Oman Investment Authority (OIA) announced its investment in US-based Crusoe Energy, as part of its continuous efforts to diversify its international investments across different countries and sectors.

OIA aims to achieve optimal benefit for Oman in terms of return on investment, attracting direct foreign investments, and attracting modern and advanced technologies worldwide to be utilised locally.

This investment highlights OIA’s pioneering efforts in attracting such advanced technologies to the region. Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation technology will serve various sectors in the region including oil and gas, power generation, and information and communications technology (ICT).

This investment embodies OIA’s efforts to localize modern technologies in promising economic sectors. Through its partnership with OIA, Crusoe targets the expansion of its operations in the Middle East, which is home to some of the biggest oil and gas producers globally.

This expansion is set to enhance the company’s profitability in a new promising market. In addition, it aims to realise environmental objectives, which is a vital aspect of this initiative, especially when Oman is one of the top 10 countries in gas flaring in the world, according to a World Bank report published in 2020.

Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation technology specifically targets oil and gas companies and fields. The company utilizes gas flaring emissions that negatively contribute to global warming by mitigating the flare of CO2e by around 63 per cent.

This includes a 98 per cent reduction of methane because Crusoe’s generators have a combustion efficiency of 99.9 per cent vs an average of 93 per cent for flares.

This technology processes gas flaring emissions in an environment-friendly and cost-effective manner; it generates enough power to operate energy-intensive computing applications in oil and gas fields far from main power grids.

This includes powering data centers for high-performance cloud computing to operate applications such as graphical rendering, artificial intelligence research, machine learning, computational biology, therapeutic drug discovery and simulation.

Ismail Ibrahim Al Harthy, Senior Manager of Technology Investment at OIA said that the OIA is playing a pioneering role in bringing this technology to the region, which is home to some of the biggest oil and gas producers globally. The aim is to benefit the energy sector in the region from this environment-friendly technology.

Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe Energy Systems said that flaring is a global problem with a global impact. He added that the company is excited to expand its Digital Flare Mitigation technology to the Middle East to help solve the region’s long-standing flaring challenges and empower a new generation of digital technology in the region.

OIA, he added, stands out as a great partner that takes a long-term view in tackling big problems.

Meanwhile, OIA signed an MoU with Crusoe Energy during a workshop exploring the potential of localising this technology in Oman. The event was attended by representatives from OIA and Crusoe, as well as government officials and representatives from companies working in fields that can benefit from technology.