14 ms·

Ohmm Mining: Turn Flared Natural Gas into Bitcoin

88 points by seibelj 7y ago

henearkr 7y ago
Well... they could have converted it in electricity, either directly on the grid or by using a battery system (like the liquid batteries used to store solar in Australia). Converting it into Bitcoin is hardly the best choice for ourselves and our planet.
- def_true_false 7y ago
  This works without being connected to the grid.
- k_sze 7y ago
  I guess one reason it’s not already been done is because of physics. You can capture the flared gas and convert it to electricity on site, but you still need to be able to deliver it to the consumers for it to be valuable. But electrical power is lost when you transport it over long distances due to wire resistance, unless you convert it to really high voltage. Maybe all the infrastructure required is just not worth the money. Bitcoin doesn’t have this problem, all you need in order to make it liquidable is an internet connection, which any gas/oil field probably already has.
  - J-dawg 7y ago
    Got to admire the creative thinking involved in this. Are there any more "practical" potential uses? Some industrial process that requires lots of power but not too much other infrastructure?
    - arethuza 7y ago
      CO2 sequestration?
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Could a coin backed by stored CO₂ work?
        arethuza 7y ago
        I promise to pay the bearer the sum of 1 ton of C02 on demand?
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Well, Bitcoin doesn't work that way either. I was thinking more of a "you get a coin for X tons of CO₂" + hype to make these work as currency, but I suppose it's just a weird version of existing carbon trading solutions.
        cwkoss 7y ago
        Kind of silly to make this a coin. Because you'll fundamentally need an external system to audit CO2 sequestration and manage issuance, the auditor might as well be a centralized issuer.
  - abraae 7y ago
    Incredible. Bitcoin used to be a solution looking for a problem. Now it's at least a solution to it's own problem.
    - magnamerc 7y ago
      Nakamoto consensus doesn't solve the byzantine generals problem?
  - henearkr 7y ago
    As I said above, the energy is very usable locally too.
- pwagland 7y ago
  The places where this is targeted for aren't close to a grid to be able to pump the power back into it. The benefit of this sort of system is that it gives you a way to consume electricity close to the source, so that you don't end up with the distribution costs. I do agree that doesn't seem like the best choice, but the alternatives proposed are not alternatives in the situations that this is targeting. I suspect/hope that there _are_ other alternatives, that may serve a better "global good".
  - henearkr 7y ago
    Well, the argument seems invalid, as they obviously use energy to run their oil field (look at these huge hammer-like machines). They could use this energy. Even their very local grid is a grid.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      Right, but I think their local energy needs are far less than what these burnoffs contain.
- DSingularity 7y ago
  Why? Assuming their “25x more impact on global warming” claims are accurate won’t this reduce global warming in a more substantial way? Also, won’t this push energy prices up thus creating more economic motivation for clean/sustainable energy and reducing demand for unclean energy?
  - kortilla 7y ago
    No, this won’t push energy prices up. If anything it will decrease them because it increases the margin by which natural gas operations are sustainable.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      You mean "Freedom Gas". https://www.sciencealert.com/us-department-of-energy-is-now-referring-to-natural-gas-as-freedom-gas https://www.sciencealert.com/us-department-of-energy-is-now-... https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-authorizes-additional-lng-exports-freeport-lng https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-authorizes... “Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”
  - corodra 7y ago
    Bitcoin mining required more energy. Thus, ramped up power plants to burn MORE fuel. Burning more fuel means more emissions. More green house gases. More global warming. IF bitcoin was going to push energy companies to go more green. It would have already. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-... Bitcoin has been the best thing to happen to fossil fuel power plants across the planet.
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  The places that gas is flared are in the middle of nowhere. There is no grid, there's hardly roads and maybe no cell service. They're not flaring gas in downtown SF here, this is like northeastern Colorado or West Texas.
- caymanjim 7y ago
  No one is venting natural gas for the hell of it. There is no economical way to use it, full stop. If the infrastructure were there, they'd sell it. It's vented because there's no profitable way to capture and transport the gas, and there's no profitable way to produce and transport electricity. These things require massive capital investment. Much of the world's fossil fuels are extracted in the middle of nowhere. And even if the extraction location were going to produce for long enough to justify running infrastructure to it, it'd still take years or even decades to get approval and build the infrastructure. One of these modules can be installed almost instantly and anywhere. You don't need any other infrastructure. You could even put these on oil platforms.
  - technofiend 7y ago
