DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Crusoe Energy Systems, Inc., a technology driven flare mitigation provider, today announced it has successfully completed a $4.5 million seed financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures and Founders Fund Pathfinder, with additional participation from Wicklow Capital, Winklevoss Capital and Dragonfly Capital Partners. This investment brings Crusoe’s total funding to $5.1 million. Funding proceeds will be used to accelerate production of Crusoe’s mobile modular data centers to provide large-scale flare mitigation service for oil and gas operators across North America.
Crusoe enables oil and gas producers to transform their wasted natural gas into electrical power at the wellsite, eliminating the need for gas flaring and significantly reducing environmentally harmful emissions. By converting natural gas to energy-intensive computing, Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM) service achieves a beneficial use for natural gas, which would otherwise be burned onsite because it is too costly and complex to transport elsewhere. Compared to flaring, Crusoe’s process also achieves over 99% reductions in emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO), which otherwise form smog.
"Crusoe is excited to announce this funding from a consortium of industry-leading technology investors. With their support, Crusoe is expanding our service offering to solve critical regulatory and environmental challenges for oil and gas operators,” said Chase Lochmiller, Co-Founder and CEO of Crusoe. “We are committed to building advanced technologies for flare mitigation that are capable of handling the large-scale gas throughputs required by today’s North American shale industry. Crusoe’s technology harnesses otherwise wasted energy for growing industries that require energy intensive computing, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence.”
Crusoe’s DFM systems are designed as modular, portable, containerized data center units, which can be deployed and commissioned in a matter of days to quickly reduce or eliminate flaring. Systems are scalable up to millions of cubic feet per day and can be deployed anywhere in the United States or Canada.
Salil Deshpande, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “It seemed ironic and broken to us that oil production gets limited by how effectively producers can handle natural gas. Bain Capital Ventures is excited to support the Crusoe team, which combines significant oil and gas industry experience with deep technical expertise around energy-intensive computing. The scale and technical sophistication of Crusoe’s digital flare mitigation system, as well as its execution in the field, is unique. Crusoe solves an important pain point for oil producers in the booming shale industry, and we’re enjoying working with the team as they advance and scale digital flare mitigation service across North America.”
Background on Flaring
Natural gas flaring has become an acute pain point for shale oil producers, which produce natural gas as a byproduct of oil drilling. This oil-associated natural gas production has outpaced gas pipeline infrastructure in many parts of the North American shale boom. In the absence of adequate pipeline capacity, operators tend to burn natural gas in a process known as “flaring” or “combusting.” Approximately 335 billion cubic feet of natural gas are flared annually in the United States, according to latest 2017 data from the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR), which is enough gas to power more than 7 million U.S. homes.
Flaring generates pushback from the public and policymakers, who increasingly raise environmental concerns around resource waste, visual impacts and air quality. State-level regulators are tightening regulations against flaring and associated air quality issues, which jeopardizes existing and future shale oil production.
About Crusoe Energy Systems Inc.
Crusoe Energy Systems provides innovative solutions for the energy industry. By converting natural gas to energy-intensive computing, Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation service delivers an environmentally sound way to create a beneficial use for otherwise wasted natural gas. Crusoe offers solutions to solve the gas flaring challenge for oil producers without upfront cost or operational complexity. Crusoe currently has flare mitigation projects operating or under development in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, Wyoming’s Powder River Basin oilfield, and Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg oilfield. Systems are scalable up to millions of cubic feet per day and can be deployed anywhere in the United States or Canada.
About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from security and cloud infrastructure to logistics and e-commerce to finance and healthcare. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Rent The Runway, SendGrid, SurveyMonkey, Taleo, TellApart and Turbonomic. Bain Capital Ventures has $4.9 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn or Twitter.
