Energy firm takes two floors in Cherry Creek building about to break ground

This story first appeared on BusinessDen.com, a BizWest news partner.

A firm founded by two Kent Denver graduates that has brought bitcoin to rural oilfields will move its headquarters to a Cherry Creek office building set to break ground next month.

Denver-based Crusoe Energy is taking 31,000 square feet across floors three and four of 255 Fillmore St., a seven-story project being developed by Denver-based BMC Investments.

“We wanted to be in Cherry Creek,” Crusoe President Cully Cavness said. “A lot of our team is in the Wash Park, Hilltop and Cherry Creek neighborhoods.”

Crusoe engages in what Cavness called “digital flare mitigation,” capturing excess natural gas produced during oil and gas extraction and converting it to electricity used to power modular data centers installed onsite that mine cryptocurrency.

“We really created the space, and have grown really quickly,” Cavness said.

The process reduces greenhouse gas emissions associated with flaring, or the burning off of the excess gas, Cavness said. And the setup mitigates one of the common criticisms of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which is that the process of digitally mining them uses vast amounts of energy.

Cavness, 34, founded Crusoe in 2018 with Chase Lochmiller, 35. After attending prep school in Cherry Hills Village, Cavness studied geology at Vermont’s Middlebury College, then jumped across the pond to get an MBA from the University of Oxford. Lochmiller, meanwhile, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford.

Crusoe has raised more than $250 million, Cavness said, including a $128 million round that the company disclosed last spring. He declined to share revenue figures.

Cavness said Crusoe has about 145 employees, some of them outside of Colorado, and could be around 250 employees by the end of the year. The firm has been leasing space at 1641 California St. downtown, but Cavness said the new space will approximately double the firm’s footprint.

The state announced last year that Crusoe would receive financial incentives in exchange for adding jobs, saying Colorado competed with Nebraska, Montana, and North Dakota to retain the company’s headquarters.

Crusoe’s name is a reference to the literary character Robinson Crusoe, whom Cavness described as someone who had to be creative and resourceful when he was stranded on an island after being shipwrecked. Crusoe Energy, he said, is a company that is creative and resourceful when it comes to stranded energy resources.

BMC CEO Matt Joblon told BusinessDen that the 255 Fillmore building will break ground on April 1, and should be completed 15 months later. The structure, which replaces a parking lot, will have about 90,000 square feet of office space, and 9,500 square feet of retail space.

Joblon said everything but 5,000 square feet of office and 3,000 square feet of retail is leased. The building will be the second major office building under construction in Cherry Creek, joining Broe Real Estate Group’s eight-story 200 Clayton, which broke ground last August.

NAI Shames Makovsky broker Dax Gitcho represented Crusoe in its lease. Newmark brokers Peter Staab, Tom Lee and Jamie Gard represented BMC.

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