Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. I am Jim Deller, Chief Executive Officer of ClearSign Technologies Corporation. I'm pleased to be able to give you a brief review of our company. We are listed on Nasdaq and based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before we start, I'm sure you have seen many of these. It is important, but I will not dwell on it. I will be making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ from our expectations at this time. Let's start with a quick overview of the company. ClearSign provides revolutionary industrial flame technology, mainly burners, that enable our customers to meet new low air pollutant emission standards at a greatly reduced capital and ongoing operational cost compared to the established alternative offerings. Following years of product development, our technology is now commercial, with orders both in production and operation. Our customers are companies like oil refineries.
This also includes renewable fuel plants like biodiesel and users of industrial boilers, which include most manufacturers and large buildings. The pollutant we address, namely NOx, will be more of an issue as hydrogen is introduced as a fuel, which makes us especially relevant as decarbonization initiatives advance. I will talk more about this later, but the key points are that you make more NOx when you add hydrogen to the fuel. Better NOx controlling technology, like ClearSign, will be required even to keep NOx emissions to the pre-hydrogen levels and the levels of our customers' current operating permits. To give a snapshot, the pollutant we address is NOx or nitrogen oxide. This pollutant is formed in flames, but can be minimized by controlling the flame chemistry.
NOx is highly toxic and highly regulated, and a key focus for social justice initiatives as it is extremely harmful locally and at ground level. There is other technology that addresses this pollutant, but it is much more capital-intensive, has higher operating costs than ours, and also requires the handling of other toxic chemicals, such as ammonia. This provides a strong value proposition for customers. I will show this in detail shortly. We enable decarbonization. The need to control NOx emissions to permitted levels will limit the use of hydrogen as a fuel if not addressed. We can overcome this problem. We have received significant government grants for this reason, which I will touch on again later. Importantly, regarding timing, our product development is done, our business structure is in place, and production and start-up of products from both our major product lines are underway.
We provide better solutions for our customers. Let me explain at a high level how we do this. The N in NOx is nitrogen, and in typical gas flames, this comes from the air. NOx is formed by two chemical pathways in the flame. Our unique technology addresses both. Standard burners only address one. This is the basis of almost 40 of our patents. Also of importance, our products are designed to be easy to install and use, a feature we often describe as plug and play. Our technology is breaking barriers. From my own personal experience, I have worked in the field of combustion and pollution control my entire professional career. I've been involved with and overseen the development of many burner technologies with increasingly refined and incremental improvements in NOx reduction.
What attracted me to ClearSign was that this was the first out-of-the-box, different approach to restructuring a burner and flame that I have seen, and with a performance potential in a different league to the standard burner technology. I joined ClearSign early 2019, and between then and now, we have developed and optimized that unique technology to provide commercial product lines, along with building a customer-focused business infrastructure. There's a lot more in addition to our technology that makes ClearSign special. To be a viable vendor for global oil companies and the like, we need to provide world-class manufacturing and product demonstration capabilities. And customers of boiler products require full installation and ongoing maintenance services. We provide these while maintaining low overhead costs through our collaborative partnerships with best-in-class combustion equipment and boiler service companies.
When developing our growth strategy for ClearSign, we are very aware that the world does not need more burner companies, but there's a great opportunity for better burner technology. To help put what we do in perspective, with our unique burners, we control NOx emissions to such a low level that we compete with elaborate chemical and catalyst processes that treat the gases coming out of heaters and boilers. I don't think that anyone would argue that it's much more efficient to not make the pollution in the first place than have to clean it up afterwards. Our technology enables us to provide cost-effective solutions to our customers.
The strength of ClearSign is the value we provide through both this unique technology and also the way we have developed our operations to leverage the opportunity of combining the capabilities of our technology with the established resources and infrastructure of our collaborative partners and their recognition in the marketplace. These two illustrations represent both our process burner and boiler burner product lines. We've selected these two cases to use as an illustration because we have actual quoted data for our and the alternative technologies, as the capital cost data is based on actual sales quotations provided to our customers. The quotations we provided by the same company and for the same scope of work, just different technology, so provide a very accurate comparison.
The process heater resulted in ClearSign technology being selected, displacing the original SCR proposal, and this unit has now been in operation since 2021. Let me explain this data a little. I'll focus on the data on the right-hand side of the screen. This is the heater where the ClearSign Core process burners displaced the originally quoted SCR. Looking at the numbers in the table at the bottom, you'll see that the capital cost of the SCR solution was $2.2 million, compared to $450,000 for the ClearSign solution. In addition, the SCR requires a constant stream of ammonia and the catalyst to be replaced at a cost we estimate that will be approximately $100,000 annually, for a five-year operating cost that will add $500,000 to the cost of ownership of the SCR.
