FuelCell Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FCEL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Manav Gupta: Good morning, guys. I want to go back to the May 1 announcement of ExxonMobil. Looks like you are making strong strides towards commercializing your carbon capture technology. So help us understand what could be the next steps in terms of your outlook, how much of this business could grow for you guys, and what else should we watch for more customers, [Indiscernible], how should we track the progress of this, specifically, as it relates to the last May 1 announcement that you had?

Jason Few: Manav, thank you very much for your question. This is Jason, again. You know, look, we are really excited about the progress that we’re making on our carbon capture technology as a company, right. We believe very strongly that carbon capture is one of the essential elements to achieving decarbonization. I think if you look at the IRA and legislations, like we talked about the EU carbon border tax, you see clear policy driving the need for solutions around carbon capture technology. If you look at just recently, in May the EPA ruling around power generation and decarbonization and what needs to happen there, you’ve got really strong support globally to address what the EIA forecast to be roughly 38 gigatons of Co2 that we need to we need to deal with.

With our technology and Exxon and the May announcement, what that is driving toward is long lead items in support for the possibility of doing a demonstration project. That is driven largely by our demonstration of technical milestones that we continue to demonstrate with our carbon capture technology and the enhancements that we’re making really around two things, we refer to as carbon transfer and power density and we feel really good about that. So we think over time, as we outlined previously in an Analyst Day little over maybe a year ago, we see carbon capture. And our technology really being able to participate in about $1 trillion market between now and 2030. So the things that you should look for are additional demonstration announcements, not only with Exxon, but with other customers where we have the ability to showcase the technology which is differentiated from the aspect of the only technology we’re aware of that can capture carbon from an external source, produce power, and hydrogen simultaneously.

And the extra benefit of doing something that is really also unique to our platform and that’s the destruction of NOX. So we feel really good about where we are, we think it’s a big market opportunity, and we look forward to pursuing it.

Manav Gupta: Perfect. My quick follow-up is if you could also help us get some more details around the commercialization of your solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers and a decade down the line do you actually think that solid oxide could be a more prevailing technology and you would be bigger in solid oxide than other technologies, so how does it shake out, would you be like a 50:50 company in terms of solid oxide or would that become the dominating technology even for FuelCell?

Jason Few: That’s a really good question. I think if I go a decade out and I tried to use a crystal ball of what I see, I think that we will see strong growth in our solid oxide platform for kind of two primary reasons. One, we see time to power as a really significant issue, when you look across not only the U.S., but around the world and just interconnection and other issues and transmission and things that are creating significant delays to implementing power infrastructure. And we see that our ability to now have a sub megawatt platform will give us a chance to participate in more opportunities than we’ve traditionally participated in as a company, so we see growth there. We also see really strong growth around one of the second things that we consider really important to the decarbonization effort and that is hydrogen.