Jim Deller
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright. Please go ahead
Thank you, Brent, for the financial overview. As always, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us on the call today and for your interest in ClearSign. Before I start on behalf of ClearSign and the Board, I want to thank our former Chairman and Board Member Rob Hoffman for his years of service and for the continued financial support for ClearSign provided by clirSPV. Rob's support was instrumental in fostering this company from a research and development technology company to the viable commercial entity we are today. On a similar note, I'd like to welcome Todd Silva to the ClearSign Board of Directors to fill Rob's vacancy as clirSPV's designee. Todd brings over 30 years of leadership and financial experience in industry spanning financial services, technology, healthcare and others. I think this is an exciting time for the company and we look forward to working with Todd and the other Board members. For the call today, I will review our product line starting with our process burners, then move to boiler burners, and then discuss the outlook for the rest of the year. So turning to our process burner line, in our last call we discussed our multiple installations and follow on orders from Kern Energy in California. At that time, our two largest heater retrofit projects had just been started up, and shortly afterwards their emissions were verified by formal third-party measurements, known as source tests. These two heaters are side-by-side, one with five burners and the other with eight. Since those two projects, we have also received follow-on orders for two additional heaters at Kern Energy. By previous orders, the initial purchase order is for engineering, and we anticipate receiving the orders for the follow-on, fabrication, and delivery to complete these retrofits after our engineering scope is complete. We continue to work with Kern Energy, obviously on our existing projects, but also in regards to discussions for the future. You may also have seen messaging from Kern Energy, particularly on LinkedIn and also news articles, referencing our work together from their perspective, emphasizing their priorities and values, and why our projects are important to Kern Energy. In their words, the supply of ClearSign's technology helps the refinery continue to meet California's clean air goals and go beyond established emissions limits to further reduce their environmental footprint. Since then, and most recently, we have made further significant progress in our process burner product line. On July 17, we announced that we had received the engineering order from engineering company and heater manufacturer Birwelco USA Incorporated, a boosted International heater company for the first phase of our project to retrofit four process heaters with a total of 26 ClearSign Core burners to be installed in the Gulf Coast facility of a Fortune 500 global chemical company. This order is important, not just for the size and anticipated revenue associated with it as important as that is, but also because the order is destined for a facility in Texas, which is part of the USA Gulf Coast region that we expect to ultimately be the largest market for our current product lines and one that is now in the process of advising their clean air regulations. Because of the prominence of the engineering and heater manufacturer Birwelco were paramount in the selection of the equipment for this project, which also resulted in the order being placed with ClearSign. For anyone looking to get insight into this industry, I encourage you to look up at Birwelco and particularly to visit their website. They work with a distinguished list of major refiners, midstream and chemicals. They are based in Houston and part of Boustead International Heaters, or BIH, which includes sister companies in Europe, Malaysia and Singapore. Birwelco business is predominantly the supply of heaters to refineries and petrochemical plant or engineering and managing projects to upgrade them, including projects that require the change out of the burners. We believe that having Birwelco expressed their confidence in ClearSign's technology allowing them to have first-hand experience of it and the exposure to what we do makes us well positioned to be part of the solutions they offer and may provide for future clients. As you would expect, we are engaged in other early stage conversations of this nature with them. If you participated in previous conference calls, we have mentioned that we are working with a major global chemical company to become a proved vendor in their system. In fact, that was not a one-off but one of these was a precursor to this order I have just described. Beyond this, we have a 20 burner order nearing completion. The final witness test was completed some time ago, and these burners are now finishing fabrication by our partner, Zeeco and are scheduled to be shipped to our client in the Los Angeles area of California late in September. When up and running, there will be another two heaters this time with eight and 12 burners, which will provide a very significant reference for us, especially given their location in the large refining hub in the Los Angeles area. As previously noted, in accordance with the contract terms of this project, we will collect revenue upon shipment of the burners. So referring back to Brent's comments earlier, our revenue flow is based on the contractual milestones of our projects. So we anticipate that during the period in which we are establishing sales, our revenue flow may be lumpy. While we had significant sales news in the second quarter of 2024, shipping orders like this are what show up in our financial results. Regarding our crossover product line, meaning our horizontal fire burdens for process heating. On June 26, we announced the sale of our largest burners to-date. The sale is meaningful for a couple of reasons. First, the fine rate of this burner at close to 90 million BTUs per hour is almost 2 times the size of our previous largest single burner sold. With this, we will have demonstrated products designed for our small, medium and large-sized ranges in the field. Secondly, this burner was sold in collaboration with another heater manufacturer, Devco Process heaters or Devco into the midstream market, which will introduce our solutions to new customers and expand our sales channels. In that regard, we have received requests to provide quotes for additional projects from Devco in supply of this burner. The burner will be going into a heater in Central Texas gas processing facility. We expect the burner to be delivered during the third quarter this year. This product line continues to gain traction. We believe this level of interest and customer requests for quotes indicate that there is a ready market