    Gas pipelines use the product itself to fuel compression. There doesn't seem to be anything small enough to justify aggregating at the well head and compressing in situ using the fuel to compress itself. For example I see this but it's still quite large. https://www.wartsila.com/marine/build/gas-solutions/lng-solutions/lng-plants-small-scale-liquefaction-technology https://www.wartsila.com/marine/build/gas-solutions/lng-solu...
  - coryrc 7y ago
    Then fuck 'em, venting and flaring should be banned. Too expensive? Then leave it all in the ground where it belongs.
pwagland 7y ago
I like the idea of: > conserv[ing] sources of wasted energy without the need for invasive infrastructure (pipelines, power lines, etc). However, it isn't just a matter of dropping one of these skids onsite and leaving, since these skids need to be connected to a power source, not a waste gas source. So that waste gas _first_ needs to be converted to power, and then that power routed into the skid. This _is_ much easier than running lines out to the main grid to get rid of that generated electricity. And a 750 kW generator probably isn't going to be the main cost centre. Neither does bitcoin require particularly high bandwidth by normal standards, but they are quite high for a remote location, and doesn't seem to be mentioned in the blurbs. It would also still be competing against cheap energy sources, since bitcoin cost is essentially your input energy cost. And even if the gas that powers the generator is "free", there are still a large number of costs with doing anything remote…
- DSingularity 7y ago
  It can be done and if a POC is legit and the numbers line up it will be done. When energy is primary cost — and assuming enough rigs can be built — the operational scale that can be reached by a 10x-leaner setup will disrupt the network. The computational difficulty (which they will only increase) outweighs the communication challenges of broadcasting the blocks or being first to the mempool. Even the communication costs will likely be driven down simply because of the profit incentives to doing so.
- comboy 7y ago
  For those wondering just like me, 750 KW generator yields $657K worth of electricity during a year assuming 1kWh=0.1$ I'm guessing these rigs are at least $500K+ and you have to take into account things breaking like they always do. Btw, these rigs definitely don't look like they would be able to provide appropriate cooling in a hot climate, but maybe that's not where they are going to be used.
  - jdhn 7y ago
    Based on the .ca domain as well as the fact that they talk heavily about Alberta, I'm betting that they're targeting the Canadian market. While Canada can get warm in the summer, it's no Texas, and it's markedly colder during the winter. I don't think that they're too worried about their equipment overheating.
michaelt 7y ago
A few years ago, I wondered if my electrically-heated office could instead be heated with bitcoin mining hardware. It would effectively be free electricity, right? What I found out from sources like [1] was, because the bitcoin mining difficulty is constantly increasing, the BTC a bitcoin miner produces reduces exponentially. So even with free electricity, a miner that makes BTC worth a total of $361 in 24 months, will only make $10 more if run for 99 months. And if you only need to heat your office 25% of the year? Well, the mining difficulty will keep on rising even when your hardware is turned off, so it'll be obsolete after 24 months anyway. But it'll only have produced 25% the BTC in its fixed useful life. So if buying retail mining hardware is already questionably profitable† even with free electricity, buying it and only running it a fraction of the time is even moreso. This company must be getting a great price on mining hardware if it's profitable to install and run it only a fraction of the time. [1] https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=14500000000000&hc=625&hp=1350&er=8736.77&sd=19-05-30&d=36 https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=1450000... † Which seemed to be the case when I researched this, although bitcoin prices can vary a lot of course.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> buying it and only running it a fraction of the time is even moreso. If you have an intermittent power supply, slap a battery on the system and turn it into a continuous power supply. Over a period of time the next amount of mining done will be the same. My point is whether you mine intermittently or continuously you will average out to the same amount of mining at the end of the day/month/year. The only issue is how you tune your battery/mining rig ratios to optimize the hardware investment.
  - wmf 7y ago
    There's nothing to optimize; the battery costs far more than the value of Bitcoin mined.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      But what if you steal the batteries? Hell, steal the electricity, too! We're talking Bitcoin here! The real money making opportunity is running the security firm that guards all those remote expensive rigs and batteries from being stolen.
ilaksh 7y ago
How does it connect to the internet?
- magnamerc 7y ago
  Starlink obviously.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    You laugh, but existing satellite internet like Viacom is probably doable. $50-70/month with a 40GB/month soft cap should be good enough with a local Stratum proxy. Latency is high, so you could lose a small amount due to stale work units, but it’s not a big amount.
- syedkarim 7y ago
  Any satellite internet connection would do. Or point-to-point connection.
- SilasX 7y ago
  I assume it can just use a cellular 3G connection or satellite link, because it doesn't need to be very fast or low latency. The way mining pools work, the pool gives a short description of a massive block of nonces for your miner to check, and then you send back a short proof that you checked all the nonces (because you will have a predictable number of partial matches, and so the proof will be very short). So you don't need to send much data back and forth. Whatever bitcoins the pool then mines are then allocated out in proportion to what fraction of nonces yours had checked.
