ACT Expo is where the commercial transportation industry comes to reckon with reality. The annual conference cut straight to the practical questions that every fleet operator, fuel supplier, and clean fuel technology company is wrestling with finding solutions that are ready to work at the right scale today, with economics that can scale-up from there.
Vegas in early May; the convention center floor buzzing with fleet managers, procurement leads, infrastructure developers, and technologists, all circling the same set of hard problems. Battery-electric has momentum for some specific duty cycles whereas hydrogen fuel cells are proving themselves in the most challenging. For those moving heavy loads over long distances, and waste management in particular, the calculus is becoming clearer by the quarter – hydrogen is the only practical answer.
Utility Global showed up to this conversation with something unique: a practical, economics-first answer grounded in real deployments and a technology, H2Gen®, purpose-built for exactly this transition, that can work at today’s scale and grow with demand, economically.
A Booth That Answered the Right Questions
Our presence on the expo floor was designed around the core message that is part of Utility Global’s offering: biogenic clean hydrogen offers one of the most effective pathways to economic low-carbon fuels that can decarbonize heavy-duty transport and beyond.
The booth made that case visually and in conversation. Our Frontier Houston H2Gen® unit image anchored the left panel, walking visitors through the technology’s logic of taking residual energy from biogas and waste streams to produce application-specific, high-purity hydrogen from water, without electricity. Alongside it, panels on economic industrial decarbonization showed the irrefutable utilization pathway from dairy digester, landfill and wastewater treatment plant biogas to low-carbon transport fuels.
Anchored by the game-changing project with MAAS Energy Works in Central California, the result was a space that attracted serious offtakers, infrastructure developers, and fleet operators who had moved past asking whether hydrogen could work, and were now asking who could deliver it, where, at what carbon intensity, and at what cost.
The Team
Representing Utility Global at ACT Expo was a cross-functional team that brought the full depth of our commercial and technical capabilities to every conversation:
Parker Meeks, President and Chief Executive Officer
Mike Iannelli, VP of Business Development – Global Biogas
Cory Shumaker, Director of Hydrogen Business Development
Nitin Natesan, Director, Commercial Execution
Jordan McRobie, Senior Consultant – Canada
Jenna Marsten, Sr. Marketing and Communications Manager
Together, this team worked the floor with focus and energy, progressing existing customer relationships, opening new ones, and making the technical and economic case for H2Gen® to decision-makers across the entire ecosystem: fleet operations, fuel supply, and infrastructure development.
Parker on Stage: Unlocking Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks
The conference program at ACT Expo is where fleet operators and technology companies have the most direct and honest conversations. On Tuesday, May 5th, Parker Meeks joined a panel that cut to the heart of were hydrogen fuel cell trucking stands today.
The session “Unlocking the Potential of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks through a Use-Case Centric Approach” was moderated by Patrick Couch, Senior Vice President, Technical, TRC Companies | Clean Transportation Solutions, a seasoned voice in the clean transportation infrastructure space who kept the conversation grounded in operational realities.
The panel brought together a set of perspectives that rarely sit together in a single room. Rick Breunesse, Commercial Lead at SYMBIO North America, brought the fuel cell system manufacturer’s vantage point. Tyler Flynn, Vice President of Procurement at Savage Companies, represented the operator perspective of a company moving real freight across complex logistics networks. Marty Tufte, Corporate Fleet Director at WM, one of the largest fleet operators in North America, spoke to the practical challenges of transitioning a massive, diverse fleet to zero-emission at scale.
And Parker spoke to the piece that often gets overlooked in the hydrogen trucking conversation: where does the fuel come from, at what cost, and with what carbon intensity?
The question isn’t whether hydrogen fuel cell trucks can perform, the technology has answered that. The question is whether the hydrogen they consume can be produced economically, at the right scale, with genuine low-carbon credentials. That’s exactly the problem H2Gen® was built to solve.
The use-case centric framing of the panel was particularly well-suited to Utility Global’s positioning. H2Gen® doesn’t pretend to be a universal solution. It is engineered for specific, high-value industrial applications: sites with access to biogas, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, agricultural operations, dairy facilities, where the feedstock already exists, where the carbon math and cost structures are compelling, and where proximity to heavy-duty transport fuelling demand creates a natural economic anchor.
For fleet operators like WM and Savage Companies, whose vehicles run fixed and semi-fixed routes with predictable return-to-base patterns, the use-case centric approach is exactly the right lens. The panel surfaced a clear emerging consensus: hydrogen fuel cell trucks work best when the hydrogen production, storage, and dispensing infrastructure is co-located with the operation’s needs, and when the economics of the fuel can stand on their own at both starting scale and full operational integration.
It was the kind of conversation that moves an industry forward.
What the Market is Telling Us
There is a palpable shift in the quality of interest that Utility Global is receiving at events like ACT Expo. The questions have changed. Two years ago, visitors to our booth wanted to understand the concept. This year, they arrived having already done their homework, wanting to talk about specific sites, specific feedstocks, specific routes, and specific timelines.
That is the signal we have been waiting for. The market is not just warming to the idea of biogenic clean hydrogen for heavy transport, it is actively looking for partners who can deliver it, project by project, with the technical credibility and commercial infrastructure to close the gap between pilot and scale.
The conversations at ACT Expo, both on the floor and in Parker’s panel, confirmed that Utility Global is squarely in the frame for that role.
Utility is a Team Sport
Beyond the structured sessions and scheduled meetings, ACT Expo is a show where the informal moments mattered just as much. It is where a fleet director walks past your booth twice and on the third pass decides to sit down. It is where a supplier you have been corresponding with for months finally meets your team in person and the relationship accelerates.
The Utility Global presence at ACT Expo had that quality throughout. The team showed up cohesive, energized, and aligned, each person bringing a different expertise to the conversations, but all telling the same story with the same conviction.
That is what makes the difference at a show of this scale.
What's Next
ACT Expo is a starting line, not a finish line. The threads picked up in Vegas, in booth conversations, in hallway exchanges after Parker’s panel, in the dinner discussions that carry on after the show floor closes, are the threads that become projects.
We are following up on every one of them. If you were at ACT Expo and connected with any member of our team, expect to hear from us. If you missed us in Vegas and want to understand how H2Gen® could fit your operation, your feedstock, or your fleet, we would be glad to continue the conversation.
About Utility Global
Utility delivers practical solutions that enable economic industrial decarbonization across hard-to-abate sectors including steel, mobility, refining, chemicals, and upstream oil & gas. The company’s breakthrough H2Gen® technology harnesses energy from industrial off-gases and biogases to produce application-specific, high-purity hydrogen with low-to-negative carbon intensity on-site from water, without electricity, using a proprietary electrochemical process.
H2Gen® also produces a high-concentration carbon dioxide stream, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of carbon capture. Modular, scalable, and operationally flexible, H2Gen® systems integrate seamlessly into existing industrial assets with a record-small footprint, enabling practical and economical decarbonization.
Utility is a portfolio company of Ara Partners, a global private equity and infrastructure firm that is decarbonizing the industrial economy.
For more information on Utility’s solutions and services, visit www.utilityglobal.com