for these burners. We have proposals that are progressing well, and I hope to have further news from this progression in the near future. We also have an update on our hydrogen burner technology. On the last call, we reported that this new technology had worked very well and have exceeded our expectations at this stage of the project. We also mentioned that we have shared some of those initial results on LinkedIn. While we still have some work to do before calling this product line complete, the hydrogen burner performance is sufficiently robust and comprehensive that we are able to offer this new product for sale and have already been doing soon. One of the attributes of this new technology is that it will perform not only with 100% hydrogen as a fuel in the future, but also with the fuel gas is currently in use today. And because of this, it is a product that our customers can install to meet their NOx and other operational requirements today and at the same time, have the technology in place and ready to operate as they introduce additional hydrogen to their fuel gas streams or convert to 100% hydrogen when that fuel source becomes available in the future. Last week, we hosted a process burner technology launch event at the facilities of Zeeco. I have frequently emphasized that one of our priorities is to develop familiarity and confidence in our technology and its capabilities throughout our customers and other industry stakeholders. Obviously, a key part of this is developing our installed base, but we can also progress this by holding events such as this, in which we demonstrate that our technology operating in the Zeeco test burners. As you would expect, this was accompanied by a series of presentations and discussions about our technology, how it is installed and operated, et cetera, including our introduction and presentation of our new hydrogen burners which provided an opportunity for our customers to literally see it in person for the first time. This demonstration was well attended, included by senior technical representatives of two global super major refineries and an equivalent global chemicals company, multiple global engineering procurement and construction or EPC companies, multiple leading heater manufacturers and prominent engineering and consulting companies. The burner demonstration went seamlessly and from what we can tell with the presentations were well received with active engagement and significant discussions throughout the day. I'm also pleased to note that there's significant interest in the new 100% hydrogen capable burner. What was also particularly pleasing was the continuing active dialogue and in particular, with our customers raising their needs and highlighting how our technology could help them solve their respective challenges and the value of these solutions for them, which is very helpful as we prioritize our product development initiatives. There have been some developments in clean air regulations in both Texas and Colorado that are relevant to both our process and boiler burner product lines. First, in Texas, there was a final certification by the United States EPA of Texas reclassification of non-attainment status for compliance with the 2015 National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone for moderate to serious, for both the Greater Houston and Greater Dallas regions. This triggers many actions by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality or TCEQ. Most notably a revision of the state implementation plans or SIPs for both regions and implementation of new reasonable available control technology or ramped rules for emission sources. We believe these developments are good news for a long-term ClearSign business. I will temper that development with a reminder that government and regulatory processes take time to be implemented, if at all, and the changes to state implementation plans and wrapped rules are not due until late next year into early 2026. Although on the positive side, customers in the effective areas and the regulators issuing permits know that these changes are on the horizon. So we should expect NOx requirements for new permits and opportunities be pushed down ahead of the new regulations being formalized. Secondly, in Colorado. following the recent reclassification of federal ozone nonattainment and severity for Denver and the North front range, Colorado Governor Polis sent a letter to the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment dated March 16, 2024, directing action for Ozone and NOx reductions. This letter directs these agencies to reduce NOx in the affected regions by 30% by the 2025 and by 50% by the end of 2030. Following this development about two weeks ago, we met in person with the senior staff of both the Department of Public Health and Environment and the Energy & Carbon Management Commission to introduce ClearSign Technologies to understand their planning process and to identify how we could support their NOx reduction initiatives. Now turning to boiler burners. The commissioning of our large 1,200-horsepower 2.5 ppm NOx burner brand in Near Zero NOx, for a recycling plant California is underway. This burner is installed, and as you would expect with this being the first burner of this scale, there are some details to work through. However, we believe we are close to having these worked out, we look forward to having this plant in full operation and the formal source test completed. When in service, we believe that this will be a prominent development in the industry and a great reference installation for us. We also have the first article of our new horizontally fired burner design being manufactured. If this burn performs as we expect it to, and as shown in that computer modeling, it will provide extremely low NOx in short length heaters and boilers. Bear in mind, our current boiler burner technology is optimized for 5G boilers in which the space for the flame is typically long and narrow. The first burner of this new design is for installation in a hot oil heater in Texas. The reason I've included this in this section is that we anticipate that the biggest market for this new burner will be watertube boilers, a segment of the market that we have not been able to effectively pursue at this point. Our expectation is that we will be able to install this burner in the fourth quarter this year, although this may be contingent on the coordination of the installation with the client's operations schedule. We are pushing to arrange this installation to be as early as we can because we already have several opportunities waiting for this new design to be demonstrated in service both in terms of repeat orders from existing customers and from potential new clients and covering both hot oil midstream type processes or applications and watertube boilers. Other upcoming events related