thinkcontext 7y ago
Deeply skeptical of this but I'm curious about the practical aspects of consuming the excess gas. What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig? Is there a storage vessel as part of the rig or at the drill pad to buffer gas that would normally be flared? All of this affects what capacity factor can be achieved which determines whether this can be made economic, ie the difference between having to move the rig every few days vs letting it just sit in one place for months on end sipping gas.
- npongratz 7y ago
  > What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig? I have no numbers, but the flares are apparently pretty easy to see from space: https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/ https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/ And I've heard from first-hand reports that the amount of heat and light being thrown off by flares is staggering. Like, feel-it-from-a-hundred-yards-away hot. (Of course, I'm just some guy on the internet -- do your own research, grain of salt, and all that).
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Others in the oil and gas industry are looking at this too. Natural gas is cheap and plentiful, natural gas generators (that can burn Y grade) are common. Vertically integrating around power seems the logical next step in bitcoin mining. I'm waiting to see the first bitcoin mining company that builds their own ASICs and drills their own wells.
- Xplosiveoctopus 7y ago
  I'm sorry this is off-topic, but there's no other way for me to contact you. I read your comment in one post about salaries: "Your comment really saddens me. There’s so much more you could have. There’s no reason why what I make has to be an outlier. I’m so so so not special. Many people have come on HN to say exactly what I’ve said and have achieved outsized results. Jesus, is patio11 really that incredible of a guy? I mean, he’s really nice and pretty smart but dude he made his start with a bingo card creator. Our mindset is our greatest limitation." I'd like to send you a letter. Could you please drop me an email at xplosiveoctopus (at) gmail.com? Thank you for your time, Ryanmarsh.
throwaway5752 7y ago
Or burn it, pretty much the same. Anything furthering bitcoin going to result in much more electricity use, so flaring might be preferable environmentally. Microgenerators or fuel cells (both complicated by source stream being unscrubbed) would be better. If grid tie is the issue, would be more interesting and productive to advance trapped energy source storage methods, either thermal/kinetic, hydrogen separation (of source stream or splitting local water), or other chemical. One thing is that you don't generally have a bunch of completely isolated wells - usually clustered smaller platforms or a giant one with tie-backs.. point being they share infra, though, so you can probably have a bunch of wells in the same field sharing some energy storage infrastructure. What the net energy saves would be is a great question.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Too late to edit, but "Microgenerators" should have been "microturbines"
solarengineer 7y ago
I wonder if protein folding might be a better use of such ideas and energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
- qqii 7y ago
  Grid Coin is built on that idea: https://gridcoin.us/ https://gridcoin.us/
guy_c 7y ago
The founder was interviewed on this podcast - https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16 https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16 To summarise points that are missed in the comments and maybe not well describe on the website: This is based in Canada. The vast majority is heavy oil in unconsolidated sand. This cannot be pumped, so there are commonly no pipelines. During the process of extraction a lot of low value methane escapes from the oil. Canada has limits to the amount of venting a well can do, so if they reaches the limit they have to either slow the well's production or spend money on building a flare. Both options have an economic cost. These mining units are addressing this.
DonHopkins 7y ago
If you invent a money printing machine, then why not just use it yourself instead of trying to sell it to other people?
- hjk05 7y ago
  Obviously because you can make more money selling it then keeping it to yourself. If the purpose of the machine is to make money why chose the least effective way of making that money just to prevent others from making money as well? Incidentally this is also the reason that people sell profitable companies even though they are “printing money” every year.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    The point is that if you can make more money selling machines than printing money, then it isn't a very good money printing machine, and you're just another bitcoin scammer, refusing to eat your own dog food, selling an impossible dream to suckers. To purpose of simply using the machine yourself instead of selling it isn't preventing others from making money, it's to avoid wasting your own time and money on sales and marketing and customer service and hiring employees and paying for their health care and leasing office space and manufacturing and shipping products and giving refunds to unsatisfied customers, when you could just be shoveling money directly into your bank account instead, without all the overhead. If the machine was really so great, then you could just print all the money you needed, and give the machines away for free. Now if you could invent a machine selling machine, then you'd have something.

