menendez will be returned to China within a month. We have remained in contact with the Beijing District Heating Group, Shuangliang Group as well as other potential customers and anticipate being able to continue the path to obtain government certification of our watertube boiler burner and our 500 horsepower midsized firetube boiler burner. We very much look forward to getting that program moving forwards again. There are also some other changes of interest in China. We have learned that new regions are adopting strict low NOx emissions requirements. Of particular interest is Shenzhen, China’s fourth largest city right in the south of the country next to Hong Kong. These changes are expected to greatly increase the demand for new ultra-low NOx firetube boiler burners for both new boiler and retrofit installations. We have plans to meet with local government officials responsible for the implementation of these new policies. Looking forward to the rest of this year. In terms of our process burner business, we expect to complete the burner testing for our California project and anticipate that the following purchase order for the fabrication of the remaining equipment will be received. We also are optimistic that we will see and be able to announce some positive sales news by growing proposal funnel in this product line. I do believe the deployment of rental boilers in addition to our ongoing sales efforts is a promising strategy. During the remainder of this year, I expect seasoned ClearSign Core boiler burners deployed possibly through sales and also in rental units, providing us with valuable benchmarks and references in the market. We are also working with customers in other regions and verticals as evidenced by the sale of the enclosed oxidizer into Canada and we certainly have the potential to see other orders from these engagements. We also need to be cognizant at this stage in our developments. Even unsuccessful proposals are useful. They are an opportunity for us to engage with prospective customers and to show what we can do for them and the capabilities of our technology. We also look forward to updating you all on our progress in China. We are very pleased to fully reengage there in person. On a more general note, I want to publicly introduce and welcome a new Director, Gary DiElsi, who was appointed in August. Gary has extensive and very relevant industry experience, including time with Chevron and UOP. His involvement with the Board in the short time he has been with us has been very productive. And on behalf of myself and our other directors, we very much look forward to working with him in the future. I also want to pass on my thanks for the service to ClearSign provided by Bruce Pate. Bruce has contributed greatly to the transition of ClearSign over the last few years, and we wish him well. While not visible from the outside, the increased proposal and project work flowing through the company has required our ClearSign team to quickly develop procedures and efficiencies to keep up. This includes not just our engineers and project managers with our accounting team and everyone else in the company. It is very pleasing to see our growing team day [ph] so well, and I’m very grateful to them all. With that, I would like to open up the call for questions. Operator?