OPAL | Market Cap: $356.5M (07/13/26)
Industry:
Renewable & Alternative Energy

DESCRIPTION

OPAL Fuels captures biogas from landfills and dairy farms and converts it into renewable natural gas (RNG), which it sells as a transportation fuel to heavy-duty trucking fleets. OPAL operates 12 RNG projects with combined design capacity of roughly 9.1 million MMBtus per year, with 5 more projects under construction. OPAL also operates 15 Renewable Power projects that generate electricity from landfill gas under long-term PPAs, though the company is gradually converting these assets to RNG production. OPAL's business model is vertically integrated: the company produces RNG upstream and also designs, builds, owns, and operates compressed natural gas fueling stations downstream, currently running 47 stations with 41 more under construction. This vertical integration allows OPAL to physically dispense RNG as transportation fuel, which is required to generate D3 RINs — the federal environmental credits that are the single largest driver of upstream profitability. OPAL also earns LCFS credits from state-level low-carbon fuel programs, which are additive to RINs, and is registering facilities for 45Z federal production tax credits. Once built, RNG projects require low ongoing capex, making them long-lived, high free-cash-flow assets. OPAL targets 4-5 year unlevered paybacks on new projects, which require 18-24 months to construct. The downstream Fuel Station Services segment earns construction fees, O&M service contract revenue, and per-gallon dispensing economics, and its cash flows are largely uncorrelated to environmental credit prices, providing some balance to the commodity-price sensitivity of the upstream business.

Read full business overview →