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A Bitcoin Mine at a Natural Gas Well in Texas
- kthejoker2 5y agoA simpler solution: charge an indefinitely scheduled Bitcoin tax for any gas flared. As in, you agree that in exchange for flaring some amount of gas today we can come collect anytime in the future some amount of a wildly speculative and volatile asset from you, even if it involves more liability than your entire organization can sustain. Oh wait, we already have this, it's called climate change, we just pay it as an entire planet. This way lies madness.
- wffurr 5y agoThe real problem is Texas and the federal government allowing flaring in the first place. With better regulations, many better things could be done with that gas rather than mining Bitcoin.
- CodeShmode 5y agoThe amount of gas to too small to be economical to transport away from the well.
- nharada 5y agoMaybe that's a problem with economic incentives and it shouldn't be free to just burn the gas to get rid of it.
- CodeShmode 5y agoWhether or not they pay a carbon price for burning the gas, it's still better for it to be productive in the process.
- chockchocschoir 5y ago> With better regulations, many better things could be done with that gas rather than mining Bitcoin. With better regulations we could also maybe outlaw desktop gaming computers as there are a lot of powerful (and power hungry) desktop computers just being used to play video games when they could be doing many better things, like contributing to Folding@home or other efforts.
- Ourgon 5y agoRegulations, because we know better. More specific, you know better what people should do with both their time as well as their money. They should not play those games nor should they buy those computers for playing games, instead they should buy those computers and the power needed to run them to run $Thing_You_Deem_To_Be_Proper_Today. Since those gamers are just to stupid to realise this they need to be forced to your will because you are right and they are stupid and wrong. It is that attitude which was part of the reason why the USA got its previous president. Assuming that you did not like the previous president of the USA you'd do well to tone it down a bit since people don't like to be patronised.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoGP is being sarcastic. Perhaps people not understanding words written on the Internet is why we got the previous president, but that is very far off topic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chockchocschoir 5y ago"Who's to say what's "better" for anyone?" was my point, but I failed to actually make that point with my thinly veiled sarcasm. > Assuming that you did not like the previous president of the USA Bold assumption I even care about who the president of the USA is. They're all made of the same fabric.
- 127 5y ago
- lovingCranberry 5y agoGot any ideas for what you could do with that gas "rather than mining Bitcoin"? Believe me, if there was a way to make "better things" with it instead of flaring, they would do it. (Because doing "better things" usually implies that money can be made!) You will always have to burn waste and unwanted gas at such facilities, because you need to stabilize pressure and flow from the well and you just cannot just capture and process all gas that comes out of it. The majority of the burnt gas is methane anyway, and I prefer this to be burnt rather than released into the atmosphere.
- wffurr 5y agoNo but with the correct economic incentives I am sure someone will figure it out. After all, Bitcoin incentivized someone to do something with it. If those oil wells are uneconomical to operate in a way that doesn't entail leaking the natural gas, maybe it's best for them not to operate at all.
- Something1234 5y agoI've been wondering why they don't use the flare gas in a local power plant to power the site and drill.
- maerF0x0 5y agoIt seems pretty likely that 1) they do and 2) the gas far too much energy to consume onsite. Adding electrified vehicles might help a little. What I'm surprised is that they cant find a way to add that electricity to the grid, am i right that you must have an internet connection to mine? If so maybe wireless power is the innovation to unlock these distributed sources?
- Scoundreller 5y agoOr to power some other kind of task. Nobody is posting ads: “hey, need cheap electricity for your industrial thingamajig? See what we can do for you!”
- toomim 5y agoOften because there is no way to get the gas to a power plant. There might not be a local power plant that uses natural gas, or there might not be pipelines, or the local plant might not need the gas. Methane pops up in many places, and in order to use it for the power grid, you need it to pop up in a convenient place for the power grid. The only other options left are to flare it, or vent it into the atmosphere. Methane is 40x worse for the environment in its uncombusted form than after burning it, so it's better to burn (flare) it. But sometimes the extractors don't bother. Bitcoin mining provides an incentive for entrepreneurs to seek out methane that isn't being burned, and burn it.