88 points by seibelj 7y ago

Well... they could have converted it in electricity, either directly on the grid or by using a battery system (like the liquid batteries used to store solar in Australia). Converting it into Bitcoin is hardly the best choice for ourselves and our planet.

def_true_false 7y ago
This works without being connected to the grid.
k_sze 7y ago
I guess one reason it’s not already been done is because of physics. You can capture the flared gas and convert it to electricity on site, but you still need to be able to deliver it to the consumers for it to be valuable. But electrical power is lost when you transport it over long distances due to wire resistance, unless you convert it to really high voltage. Maybe all the infrastructure required is just not worth the money. Bitcoin doesn’t have this problem, all you need in order to make it liquidable is an internet connection, which any gas/oil field probably already has.
- J-dawg 7y ago
  Got to admire the creative thinking involved in this. Are there any more "practical" potential uses? Some industrial process that requires lots of power but not too much other infrastructure?
  - arethuza 7y ago
    CO2 sequestration?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Could a coin backed by stored CO₂ work?
      - arethuza 7y ago
        I promise to pay the bearer the sum of 1 ton of C02 on demand?
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Well, Bitcoin doesn't work that way either. I was thinking more of a "you get a coin for X tons of CO₂" + hype to make these work as currency, but I suppose it's just a weird version of existing carbon trading solutions.
        cwkoss 7y ago
        Kind of silly to make this a coin. Because you'll fundamentally need an external system to audit CO2 sequestration and manage issuance, the auditor might as well be a centralized issuer.
- abraae 7y ago
  Incredible. Bitcoin used to be a solution looking for a problem. Now it's at least a solution to it's own problem.
  - magnamerc 7y ago
    Nakamoto consensus doesn't solve the byzantine generals problem?
- henearkr 7y ago
  As I said above, the energy is very usable locally too.
pwagland 7y ago
The places where this is targeted for aren't close to a grid to be able to pump the power back into it. The benefit of this sort of system is that it gives you a way to consume electricity close to the source, so that you don't end up with the distribution costs. I do agree that doesn't seem like the best choice, but the alternatives proposed are not alternatives in the situations that this is targeting. I suspect/hope that there _are_ other alternatives, that may serve a better "global good".
- henearkr 7y ago
  Well, the argument seems invalid, as they obviously use energy to run their oil field (look at these huge hammer-like machines). They could use this energy. Even their very local grid is a grid.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Right, but I think their local energy needs are far less than what these burnoffs contain.
DSingularity 7y ago
Why? Assuming their “25x more impact on global warming” claims are accurate won’t this reduce global warming in a more substantial way? Also, won’t this push energy prices up thus creating more economic motivation for clean/sustainable energy and reducing demand for unclean energy?
- kortilla 7y ago
  No, this won’t push energy prices up. If anything it will decrease them because it increases the margin by which natural gas operations are sustainable.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    You mean "Freedom Gas". https://www.sciencealert.com/us-department-of-energy-is-now-referring-to-natural-gas-as-freedom-gas https://www.sciencealert.com/us-department-of-energy-is-now-... https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-authorizes-additional-lng-exports-freeport-lng https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-authorizes... “Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”
- corodra 7y ago
  Bitcoin mining required more energy. Thus, ramped up power plants to burn MORE fuel. Burning more fuel means more emissions. More green house gases. More global warming. IF bitcoin was going to push energy companies to go more green. It would have already. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-... Bitcoin has been the best thing to happen to fossil fuel power plants across the planet.
fred_is_fred 7y ago
The places that gas is flared are in the middle of nowhere. There is no grid, there's hardly roads and maybe no cell service. They're not flaring gas in downtown SF here, this is like northeastern Colorado or West Texas.
caymanjim 7y ago
No one is venting natural gas for the hell of it. There is no economical way to use it, full stop. If the infrastructure were there, they'd sell it. It's vented because there's no profitable way to capture and transport the gas, and there's no profitable way to produce and transport electricity. These things require massive capital investment. Much of the world's fossil fuels are extracted in the middle of nowhere. And even if the extraction location were going to produce for long enough to justify running infrastructure to it, it'd still take years or even decades to get approval and build the infrastructure. One of these modules can be installed almost instantly and anywhere. You don't need any other infrastructure. You could even put these on oil platforms.
- technofiend 7y ago
  Gas pipelines use the product itself to fuel compression. There doesn't seem to be anything small enough to justify aggregating at the well head and compressing in situ using the fuel to compress itself. For example I see this but it's still quite large. https://www.wartsila.com/marine/build/gas-solutions/lng-solutions/lng-plants-small-scale-liquefaction-technology https://www.wartsila.com/marine/build/gas-solutions/lng-solu...
- coryrc 7y ago
  Then fuck 'em, venting and flaring should be banned. Too expensive? Then leave it all in the ground where it belongs.