Looking at the total cost of ownership over that 5-year period, you will see that the SCR cost was almost 6 times that of the ClearSign solution. And of course, if you take a longer time horizon, that ratio will only increase. As you can see, the ClearSign solution provides substantial value from both monetary savings and, in addition, avoiding the need to receive shipments of and handling chemicals like ammonia. The loss of downtime required to replace spent catalyst material and the many other requirements of having to run an SCR and manage vast amounts of ammonia. So let's look at the organization. We have structured ClearSign to be highly scalable and to enable our business to grow efficiently. Our technology provides a high value to our clients. We take advantage of this when setting our pricing, enabling anticipated operating margins in the range of 40%-50%.
Because of our business structure, leveraging the resources of global and national collaborative partners, our business is very scalable. This also allows us to control our capital needs and overhead costs. Who makes up the company leadership is also important. We have a deep experience in the combustion and energy markets. We have limited time here, but our bios are on our website. There is a large target market for ClearSign products. We anticipate that our business will evolve in waves, starting with the regions with the tightest NOx regulations, and expanding as regulations in other regions are updated. Southern California is already a key market for us, and we anticipate the Gulf Coast region of Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado, and states in the Northeast of the United States will follow.
We are also seeing rapid emission regulation change in China, driving our market opportunity there, specifically for our boiler burner product line. On this slide, our intent is to provide a meaningful representation of the opportunity. The numbers here are an estimate of the number of burners installed in the various global regions. For back-of-the-envelope math, a reasonable approximation of the average sale price or revenue is $100,000 per burner, and guidance from ExxonMobil is that about 15% of burners will be good applications to retrofit with our technology. You can do the math, but I am sure even at your first glance, it is clear that with an anticipated 40%+ margin, we only need a small share of this market to gain a significant income. Before we move on, a quick background of that statement.
We recently completed a burner product performance test for our largest California refinery order. The test demonstrated for all the operation in line asphalt and NOx levels of 3.5 parts per million. Bear in mind, the typical best-in-class for low NOx burners is around 50 parts per million. This quote was verbatim the reaction from their lead engineer. There are significant social and political initiatives supporting our market. The replacement of burners is driven by the need to reduce emissions. Already considering the introduction of hydrogen as a fuel, the need to maintain emissions as the introduction of hydrogen into fuel gases is a multiplying effect on the formation of NOx. Layered on top of these physical phenomena and emphasizing their impact on newly more transparent and increasingly closing requirements and substantial government funding for decarbonization and social justice initiatives, which include reducing NOx levels.
The regulatory changes that are driving our business are already evolving. This includes changes to NOx regulations. The Los Angeles region and Valley District of California have already updated their NOx regulations. These were published in 2020 and 2021. The U.S. EPA is applying pressure to reduce ground- level ozone to safe levels, and as NOx is a precursor of ozone, this is implemented through NOx reduction measures. In China, addressing smog and air quality are key drivers, again, implemented with tightening NOx emissions regulations. These evolving regulations are supporting our sales, and we are developing a significant reference list of orders and installations around the world. The enacted or anticipated regulatory changes correlate well with our current installation and ongoing. As you can see, as expected, these are predominantly in California, but we also now have projects in the highly industrial Texas Gulf Coast area.
We have an installation with a global refiner in Europe and enjoy a growing engagement in China. These are key for us as being new technology, even with such a strong value proposition. Feedback from our customers is that proven operating units are key. We have heard from many customers in various words that they want to be the first, second company to install our burners. With our technology and business infrastructure developed and markets evolving, we are advancing towards full commercial operations. We believe that this is an exciting and pivotal time for ClearSign. We now have significant new orders in production, already installed and in operation. On top of that, our technology and company have been recognized by the government, resulting in several substantial technology development grants, mainly focused on enhancing our hydrogen capabilities, and we are getting sales and engagements in increasingly and diversifying markets.
These actually expand beyond the strictly refining and boiler data shown a few slides back. A good example of this is our collaboration with Southern California Gas Company, just announced on September 20. From an ESG perspective, clearly our business is in enabling the reduction of pollution and also facilitating the progress of decarbonization through the adoption of hydrogen as a fuel. Reduction of NOx emissions impact all socially disadvantaged communities that tend to live in areas more likely to be affected by industrial plant. We also endeavor to run ClearSign in a responsible way and in consideration of the fair treatment and well-being of all our stakeholders. To summarize, we have a high-margin, asset-light business that is at an inflection point and gaining recognition and traction in an attractive and large global market. Our business model is readily scalable, and the company is run by seasoned industry experts.
We also check the box of doing a good thing for the environment in a way that is meaningful today. Before concluding, here is a quick look at some key data. As per our second quarter 2023 10-Q, we had just under 40 million shares outstanding, 20% of which are held by insiders. We had $8.5 million cash on hand and technology that is protected by 110 patents, 36 of which are specific to our burner technology. We have analyst coverage by H.C. Wainwright, and ClearSign is included in the Russell Microcap Index. The following slide is our contact information for reference. We will be pleased to hear from you. Thank you for your time today.