Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (NASDAQ:CLNE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Andrew Littlefair: Yes, exactly. Look, here’s — well, last year didn’t bode too well without a little bit of linearity. But I would say that we’re talking about it. So I’m going to say that there’s a little bit of similarity between the years where historically, Q1, we’ve — just a little bit of a slower quarter. And then as we talk about completing stations, they’re not all going to get done here in March, kind of thing. So that plays into increasing volumes throughout the year. And you are correct Eric, it is interesting. I’ll put the little caveat out there. California did have a huge issue with natural gas prices in January. Like more, I noted that natural gas prices doubled in December. So they went from like $7 and end to $15 and that’s about $1.

And then they went from 15 and end to $50. So that’s kind of mind boggling. And we’re going to see some impact from that. There’s no doubt about it. I mean it’s like usual, I mean it may be some painful. The good news is we have a fair amount of the year to try to manage around that and recover from it. But that was — that’s something that — that’s kind of part of how we do things. I didn’t get out there and necessarily change guidance on January at all. But it’s something that’s — those are the types of things that we had some headwinds in ’22. Frankly, we had it in the third quarter. And then we thought we — again, that was part of the optimistic view of the fourth quarter was that we have that high gas price from the third quarter out of the way and just when we thought we were kind of out of the woods, California, our largest market doubles.

So, all of that is temporary volatility. So I mean, our view is long on this solution and the fuel. And we’ve got projects being built out and so we’re in this for the long haul.

Eric Stine: Got it, that’s helpful. And maybe just turning to the RNG. Just maybe an update. I know you’ve provided it before. But as you see the JVs playing out ultimately the number of projects you see, and then maybe the average gallons per project. Thank you.

Andrew Littlefair: These projects tend to be the dairies tend to be oh, Eric, I’m sorry. Eric, these projects tend to be in the range of 1.5 million to 2 million gallons 2.5%. Now we have one underway in Idaho right now. It’s really big projects, $5 million. But let’s just say $2 million is a good number. So you could see that we’ve got many more projects come on, which we are very excited about the scope and the size of the market is still big. Now what you’ll have, Eric, is you won’t have as many 10,000 cow dairies or larger, but you’ll begin to cluster these. And so there’s dozens and dozens of projects that are still out there. And in fact, right now, we have 27, I think, in our pipeline. So not of the ones we’ve discussed, not of the 13 that are sort of I put under construction and underway.

We’ve got another 27 that we’ve — we’re talking to and treating paper with. So I think we’ve always sort of said that you’d be in the 35 to 40 projects before this is — before we realized what we laid out for you last year.

Eric Stine: Okay, thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from Matthew Blair with Tudor Pickering Holt. Please proceed with your question.

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