pwagland 7y ago

I like the idea of: > conserv[ing] sources of wasted energy without the need for invasive infrastructure (pipelines, power lines, etc). However, it isn't just a matter of dropping one of these skids onsite and leaving, since these skids need to be connected to a power source, not a waste gas source. So that waste gas _first_ needs to be converted to power, and then that power routed into the skid. This _is_ much easier than running lines out to the main grid to get rid of that generated electricity. And a 750 kW generator probably isn't going to be the main cost centre. Neither does bitcoin require particularly high bandwidth by normal standards, but they are quite high for a remote location, and doesn't seem to be mentioned in the blurbs. It would also still be competing against cheap energy sources, since bitcoin cost is essentially your input energy cost. And even if the gas that powers the generator is "free", there are still a large number of costs with doing anything remote…

DSingularity 7y ago
It can be done and if a POC is legit and the numbers line up it will be done. When energy is primary cost — and assuming enough rigs can be built — the operational scale that can be reached by a 10x-leaner setup will disrupt the network. The computational difficulty (which they will only increase) outweighs the communication challenges of broadcasting the blocks or being first to the mempool. Even the communication costs will likely be driven down simply because of the profit incentives to doing so.
comboy 7y ago
For those wondering just like me, 750 KW generator yields $657K worth of electricity during a year assuming 1kWh=0.1$ I'm guessing these rigs are at least $500K+ and you have to take into account things breaking like they always do. Btw, these rigs definitely don't look like they would be able to provide appropriate cooling in a hot climate, but maybe that's not where they are going to be used.
- jdhn 7y ago
  Based on the .ca domain as well as the fact that they talk heavily about Alberta, I'm betting that they're targeting the Canadian market. While Canada can get warm in the summer, it's no Texas, and it's markedly colder during the winter. I don't think that they're too worried about their equipment overheating.

michaelt 7y ago

A few years ago, I wondered if my electrically-heated office could instead be heated with bitcoin mining hardware. It would effectively be free electricity, right? What I found out from sources like [1] was, because the bitcoin mining difficulty is constantly increasing, the BTC a bitcoin miner produces reduces exponentially. So even with free electricity, a miner that makes BTC worth a total of $361 in 24 months, will only make $10 more if run for 99 months. And if you only need to heat your office 25% of the year? Well, the mining difficulty will keep on rising even when your hardware is turned off, so it'll be obsolete after 24 months anyway. But it'll only have produced 25% the BTC in its fixed useful life. So if buying retail mining hardware is already questionably profitable† even with free electricity, buying it and only running it a fraction of the time is even moreso. This company must be getting a great price on mining hardware if it's profitable to install and run it only a fraction of the time. [1] https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=14500000000000&hc=625&hp=1350&er=8736.77&sd=19-05-30&d=36 https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=1450000... † Which seemed to be the case when I researched this, although bitcoin prices can vary a lot of course.

sandworm101 7y ago
>> buying it and only running it a fraction of the time is even moreso. If you have an intermittent power supply, slap a battery on the system and turn it into a continuous power supply. Over a period of time the next amount of mining done will be the same. My point is whether you mine intermittently or continuously you will average out to the same amount of mining at the end of the day/month/year. The only issue is how you tune your battery/mining rig ratios to optimize the hardware investment.
- wmf 7y ago
  There's nothing to optimize; the battery costs far more than the value of Bitcoin mined.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    But what if you steal the batteries? Hell, steal the electricity, too! We're talking Bitcoin here! The real money making opportunity is running the security firm that guards all those remote expensive rigs and batteries from being stolen.

ilaksh 7y ago

How does it connect to the internet?

magnamerc 7y ago
Starlink obviously.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  You laugh, but existing satellite internet like Viacom is probably doable. $50-70/month with a 40GB/month soft cap should be good enough with a local Stratum proxy. Latency is high, so you could lose a small amount due to stale work units, but it’s not a big amount.
syedkarim 7y ago
Any satellite internet connection would do. Or point-to-point connection.
SilasX 7y ago
I assume it can just use a cellular 3G connection or satellite link, because it doesn't need to be very fast or low latency. The way mining pools work, the pool gives a short description of a massive block of nonces for your miner to check, and then you send back a short proof that you checked all the nonces (because you will have a predictable number of partial matches, and so the proof will be very short). So you don't need to send much data back and forth. Whatever bitcoins the pool then mines are then allocated out in proportion to what fraction of nonces yours had checked.

