RNG’s Moment Has Arrived

For decades, the trucking industry has been promised that alternative fuels would transform how fleets power their operations. For just as long, those promises have bumped up against the hard realities of the road, which included underpowered engines, spotty fueling infrastructure, uncertain economics, and the diesel standard.

Chad Lindholm, Senior Vice President of Sales at Clean Energy, says that has all now changed for renewable natural gas (RNG), and he has the fleet feedback to back it up. Appearing on FreightWaves’ What the Truck with host Malcolm Harris, Lindholm walked through why renewable natural gas has arrived at what he called a genuine inflection point.

The math has changed not due to regulatory pressure alone, but because of a convergence of engine technology, price stability, and a maturing infrastructure network that is finally capable of supporting serious commercial deployment.

“We’ve been around for decades and have cut our teeth in the refuse sector, the transit sector, airports, and in the early days in trucking,” Lindholm said, tracing Clean Energy’s trajectory through the evolution of natural gas as a commercial fuel.

“Through the trials and tribulations of early engine technology, we’ve got to a point now where we’ve got an engine that works and works really well, and that’s important.” That engine is the Cummins X15N, a 15-liter natural gas platform that Lindholm described as the product most responsible for changing the conversation with fleet executives.

The specifications are no longer a concession: up to 450 horsepower and 1,850 pound-feet of torque, with tens of thousands of units already operating in Asia and a growing installed base on U. S. roads. “We’re not talking about a startup company. We’re not talking about conversions or repowers,” Lindholm said.

“This is an OEM product built in Jamestown, New York on the Cummins engine plant.” The OEM lineage removes one of the persistent objections to alternative fuel vehicles. Fleet operators have traditionally been hesitant to adopt specialized engines because they didn’t have confidence in who would stand behind the product when something goes wrong.

Lindholm also noted that Clean Energy’s commercial ecosystem now includes PACCAR (through Peterbilt and Kenworth) and Daimler through Freightliner, creating vertical integration from the engine platform through chassis availability to end-user delivery.

With trustworthy names backing the hardware, the biggest question left to answer is how these new engines compare to standard diesel power trains. Lindholm says the X15N is now competitive in ways the industry simply wasn’t prepared for when natural gas was built around nine- and 12-liter engines struggling to keep pace in demanding applications.

“There are now a little over a thousand of these trucks on the road, and there are demo trucks that have literally touched dozens and dozens of the largest for-hire and private providers,” Lindholm said. “The feedback we’re getting from fleets is that they’re getting comparable performance, and that comes down to the specs and horsepower and torque.

The X15N is able to pull 80,000-plus pound loads on varied topography.” Certain operations in Canada are pushing the platform even further: “There’s applications up north of the border where we’re hitting up to 140,000 pounds, without any loss in overall performance.”

Range, often cited as a disqualifying disadvantage of alternative fuel platforms relative to diesel, is also no longer the conversation-stopper it once was. According to Lindholm, the sweet spot for the X15N includes fleets that operate between 500 and 1,200 miles per day.

That range covers a substantial share of domestic over-the-road and regional trucking activity. “These fleets are able to take the trucks well over a thousand miles depending on fuel capacity specs,” he said. “So they’re able to meet the midrange and really longer range routes that other evolving technologies certainly can’t touch.”

The freight technology landscape is saturated with competing claims from battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell proponents, but Lindholm says RNG’s commercial viability outperforms the infrastructure and range limitations that still constrain electrification.

If performance is the threshold question for fleet operations managers, economics is the question that lands in front of CFOs. The financial case for RNG adoption is broader than just fuel price comparisons. The central argument is price stability.

Unlike diesel, which is subject to geopolitical supply disruptions and commodity market volatility, domestically produced renewable natural gas has historically tracked a near-flat price curve relative to what fleets actually pay at the pump. “If you look historically at fuel pricing for RNG fleets, it’s essentially a flat line,” Lindholm said.

“If you look out into the future, it’s a flat line. What does that mean for fleets? Regardless of what we’ve seen here in the recent blowup, fl