- kitkat_new 5y ago> Often because there is no way to get the gas to a power plant. build one
- zimbu668 5y agoThe fact that they don't indicates it would probably produce more net emissions than not building it.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y agoUsing flare gas for a useful purpose is a good thing. Does 'mine crypto' qualify as a useful purpose? To some, maybe, but to me energy used for crypto is still wasted energy. I'd really like to see innovators step up and disrupt the gas industry by coming up with new ways of using/capturing/exploiting the energy that otherwise would be wasted in flares. Mining crypto falls far short of that, imho.
- herendin2 5y agoHow about a data center onsite?
- tedivm 5y agoIt's been done with methane reclamation at landfills, and is still being experimented with. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-opens-prototype-data-center-powered-by-methane/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-opens-p...
- asciimike 5y agoHi! I'm the product lead for [Crusoe Energy's](https://crusoeenergy.com/ https://crusoeenergy.com/) cloud product, which is building a climate aligned data center powered by stranded energy (e.g. flared natural gas). Can confirm it's definitely possible, though definitely a non-trivial problem :) If you're interested in using our cloud or joining the team to help scale our data center deployments or software, feel free to reach out (mike at crusoecloud dot com).
- landemva 5y agoTypical data center workloads need great communications (bandwidth, latency, redundancy) and very high power uptime, which is challenging to achieve at remote sites. Some IT workloads with less stringent communication needs are better for remote data centers.
- caymanjim 5y agoI disagree that it's a good thing. It's still being burned, so the environment damage is still there. Except now it's being whitewashed. Instead of the obvious, visible waste and damage of a flare, the companies get to sweep it under the rug and pretend things have improved. Once again a fossil energy company is externalizing their pollution damage. If they were able to pump electricity into the grid it would be slightly better, but not much. Using it for crypto is turning one bad thing into another bad thing, and sweeping the true cost under the rug.
- Capira 5y agoBitcoin is crucial to build more sustainable societies.
- bilekas 5y agoThis is the first time I've heard this argument. Can you point out what you mean exactly?
- adh636 5y agohttps://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white-paper https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white-paper
- Capira 5y agoBitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable [1], and it targets the hidden cost of the petrodollar [2]. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/11/bitcoin-mining-is-reshaping-the-energy-sector-and-no-one-is-talking-about-it/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/11/bitcoin-mining-is... [2] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-petrodollar https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...
- aqme28 5y agoI don't buy this argument. It's a massive consumer of energy, so of course it makes renewables more profitable. It makes all energy more profitable.
- CodeShmode 5y agoI guess the argument would be that it has a greater impact on the profitability of intermittent energy sources as it can stabilize the grid by soaking up cheap off-peak power. Not sure if I buy it either.
- woodruffw 5y agoThe argument in the first article isn’t compelling: we have direct evidence of Bitcoin miners exploiting the diminishing profitability of coal plants to buy them on the cheap and reopen them solely for mining. Similarly for any non-renewable source: the traditional demand slump for each will encourage miners to pick up the slack, rather than investing in renewables. And even this is, on its face, a ridiculous end goal: we should be building renewable sources of power to replace our societies’ needs, not to supplant them with cryptocurrency.
- Scoundreller 5y agoOne of these got set up at an “orphan gas” well in Alberta. I found it strange that a few mw was only economical this way and not economical enough to send to the grid: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-auc-penalties-1.6194653 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-auc-penal...
- ChoGGi 5y agoIt's not the only one, I think these guys got shut down too. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/V-uOOPug4Jg https://m.youtube.com/shorts/V-uOOPug4Jg
- ip26 5y agoYeah, it does seem odd. Perhaps it's about the path of least resistance. Laying power lines, contracting with the grid, and so forth is a bunch of up front investment. Maybe Tesla could drop down a battery pack & install superchargers? There's a synergy between "place too remote to ship out power for selling" and "place too remote to ship in power for electric cars"
- asciimike 5y agoIn the hierarchy of moving things around, from difficult to easy: - natural gas (building a pipeline) - electricity (generation, transformers, high voltage lines, etc.) - bits (copper, fiber, microwave, cellular, satellite all are viable for low bandwidth operation) It's orders of magnitude in terms of cost difference. The issue with superchargers is mostly that these places are in the middle of nowhere--nobody is going to be driving their Tesla across the Permian.
- ip26 5y agoThere is no city, but Highway 10 runs through the Permian, and Big Bend National Park is just south. Ironically, with Tesla's new plant in Austin a few hundred miles east, there may be a lot of Teslas in the Permian soon.
