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Decarbonizing Heavy-Duty Engines: Podcast With ClearFlame
56 Plays2 months ago
How can we address the carbon emissions from diesel engines, which are deeply integrated into global economies but also present significant environmental challenges?
While electric vehicles are often highlighted as the solution, ClearFlame presents an immediate and innovative alternative that drives us toward a cleaner future—without the need to wait for EV infrastructure to catch up.
In this discussion, BJ Johnson, co-founder and CEO of ClearFlame Engine Technologies, shares how his company is offering a practical solution by decarbonizing traditional diesel engines. We’ll explore the story behind ClearFlame, understand their technology, and discuss its implications for the future of clean energy.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, you are watching or listening depending on the platform of your choice. A brand new episode of the green perspective podcast. Yes, we go video and audio so you can watch our podcast on YouTube or listen to our episodes on Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast or wherever you're streaming your podcast. We are basically everywhere. what this podcast is about. Well, we are bringing some amazing guests from all over the climate tech space who are here to introduce us to their technologies in their combatting climate change. And in today's episode, we are talking about the transportation industry and how we can address the carbon emissions from diesel engines. We know that they are integrated in global economies, but they pose a significant environmental threat. And when we imagine this topic, we are usually talking about EVs as a part of sal
Meet BJ Johnson and ClearFlame
00:00:45
Speaker
solution.
00:00:45
Speaker
But my guest today, BJ Johnson from a company called Clear Flame is here to offer something different. His technology is aimed at decarbonizing diesel engines and can be implemented immediately. It doesn't need any additional infrastructure. So if you want to learn about that, stay tuned and enjoy!
00:01:04
Speaker
um
00:01:11
Speaker
Hi BJ, welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast! Thank you for having me. So can you give me and our audience a short introduction? Tell us a bit about about your background and how did you end up working in this clean tech space? Absolutely. So I'm PJ Johnson. I'm co-founder and CEO at a company called ClearFlame Engine Technologies. I'm an engineer by training. So the technology that became ClearFlame had originally been my graduate research out at Stanford University in California.
00:01:40
Speaker
started the company back in 2016, wherein we moved to the Chicago area shortly after, and we've been growing it here since. What Clear Flame does is modify traditional diesel engines. So I think the big engines that are in, you know, semi trucks or larger power generators, we modify those to use low carbon fuels. So applications that aren't ready for an electric vehicle that still need the diesel engine, we can provide that performance need, but we can do it without relying on petroleum diesel fuel, which means we can not only be
00:02:13
Speaker
low carbon for customers. ah More importantly, in these commercially oriented sectors, we're actually low cost for customers as well. And what sparked your interest in developing this cleaner alternatives for heavy duty engines? The professor who became both Julie and my thesis advisor, Chris Edwards, out at Stanford, he would always talk very eloquently about there being two sides of the energy problem. That yes, of course, we have to achieve sustainability. We have to drive down carbon emissions.
00:02:42
Speaker
But also the fact that there's basically nothing in the world that's more correlated with quality of life than access to energy. And so if we're going to improve global quality of life, particularly in the global South, we're going to have to increase energy consumption. There's no way around it. And so those two things appear to be at odds. We have to increase energy consumption yet become more sustainable.
00:03:04
Speaker
And that's where this idea of decarbonizing the diesel engine came in. Diesel engines drive global economies. We're reliant on them here in the US. We're even more reliant on them in developing economies. We need that engine designed to persist, but diesel fuel contributes about five gigatons of CO2 every year. So it's about 12% global CO2 emissions.
00:03:26
Speaker
So that was the idea. How do we do something about an engine we need, but the fuel being the problem and actually addressing that with a technology that no one was talking about yet.
How Does ClearFlame Decarbonize Diesel Engines?
00:03:37
Speaker
We were still living in a world where we were either going to use diesel or EV, but there was nothing in between. There's a huge range of applications that need something in between, and that's a market need we wanted to meet. And how does your tech actually works and how successful is it? Yeah.
00:03:52
Speaker
So the the way the technology works, I'm always happy to go into as much detail here. But it's basically ah a higher temperature combustion process. So we change a little bit of the plumbing, you know the way that the air and the exhaust moves in the engine. We kind of redirect those flows to make them hotter. We make a few other modifications to the engine, and then a lot of controls changes. But really, that amounts to only about 5% of the parts. So we work with professional diesel engine rebuilders to change about 5% of the parts of the engine.
