Crusoe Energy Systems Announces $70 Million in Funding for Expansion of Digital Flare Mitigation Services

DENVER, Dec. 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Crusoe Energy Systems, Inc., a technology-driven flare mitigation provider, today announced the close of $30 million in equity funding and $40 million in project financing for a combined $70 million in new capital targeting the rapid expansion of Crusoe's proprietary Digital Flare Mitigationtm ("DFM") technology and services. The $30 million equity round was led by existing investor Bain Capital Ventures and new investor The KCK Group  with additional participation from Founders Fund, Winklevoss Capital and Polychain Capital. The $40 million project financing was led by New York-based credit fund Upper 90. Bain Capital Ventures and KCK Group will join the Crusoe board alongside the company's co-founders.

Crusoe marries technology-empowered solutions with one of the modern oil industry's greatest environmental challenges, which is the flaring of natural gas. Crusoe uses natural gas that would have otherwise been burned in the air as a "flare," and instead powers modular, mobile computing systems designed specifically for the oilfield. In addition to reducing waste, this solution also helps energy companies to significantly reduce emissions.

Crusoe Key Points
Crusoe's operational milestones demonstrate a successful, cost-effective solution for remote natural gas flare mitigation at the wellhead with reliability and scale:

• Proven Reliability For Energy Producers. Crusoe DFM modules are already reducing flaring for public and private energy producers, and have operated with high reliability across multiple states through harsh "bomb cyclone" winters and record-setting summer heatwaves.
• Scalable for a Range of Use Cases. Crusoe has agreed to the deployment of up to 40 DFM systems through the first half of 2020 with a view towards further growth thereafter. Crusoe systems are expandable from tens of thousands of cubic feet per day up to multiple millions of cubic feet per day, meeting the challenges of today's remote oilfield operations. 
• Fast and Simple Deployments. DFM service is quickly deployable anywhere in North America including major shale oil centers such as the Permian Basin, Bakken, Denver Julesburg Basin, Powder River Basin, and Uinta Basin.
• Environmental Benefits. In addition to reducing resource waste and the visual impacts of flaring, Crusoe's DFM systems generate significant emissions benefits including large reductions of NOx, CO, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and methane.
• Experienced and High Quality Team. Crusoe's team combines oil and gas operations veterans with decades of experience in the oil patch alongside top-tier technology developers who are building the future of distributed cloud computing.

"Today's announcement paves the way for Crusoe to deliver the energy industry with a scalable solution for the natural gas flaring challenge and to execute our vision of a low-cost distributed computing cloud," said Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. "The Crusoe team could not ask for a more supportive group of investors, and we are excited to deploy this new capital into our rapid scale-up of our Digital Flare Mitigation technology throughout North America."

"Crusoe has demonstrated its capability for high-caliber, safe and efficient operations since we led the team's seed financing in early 2019," said Stefan Cohen, principal at Bain Capital Ventures. "Over this time, we've gained confidence in Chase, Cully and the growing Crusoe team, and strongly believe in their ability to tackle the energy industry's flaring dilemma in this next stage of company growth. There is now a proven and scalable alternative to flaring, and Crusoe's trajectory is also poised to produce exciting new cloud computing resources for the technology industry." 

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 Mitigationtm 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 in Wyoming's Powder River Basin oilfield, Colorado's Denver-Julesburg oilfield and North Dakota and Montana's Bakken oilfield. Systems are scalable up to millions of cubic feet per day and can be deployed anywhere in the United States or Canada.

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. 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 497 billion cubic feet of natural gas are flared annually in the United States, according to data from the World Bank's Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR), which is enough gas to power more than 10 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.

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 SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Company Contacts:

Chase Lochmiller             Cully Cavness
CEO and Chairman          President

Please reach out to [email protected] or visit www.crusoeenergy.com to learn more. Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter.

SOURCE Crusoe Energy Systems, Inc.