Sixteen years of showing up, building, and overdelivering just earned Bart Frabotta the COO seat at Clean Energy Fuels, Newport Beach’s renewable fuel leader. This is what betting on your own people looks like.
When Clean Energy Fuels named Bart Frabotta its Chief Operating Officer on June 23, 2026, the country’s leading provider of renewable natural gas for transportation promoted the executive who has been quietly powering its operations for over a decade. Frabotta joined Clean Energy in 2010, rose from vice president of information technology to vice president of operations to group vice president, and now becomes one of the company’s named executive officers.
The mandate is the whole physical business: station operations, RNG and LNG production, engineering and construction, field services, supply chain, environmental health and safety, IT, and the company’s AI initiatives, plus key business transformation programs. President and CEO Clay Corbus said in the announcement that Frabotta has been handed more and more responsibility over the years and has always overperformed, crediting his leadership with driving meaningful change in reliability, efficiency, and cost structure across the station network.
“Taking on the role of COO at such an important time for Clean Energy and the broader alternative fuels industry is both an honor and a tremendous opportunity. We have an incredibly talented team across the organization, and I’m excited to continue working alongside them to enhance our capabilities, deliver reliable solutions, and help drive our company into its next phase of growth.”
Bart Frabotta, Chief Operating Officer, Clean Energy Fuels
Notice what he led with: the team. Sixteen years inside one company teaches you something no outside hire can import on day one, that operational excellence is a people outcome before it is a process outcome. It is the same truth driving the hiring trends we track across Southern California: companies are investing hardest in leaders who build capability around them.
The AI detail deserves its own spotlight. Corbus named two top priorities in the announcement, becoming a technology-forward company that captures everything AI has to offer, and accelerating growth as a low-cost operator, and he put Frabotta in charge of leading both. An operations chief with a technology backbone (Frabotta’s roots are in IT leadership) is precisely the hybrid profile the SoCal talent market is racing to develop, and Clean Energy grew its own.
For every operator building a career in Orange County’s energy corridor, this promotion is the blueprint. Master the unglamorous middle. Take the responsibilities nobody else wants. Let the compounding work. Clean Energy just showed that the path from the server room to the C-suite is real, and that loyalty, paired with performance, still gets rewarded at the highest level.
Zoom out and the moment gets even brighter. The renewable fuels industry is scaling into one of the defining infrastructure stories of the decade, and Orange County sits at the center of it, with Clean Energy’s Newport Beach headquarters directing the country’s largest RNG fueling network. Every station built, every production facility brought online, and every fleet converted creates new careers across engineering, construction, operations, and technology. A homegrown COO now leads that engine, which means the next generation of operators inside the company just watched their own ceiling lift too.
To Bart Frabotta: congratulations. Sixteen years of quiet excellence just got a very loud title, and nobody earned it more.
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Sources & verification
Appointment & quotes: Clean Energy Fuels press release (SEC Exhibit 99.1) · 8-K filed June 23, 2026
Cathy Trinh is the founder of Recruiter Hustle and has worked in executive search since 1998, advising companies and leaders across finance, accounting, operations, manufacturing, logistics, real estate, technology and professional services. Through Recruiter Hustle, she combines executive search, talent intelligence and market media to help companies and people make better decisions about work and leadership. HEART. HUMAN. HUSTLE.