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, fleets have been accustomed and familiar with saving on average $2 a gallon at the pump for their fuel. Today, that number is even higher — four or five dollars a gallon in my state, California, and three or four dollars a gallon elsewhere.”
The fuel savings on an RNG truck compared to a traditional diesel truck are substantial across the truck’s operating life when it comes to total cost of ownership. Lindholm emphasized that the economics work without dependence on government subsidies or tax credits, which distinguishes RNG adoption from some other clean technology investments that have struggled when incentive structures shifted.
“Fleets have a proven road map. It’s going to cost a little more upfront, but there’s a line of sight that says, ‘Hey, I have a quick payback on that investment without subsidies, without government grants, without tax credits,’” Lindholm said. “And for the life of that truck — five years, seven years, maybe in some cases, ten years depending on the fleet and the duty use cycle — I’ve got money coming right back to my bottom line.”
One of the more counterintuitive aspects of the RNG story is the sourcing of the fuel itself. Renewable natural gas is not a fossil fuel. It is a biogenic fuel captured from landfills and, increasingly, from agricultural operations including dairy farms, where methane that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere is instead collected, cleaned, and injected into the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
“Cow manure and manure management is a significant part of the dairy industry,” Lindholm said. “Our industry has worked very closely with dairy farms across the country. It’s amazing how many dairy farms are active . We work with those farmers to collect the manure. There’s an entire cleaning process to that manure management. And ultimately, it then gets injected into the same natural gas pipeline system that covers literally millions of miles across North America today.”
The environmental benefit, Lindholm explained, operates on two levels simultaneously. Capturing the methane from manure prevents it from escaping directly into the atmosphere. There are significant greenhouse gas consequences given methane’s potency as a warming agent. By nominating those captured molecules to fueling facilities that serve fleet customers, the emission reductions can be formally credited to the fleet’s carbon accounting.
“You’re avoiding the emissions that otherwise would have been let up into the atmosphere from that manure not being captured and just being essentially left on the ground and released into the atmosphere,” Lindholm said. “By nominating those molecules to a dispensing station and ultimately to the fleet, you’re allowed to provide that fleet with those emission reductions as well for their overall trucking operation.”
The practical question of where fleets actually fuel their trucks is one Clean Energy has been working to answer for three decades, and Lindholm described a network of approximately 600 fueling stations currently available across North America. Many fleets prefer on-site fueling like the diesel infrastructure model they already know. On-site natural gas stations, according to Lindholm, can be built quickly and cost-effectively.
The integration approach for RNG adoption involves packaging the full solution for the truck, fueling access, and ongoing support into a single commercial relationship.
“Connecting that fueling provider with the dealer that they’re typically buying the truck from is important,” Lindholm said. “There’s an entire package offered to the fleet that says, ‘Here’s the truck, here’s the truck price, here’s the fueling station, here’s the fueling station price, and here are your partners that are going to be working with you today and long term as you transition,’” he said.
RNG adoption has become a commercial differentiator for forward-thinking fleets in their conversations with shipper customers. Shippers increasingly face pressure to account for scope one and scope three emissions, and a carrier that can offer verifiable emissions reductions without operational disruption or price volatility is offering something genuinely valuable at the contract table.
“RNG fleets are able to tell shippers that they can do everything a diesel fleet can do while delivering emission reductions that can be counted toward either Scope 1 or Scope 3 platforms,” Lindholm said. “That’s important to their customers, and it’s allowing trucking fleets to engage in those conversations without having to deal with potential price increases or big changes to contracts. It really is a differentiator.”
Diesel is not going anywhere in the near term. It powers more than 99% of the Class 8 trucks on American roads today.
“We’re not looking to be all things to all fleets,” Lindholm said. The opportunity Clean Energy sees is not to replace diesel overnight, but to carve out a growing share of the 250,000-plus Class 8 trucks sold annually and the 40-billion-gallon fuel market they represent.
It is, by any measure, a large enough opportunity now that the technology, infrastructure, and economics are finally converging.
“The product works, the math works, and for the right application, there is no longer a reason to wait,” Lindholm said.
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