00:04:21
Speaker
And then you can make this engine run on a lower carbon fuel. And that goes to your question about how successful it is. The the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Like it does everything the diesel engine does today. We're able to match the torque and the power and the efficiency.
00:04:37
Speaker
It even sounds the same, which is not always a good thing. Diesel engine engines are a bit loud, but it it is a diesel engine and in every sense of the word. and That's what allows us to be on the road with customers today, pulling 80,000 pounds, running 23 hours a day because you can just refill it quickly with a liquid fuel, um doing everything the diesel truck was doing in that application before. That's what we're most proud of. We're not asking customers to change the way they get their business done.
00:05:02
Speaker
to use something that is much lower carbon, at least 50% today on a pathway towards net zero emissions by the next decade. How does the cost of operating clear flame engine compare to a traditional diesel one?
The Competitive Edge of ClearFlame
00:05:15
Speaker
at Clear Flame, we're deploying the trucks under a leasing model right now. So we go to customers and we say, well, first take a step back, about half the big trucks you see on the road are leased as opposed to owned. So it's about 50-50. There's plenty of people using that business model already. We go to them, the to the to the fleets and say, hey, what are you paying today to move your goods when it comes to the truck and the maintenance and the diesel fuel?
00:05:40
Speaker
um We'll take that and we'll beat that price point by a little bit. We'll be able to offer someone a discount. And of course that depends on how heavy their loads are and what miles per gallon they get, but it really is an apples to apples comparison. Like whatever you're getting on diesel, we can beat that and we can do that at no risk to the customer. So we don't ask for any money upfront. They just pay us per mile as they go. um Again, a rate lower than diesel and we're providing them the truck, the maintenance, and if they need it, the fuel as well.
00:06:07
Speaker
You mentioned that when we talk about achieving net zero, um we are usually relying on EVs, so let's say biofuels. So how do you market your tech?
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's a great question. So ah there's there's two ways in which I think it's important to to talk about clear-fledged technology that really differentiate it from from everything else. One is we do have the ability to be a bridge technology in the sense that we are a technology that works today. We use all of the same supply chains as a traditional diesel engine. We use the same all the same technician training as a diesel engine.
00:06:44
Speaker
We use infrastructure that's extremely similar to that of a diesel engine. We're able to keep all of that in place today. So I think when it comes to marketing it, saying we can have an impact with a solution today is one of the big differentiators. you know Contrast that with EVs, which work pretty well in passenger cars today. But for an EV truck, um that's about 60% to 90% more expensive to own over its lifetime, you know including reduced electricity costs.
00:07:12
Speaker
So you can't put something that is 60 to 90 percent more expensive into a business that has three to five percent net margins. So that's the first aspect of the answer. We can have an impact today. But the second aspect is we're not actually asking anyone to take a step back on their sustainability goals to adopt this bridge solution. In other words, it's not a bridge to nowhere. It's a bridge. I think that continues indefinitely. The fuels we use today are actually lower carbon on average.
00:07:41
Speaker
than a typical grid electron today. So we're actually lower carbon per mile than that EV truck today. And the fuels we're using are actually decarbonizing faster than the grid and have a pathway to having net negative CI scores, carbon intensity scores, which effectively means that every mile you drive, you're having the net impact of pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. So if you can be better today, easy to adopt today,
00:08:08
Speaker
and carbon negative in the future, I think that is a full spectrum of what you need to disrupt the market now, transform the market now more importantly, but persist indefinitely as part of a sustainable future.
Challenges and Government Support
00:08:19
Speaker
And what challenges did you have while developing the tech and while scaling it?
00:08:24
Speaker
Challenges while developing. um you know Of course, developing technology is is always hard. So there's a lot of of technical challenges that we've had to overcome to get to the point we're at today, actually operating with customers. I think some of the bigger challenges during the development phase is proving that this technology matters. you know This is not something people have heard of. They've heard of diesel. They've heard of EB. So where do you fit in in the questions that we've just been talking about? There's had to be a lot of education around that.
00:08:52
Speaker
And it's a market that can be a little bit resistant to change. I mean, look at EVs. If you rewind 10, 15 years, everyone was saying EVs were a dumb idea and Tesla was going to fail. But now that Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world, everyone is making EVs as well. I think ClearFlam is going to have to pay play on that that similar kind of market transformation curve.
00:09:15
Speaker
In terms of the challenges with scaling, you know we we are ah still an early growth stage startup of about 45 people. um So it's a lot of people wearing a lot of hats, and we have to discontinue getting better at customer support, customer service, scaling up our sales. you know We've proven the tech works. Now we are literally in the scaling phase of it. Can we turn one to 10 to 100 to 1,000? And that becomes as much a a commercial strategy exercise as the technical challenge one.
