ClearSign Technologies, an emerging leader in industrial combustion and sensing technologies that improve energy, operational efficiency and safety while dramatically reducing emissions, has received collaboration commitment and additional pledged funding for its 100% H₂ ultra-low nitrogen oxide (NOx) burner project from Southern California Gas (SoCalGas).

SoCalGas has pledged financial support on top of the SBIR program Phase 2 Award for $1.6 MM from the DOE which was previously announced. Their support will provide additional funding to the project which is designed to help decarbonize hard-to-electrify industries and is entering the commercialization phase. Their support will include $500,000 to promote the introduction and field demonstration of our H₂ capable ClearSign Core burner technology in Southern California.

“We are extremely pleased to receive this support from the forward looking team at SoCalGas. We believe our collaboration with SoCalGas provides not just additional financial support, but also their engagement with us in moving the energy transition forwards in Southern California and making our ClearSign Core technologies part of the technical portfolio available to all the industries that SoCalGas serves,” said Jim Deller, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of ClearSign.

“This exciting and innovative project offers a look at how H₂ can play a vital role in helping industries in California start down the path to net zero through technology that allows the transition to clean fuels,” said Neil Navin, SoCalGas Chief Clean Fuels Officer. “Investments in clean fuel technologies like this will be key in providing hard-to-decarbonize industries the means to reach net zero quickly and affordably.”

The goal of this project is to develop ultra-low NOx H₂ burner technology, which the company believes will enable the adoption of H₂ fuel for industrial heating, leading to reductions in the industrial emissions of both CO₂ and NOxs. Current burners and previous efforts to decarbonize industrial combustion processes through the utilization of H₂ fuel are inhibited by the lack of industrial H₂ burners capable of burning pure H₂ while preventing additional NOx emissions.

Phase One saw the completion and deployment of a prototype process burner that successfully integrated H₂ and H₂ blending while maintaining NOx below 5 ppm. Phase Two will entail scaling up the size of the burner from 2 MMBtu/hr up to 8 MMBtu/hr and deploying it in real-world, commercial industrial settings where high heat is required, over the next 2 yr.

SoCalGas has made clean energy innovations designed to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors a key component of its efforts to help California achieve net zero by 2045. To that end, SoCalGas is working to develop Angeles Link, a proposed green H₂ pipeline system that could deliver clean, reliable, renewable energy to the Los Angeles region. The project, which could be the nation’s largest green H₂ pipeline system, is being designed to support significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from electric generation, industrial processes, heavy-duty trucks, and other hard-to-electrify sectors of the Southern California economy.

SoCalGas is also working to help the state of California develop a H₂ blending standard through pilot projects, to help better understand how clean fuels like renewable H₂ could be delivered at scale through California’s existing natural gas system and to help drive down costs of H₂ by scaling up use and building a H₂ market.