thinkcontext 7y ago

Deeply skeptical of this but I'm curious about the practical aspects of consuming the excess gas. What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig? Is there a storage vessel as part of the rig or at the drill pad to buffer gas that would normally be flared? All of this affects what capacity factor can be achieved which determines whether this can be made economic, ie the difference between having to move the rig every few days vs letting it just sit in one place for months on end sipping gas.

npongratz 7y ago
> What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig? I have no numbers, but the flares are apparently pretty easy to see from space: https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/ https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/ And I've heard from first-hand reports that the amount of heat and light being thrown off by flares is staggering. Like, feel-it-from-a-hundred-yards-away hot. (Of course, I'm just some guy on the internet -- do your own research, grain of salt, and all that).

ryanmarsh 7y ago

Others in the oil and gas industry are looking at this too. Natural gas is cheap and plentiful, natural gas generators (that can burn Y grade) are common. Vertically integrating around power seems the logical next step in bitcoin mining. I'm waiting to see the first bitcoin mining company that builds their own ASICs and drills their own wells.

Xplosiveoctopus 7y ago
I'm sorry this is off-topic, but there's no other way for me to contact you. I read your comment in one post about salaries: "Your comment really saddens me. There’s so much more you could have. There’s no reason why what I make has to be an outlier. I’m so so so not special. Many people have come on HN to say exactly what I’ve said and have achieved outsized results. Jesus, is patio11 really that incredible of a guy? I mean, he’s really nice and pretty smart but dude he made his start with a bingo card creator. Our mindset is our greatest limitation." I'd like to send you a letter. Could you please drop me an email at xplosiveoctopus (at) gmail.com? Thank you for your time, Ryanmarsh.

throwaway5752 7y ago

Or burn it, pretty much the same. Anything furthering bitcoin going to result in much more electricity use, so flaring might be preferable environmentally. Microgenerators or fuel cells (both complicated by source stream being unscrubbed) would be better. If grid tie is the issue, would be more interesting and productive to advance trapped energy source storage methods, either thermal/kinetic, hydrogen separation (of source stream or splitting local water), or other chemical. One thing is that you don't generally have a bunch of completely isolated wells - usually clustered smaller platforms or a giant one with tie-backs.. point being they share infra, though, so you can probably have a bunch of wells in the same field sharing some energy storage infrastructure. What the net energy saves would be is a great question.

throwaway5752 7y ago
Too late to edit, but "Microgenerators" should have been "microturbines"

solarengineer 7y ago

I wonder if protein folding might be a better use of such ideas and energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

qqii 7y ago
Grid Coin is built on that idea: https://gridcoin.us/ https://gridcoin.us/

guy_c 7y ago

The founder was interviewed on this podcast - https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16 https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16 To summarise points that are missed in the comments and maybe not well describe on the website: This is based in Canada. The vast majority is heavy oil in unconsolidated sand. This cannot be pumped, so there are commonly no pipelines. During the process of extraction a lot of low value methane escapes from the oil. Canada has limits to the amount of venting a well can do, so if they reaches the limit they have to either slow the well's production or spend money on building a flare. Both options have an economic cost. These mining units are addressing this.

DonHopkins 7y ago

If you invent a money printing machine, then why not just use it yourself instead of trying to sell it to other people?

hjk05 7y ago
Obviously because you can make more money selling it then keeping it to yourself. If the purpose of the machine is to make money why chose the least effective way of making that money just to prevent others from making money as well? Incidentally this is also the reason that people sell profitable companies even though they are “printing money” every year.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  The point is that if you can make more money selling machines than printing money, then it isn't a very good money printing machine, and you're just another bitcoin scammer, refusing to eat your own dog food, selling an impossible dream to suckers. To purpose of simply using the machine yourself instead of selling it isn't preventing others from making money, it's to avoid wasting your own time and money on sales and marketing and customer service and hiring employees and paying for their health care and leasing office space and manufacturing and shipping products and giving refunds to unsatisfied customers, when you could just be shoveling money directly into your bank account instead, without all the overhead. If the machine was really so great, then you could just print all the money you needed, and give the machines away for free. Now if you could invent a machine selling machine, then you'd have something.