to our boiler burner line include industry demonstration that will be held in Santa Ana, California next week. The investor-owned California utility companies fund energy efficiency research on available and near future products and technologies. One of these programs is called the statewide Gas Emerging Technologies or GET program, which is administered by a Southern California Gas Company through a contract awarded to ICF, a global consulting and digital services company. The GET program's objective is to source and screen technologies, gather necessary technical information and data on potential efficiency gains to identify key market barriers to the adoption of these technologies and develop strategies to overcome such barriers. ClearSign is pleased to have been selected to participate in this important program. We have completed a study that formally tested and quantified operating efficiency improvements that will basically translate into fuel savings at the ClearSign Core boiler burner technology compared to a typical industry standard ultra-low-NOx burner. The test method was developed by independent third-party engineers and the testing was also overseen by independent third-party engineers or contracted directly by the GET program. We are not able to give results today as the work and data is owned by the GET program, and they have not released a report at this time. However, I can say that the results were pleasing both in terms of efficiency and NOx emissions demonstrated. We plan to provide access to this report on our website when available and also provide notification, but it is issued and a link on LinkedIn. The study results and a physical demonstration of the burner in operation will be presented at the industry demonstration next week. We are expecting approximately 70 attendees including many from the various California air regulators, California refineries, both super major and local, national energy and infrastructure companies, engineering companies and national boiler operators. One final project update on our boiler burner line. In February this year, we announced an order, which is the first of four burners to California plant. That first burner is in production, but the client schedule has moved out a little and that burner is now scheduled to ship at the end of the year and to be installed by the end of the first quarter of 2025. As usual, we will keep you informed as that project progresses. And as we get dates for the remaining three burners for that project. And finally, regarding boiler burners, on the last call, I mentioned that our China certification project has seen some delays. While some progress has been made, I do not have any significance updates regarding the project schedule at this time. In closing, it is worthwhile to look at what we are doing at a tactical level and also at a strategic or high level. The updates I have given here are mostly tactical individual product updates, customer demonstrations, et cetera. At a strategic level, there are areas of focus that are consistent and it is useful to articulate these to provide a framework to understand what we are doing and to gauge progress. Our top-line objective is to increase sales and profitability both in the near-term but also increasingly in the future. To do this, we need to continue developing products that provide value to our customers and because our technology is new, we need to develop our reputation and familiarity in the market. In working towards this objective, we have discussed significant new orders, especially the process burn order for a chemical company in Texas, likely in the most significant United States market for us in midterm and also the engagement of a leading heating manufacturer and engineering firm, who is actually our direct customer for this project and is now getting first-hand experience of our products and working with ClearSign. Under this general seeding the industry objective, we also have carried out a large-scale product demonstration in the Zeeco facility for our process burners last week. And we'll be doing another demonstration for our 5G boiler product line in California next week. We're also noting our relationship with Kern Energy as evidenced by press releases from both us and them regarding our installations there. We will continue to publish news and journals articles related to our installations with Kern Energy throughout the remainder of this year. In support of our continued business growth, we are investing time and energy and bringing new products to market and developing new markets themselves. The new products that are most advanced are our new process burner capable of burning fuel gas ranging from the fuel gases in use today up to 100% hydrogen, while maintaining the same market-leading NOx levels, enabling the burners to be installed now and our customers to be ready for new higher hydrogen fuels as those become available. We are seeing a lot of interest in this new burner as evidenced in the level of engagement during the demonstration last week. And as mentioned, we are starting to provide sales proposals for this burner. The second new product line, a new horizontally fired burner. With the first of this new technology currently in fabrication and plants to be installed in the hot oil heater in Texas. When successfully installed and commissioned, this burn is expected to open up the watertube boiler market for us in addition to the midstream heaters in the process burner market. We also already have interest in this burner, just waiting on the demonstrated operation of this first article in Texas. We also maintain an ongoing portfolio of early-stage development projects and are receiving multiple customer requests for new variations of our technology, some of which we continue to develop and some of which will get dropped as we work through the standard technical business and marketing assessments of these different opportunities. In the same category of development for the future, we are also considering the development of our resources. Such as the recent investment in computer modeling capabilities. We also engaged in developing market access for the future. I talked briefly about our engagement with the regulatory leadership in Colorado, which we will continue to work on. We are also in frequent contact with the California Air Resources Board, the body that oversees the air districts in California and also members of the [TCEQ] (ph) in Texas. We will appreciate that to get all this done in addition to our ongoing normal business operations will take a lot of time and effort. We are conscious of the cost of running ClearSign, and we only had to our headcount but absolutely needed. I greatly appreciate all the hard work and dedication of our team. And with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions. Please, operator?