00:09:44
Speaker
And when we talk about widespread ah adaptation, might government policies play a role? A very good question. Certainly government policies could play a role. Now, one of the things that I think is clear flames strength is that we're not actually really reliant on government policy policies today. Like our engines are not subsidized in any way.
00:10:04
Speaker
And while the growth of the biofuel sector had been subsidized for a while, all subsidies at the biofuel level, at least for ethanol, are gone as well at this point. So we exist in an unsubsidized world, which means we're not super sensitive to government policy. That said, I do think intelligent government policy can help us. For example, rather than mandating people adopt EVs, we can incentivize people to adopt lower carbon solutions. I think that's an easier policy to sell to the market because it allows customers to choose what makes sense for them. I think it actually also makes more sense for the environment. I don't think a policy that says an EV that might be getting recharged by a diesel generator, which is happening a lot these days, that should not be treated as cleaner
00:10:53
Speaker
than a combustion engine that is running on a carbon-negative fuel. So by incentivizing the outcome, decarbonization, rather than the means, EV versus engines, I think we'll get more reception to decarbonization and as a result, faster decarbonization, which is ultimately what we all want. And what recent developments or announcements are you most excited about within Cleveland?
ClearFlame's Market Deployment
00:11:14
Speaker
So we have recently crossed the hurdle into being a post-commercialized post-revenue company. So started rolling out. Thank you. Started rolling out.
00:11:23
Speaker
our product with customers in early July, running largely around Iowa. um So we're excited to say, hey, we're actually deploying the trucks full time to customers and and and making money on them. My ask to the audience is always, you know, we're looking for like-minded fleets. I think there are a lot of customers out there that want to do something good to lower their carbon intensity.
00:11:46
Speaker
No one is out there saying I want to leave the world a worse place environmentally. But if your choice is do something about carbon or keep your business afloat because your margins are very thin, of course you're going to choose the latter and and no one should be demonized for that. People that are looking to do that right thing and yet haven't found an economically viable way to do it, that's the kind of kind of customers that we're looking to work with. And I think there's a huge value that we offer those customers because then they're allowed to become market leaders and go to all of the big brands of the world, you know the the the Nikes and the IKEAs, to be able to say, hey, we can move your goods sustainably and we don't have to charge you more for it. That's a really powerful message and a market that is missing that voice
Advice for Clean Tech Entrepreneurs
00:12:31
Speaker
today. And do you have some feedback that you can share since you've partnered with some of the fleets and did they had any prejudice since this is a new tech? There is always some prejudice for new tech. um you know I think really what it comes down to is you know they're really evaluating, you know does it do everything my diesel engine did today?
00:12:49
Speaker
And so a lot of the things that we learn about our trucks have nothing to do with the technology at all. So ah for example, in the trucks, there's something called the rear end ratio, which is what converts the the engine motion into the the wheels turning. That can vary truck to truck. And if you give the customer the wrong rear end ratio, again, standard diesel truck spec, it will not give them the performance they're used to. So we've had to actually learn that and change it on the fly. Customers also care about what color the truck is. um Nothing to do with our technology, but something that you shouldn't get wrong. um So a lot of the feedback is about, you know, hey, you know, this is like fundamentally working, but you should have done X, Y, and Z different because like that would have been easy to do. And that's been good learnings for us because the customer is right. Those are things that are easy for us to do and we can do a better job actually figuring out in advance what exactly do you want your truck to look like? Because that's the same question any diesel OEM would be asking them to.
00:13:43
Speaker
And well, you started the company yourself. So what advice would you give to someone who wants to follow your path and enter this clean text space?
00:13:56
Speaker
I would actually apply this advice advice even more broadly than just the the clean tech space, which is just go ahead and do it. The worst thing that is going that can happen is that the company will fail. That is the most likely outcome for any startup, right? But at the end of the day, that that really is the worst thing that can happen. And regardless of whether you succeed or fail, um you're going to learn so much more doing that than you would If you were, you know, going into a consultancy or working at a large company and there's nothing wrong with those careers as well. But like, you know, if you want to be an entrepreneur, the best thing that you can do is try. Cause the worst thing that happens is that you fail and then you're smarter the next time you try to start a company. That's the broadest advice I would, I would give. And then specifically on clean tech, I would really encourage people to think more about the.
00:14:42
Speaker
Entrepreneurial routes when we were starting clear flying you know one of the questions was you know do we want to go work for one of the big engine companies is try to convince them to do that and it's really hard to change traditional industries.
