Denver, CO and Houston, TX / October 26, 2022 / Business Wire / — Lancium Inc. (Lancium), an energy technology and infrastructure company that advances the decarbonization and stability of the electric power grid and Crusoe Energy Systems LLC (Crusoe), a pioneer of clean computing infrastructure that reduces both the costs and the environmental impact of the world’s expanding digital economy today announced an agreement to cross-license their respective patented technologies.
“Lancium and Crusoe share a common vision of promoting decarbonization and improving the stability of electrical power grids,” said Michael McNamara, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lancium. “Given the uniqueness of our respective Intellectual Property, we believe the best way to advance our collective goal is sharing our knowledge.”
“Both Crusoe and Lancium have developed solutions to harness stranded and wasted energy resources to power advanced computing systems needed to drive our shared progress,” said Crusoe’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chase Lochmiller. “Collaborating so that each of us can continue building on the other’s progress will help us accelerate the transition to a renewable and clean energy future.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Lancium will make its patented intellectual property directed to the operation of rampable data centers as Controllable Load Resources (CLRs) available to Crusoe. The ability to flexibly control the power consumed by large scale data centers allows tenants to benefit from lower power prices, while simultaneously providing power grid operators with a powerful tool to maintain the stability of the grid. Power grid operators are increasingly seeking solutions to enhance the flexibility of the electrical system to mitigate the impacts of climate change and the intermittency of rapidly growing renewable generation. Since 2017, Lancium has invested millions of dollars and tens of thousands of personnel hours in research and development efforts to improve the efficient operation and dispatchability of rampable datacenters. As a result of these efforts, in June 2020, Lancium successfully qualified the first datacenter CLR in ERCOT.
Crusoe will make its patented Digital Flare Mitigation® (DFM) solution available to Lancium. DFM systems are deployed directly to the oil wellsite to convert stranded gas, a by-product of oil production that would otherwise be wasted and flared, into electricity used to power modular data centers. In addition to reducing energy waste by creating a beneficial use for the natural gas onsite, Crusoe’s technology achieves a combustion efficiency of 99.9% (versus an average of 91.1% for flares), thus reducing methane emissions approximately 99% and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by up to 68.6%. Crusoe’s deployed DFM systems are reducing CO2-equivalent emissions by approximately 800,000 tons per year, equivalent to removing about 170,000 cars from the road.
While Lancium is known as an innovator in grid stabilizing technologies and Crusoe in digital flare mitigation, the cross-license covers other areas including High Throughput Computing and workload mitigation. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.