Wasted natural gas to power the fight against COVID-19

Crusoe Energy Systems has deployed more than twenty energy-intensive computing modules throughout America’s oil and gas fields as part of its Digital Flare Mitigation system, which captures otherwise flared or wasted natural gas to power computing processes at the wellhead. Today the company announces that it has begun allocating a portion of its computing systems to the search for a coronavirus vaccine.

Crusoe is working with the Folding@Home Consortium, a distributed supercomputing system for life-science research launched out of Stanford University. The Consortium allows researchers to remotely utilize Crusoe’s computational resources for the vaccine search and discovery process and recently launched a new protein folding simulation project specifically targeting vaccines and therapeutic antibodies for COVID-19.

Crusoe has configured eight of its most advanced graphic processing units to support the Consortium’s vaccine development project and commenced work units for COVID-19 research in Crusoe’s field operations center in North Dakota earlier this week. Crusoe is now one of the largest contributors of computing power to the protein folding Consortium, ranking in the top 10% of computational power providers for the vaccine research system. Crusoe ultimately plans to deploy protein folding servers to multiple flare gas-powered computing modules in the oilfield after expanding network bandwidth at selected sites.

COVID-19 is closely related to the SARS coronavirus. Both coronaviruses infect the lungs when viral proteins bind to receptor proteins in lung cells. A SARS therapeutic antibody, which is a protein that can prevent the SARS coronavirus from binding to lung receptors, has been developed previously. To develop a similar antibody for COVID-19, researchers need to better evaluate how the COVID-19 spike protein binds to receptors in the human body. The Consortium’s new protein folding project simulates antibody proteins and how they might prevent COVID-19 viral infection, however, the simulation process is very computationally intensive and therefore energy-intensive.

Crusoe can support this vaccine research using its distributed computing resources deployed at natural gas flaring sites in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. Today, Crusoe consumes millions of cubic feet of natural gas per day that would have otherwise been wasted by burning in the air, or “flared.” Instead, that waste gas powers Crusoe’s mobile, modular computing systems, which are deployed directly to the wellhead to mitigate flaring. Crusoe’s initial computational use case was blockchain processing. More recently the company has been developing high performance and general-purpose cloud computing solutions, which are used in a variety of applications including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and protein folding.

“At this time of growing global concern around the coronavirus, we are grateful to have the opportunity to support the Folding@Home Consortium’s search for a vaccine,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. “We’ve configured very powerful computing hardware that is typically used for machine learning and artificial intelligence research to search for helpful therapies against coronavirus. This is very much in keeping with Crusoe’s vision that distributed computing resources have an important role to play in solving real-world problems.”

Crusoe began processing work units for COVID-19 on March 15th. In addition to COVID-19, the Company has previously completed work units related to cancer research.