00:14:54
Speaker
And energy is about as traditional an industry as there is out there. It's hard to change from the outside. It's not because they're bad people or bad companies. It's just because they have established business models that have worked for decades. So the onus is on us as as entrepreneurs and innovators to show that something else can work and then help them adopt it. So especially for clean tech, if you do want to see change, um I really don't think there's any alternative close to proving that you can make that change happen yourself.
00:15:24
Speaker
And you feel that that ah adaptation of change has actually changed now and since, let's say, before the pandemics, and because I feel like clean tech has become more mainstream than it was then. You're right. um A lot happened kind of around the 2020 election that made clean tech popular again.
00:15:44
Speaker
um you know these These things do go in cycles. you know Ultimately, it's ah driven by what the financial markets want. Back in 2008-2009, everyone thought clean tech was going to be a really, really great investment thesis. By 2013-2014, everyone thought it was a terrible idea. By 2020, everyone thought it was the greatest idea we've ever had. Now we've come back to Earth a little bit, so it it will be in those cycles.
00:16:08
Speaker
I think that's one of the ways in which being an entrepreneur is important because you can ride out those cycles. I am not evaluated on my quarterly analyst report that a CEO at a Fortune 100 company would give. Now, I'm still evaluated on my performance, but it's on you know VC funding cycles of 12, 18 month funding increments. And so it allows you to ride out some of those faster paced market fluctuations.
00:16:33
Speaker
I do think there's also a lot of geographic variation of that. You see a lot more willingness to take on entrepreneurship on on the West Coast and in the Northeast. um But that's just, I don't think that has anything to do with a different set of people there. It's simply they're just more examples and it's more normal out there.
00:16:49
Speaker
And I am encouraged to see um it's becoming more and more and more of a normal thing here on the Midwest as well, because anyone can do it. And actually, we need entrepreneurs around the country because the types of problems that people focus on solving on the West Coast are not the same. That's the type of problems that need to be solved in the Midwest. And so we're going to need all of that to solve energy because energy is a global
Future Vision for ClearFlame
00:17:10
Speaker
problem. And ideally, where would you like to see your company in five years? And this whole heavy duty is truck space.
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think when I when i want to see Clarifying in five years, I mean, at that point, I want to see us making the transition to being a public company, you know, we'll be profitable at that point, but we need to scale ourselves up. um I think more broadly than that, I want to see the vision of Clarifying really taking off.
00:17:32
Speaker
So I don't want to just be clear flame trucks. I also want to see clear flame engine technologies and off-road equipment like backhoes and tractors and mining rigs and power generators. um I also want to see other incumbents um you know kind of following in our footsteps. So just like Tesla showed GM and Ford and in others that you know EVs were a good idea. I think clear flame is going to set that example for Daimler and Volvo and Packer and Cummins to say, hey, you guys can do this too.
00:18:00
Speaker
um And I'm excited to see more companies using our technology, not just us, based on what we've been able to prove about the market. That customers fundamentally want the performance of the diesel engine, and there's a way to do that with a low-carbon fuel.
00:18:13
Speaker
And since this is a but relatively short conversation, where can people learn more about you, your partners, ClearFlame?
Learn More and Closing Remarks
00:18:20
Speaker
Our website is www.clearflame dot.com. We're most active on on LinkedIn. So follow the company, follow me on on LinkedIn. It's always very much appreciated.
00:18:30
Speaker
And if you ever have thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. So much of Clear Flame support today has been grassroots of people just being passionate about this idea and and driving conversations like this so we can have more awareness of it. So I'm always grateful for those opportunities and and to learn more from other people out there and what they're experiencing in this market today. Well, thanks, Vijay. We're here to help and, well, amplify your words as much as we can. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
00:19:03
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in to Green New Perspective. This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective. We are a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients only for over 20 years now. And if you want to check out how we help our clean tech clients, row, you can click on the link in the description of this episode. If you like what we do here with the podcast, giving some amazing amazing people from all over the clean tech space a place where they can showcase their innovative tech aim at combating climate change, you can support us in so many ways, you can leave reviews, comments,
00:19:37
Speaker
or consider subscribing to our channel on your favorite streaming platform. We've noticed that around 75% of you who are regularly watching our show are not subscribing, so just by hitting that subscribe button you could help us to grow to get even more people from the climate tech space and create additional content. So please consider doing that. Thank you in advance and of course thank you for tuning in to this episode and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Bye!