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- occz 5y agoThat's one of the more dystopian things I've read this week.
- Ourgon 5y agoThat's because you have not looked around very much and did not understand what would have been done with this gas had it not been used in a generator to power that $hitcoin-mine. As to not looking around I'd say the malversations around all those (soon-to-be) warring nations far eclipse whatever can be achieved by a single funny-money-mine in the backwoods of the Republic of Texas. As to not understanding what would have happened had they not hooked up that generator to the gas line there it should be enough to have a look around an oil extraction area at night where the darkness is often shattered by bursts of reddish light coming from flares. Flares which burn natural gas (and whatever else happens to come up in gas form). Reddish light due to the incomplete combustion inherent in the technology and the gas mixture. Here that gas is burned in a generator which both provides for a more complete combustion as well as produces power to run that mining rig. The net result is less air pollution due to better combustion of spill gas, less light pollution due to the absence of flares plus whatever money that mining operation brings in. There's plenty of flares to go around for mining operations, including those at refineries - have at it. Any $shitcoin mined this way is not mined using power which would otherwise have gone to more useful applications.
- Angostura 5y agoAnd the energy from these flares can't be used for actually useful applications, because?
- lern_too_spel 5y agoBecause Ted Cruz is now getting in on the cryptogrift, acquiring Bitcoin and tweeting about Bitcoin while voting to keep it underregulated. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gvmv/ted-cruz-bitcoin-booster-bought-a-bunch-of-bitcoin https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gvmv/ted-cruz-bitcoin-boos...
- darksaints 5y agoI'm disappointed there aren't more technical details. Small scale gas-to-electric conversion isn't something you really find off the shelf. Diesel generators can be converted to use natural gas, but the conversion isnt something really available off the shelf. The smallest commercial gas turbines are 30kw, which seems a bit too high for what I assume to be the Bitcoin mining equipment in the utility box on the pole in the picture. Some solid oxide fuel cells can convert methane, but the ones you can find commercially can't handle the dirty sulfur-rich natural gas that you'd find in an oil well. So there is something novel happening here to convert the gas to electricity, but it is completely overshadowed by the bitcoin story.
- aresant 5y agoI think https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ is by far the largest participant in this space with a view on using crypto mining as entry point but layering in distributed compute data centers as scale play It’s an interesting idea to bring the utility directly to the energy and think about the infrastructure required (uplink / maintenance / etc) required to fulfill the vision
- asciimike 5y agoI'm the product lead for Crusoe's Cloud; thanks for mentioning us! Our data centers are currently in alpha with a number of A100's and A40's currently running on flared natural gas. We're able to offer a product that's carbon negative (each GPU running for a month offsets ~400kg CO2e) and also ~40% cheaper than hyperscale cloud providers. If you're interested in giving our cloud a shot, feel free to email me @ mike at crusoecloud dot com. And of course, we're always hiring: https://www.crusoeenergy.com/careers https://www.crusoeenergy.com/careers
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulgb 5y agoInteresting, what use cases are you targeting? Is it mostly batch ML training, or do you have customers using you for real-time rendering applications? Or just lots of ETH mining?
- asciimike 5y agoA100s for ML training as well as simulations/FEA/CFD/etc. E.g. we're working with the physics dept at a large university to do various theoretical physics simulations. A40s for rendering and transcoding. We've got some A5000s and A6000s for similar purposes, but at a lower price point. ETH mining is something folks could do if they'd like, but not something we're explicitly targeting.
- aresant 5y ago
- Maursault 5y agoComments seem to be focused on whether this is good or bad. The argument for good sounds suspiciously like the (all invalid) arguments for hunting, that hunting is somehow conservation, because if game not hunted, it would reproduce beyond the point the environmental resources could support their numbers, and they will all suffer greatly by starving. So, if these generous and selfless bitcoin mining individuals were not using residual methane from old wells to mine bitcoin for their own self-interests, then the methane would be released into the atmosphere, and everyone on Earth would be worse off. When you hear these individuals speak in support of themselves, all you will hear, over and over again, droning out your ability to discern if what they're saying makes sense, is, "it's win-win. It's really a win-win. So it's a win-win," and the only message you need take with you is that it is a win-win. I don't know if there are lesser evils here, but the smell of bullshit is overwhelming.
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y agoOne Alberta wellhead bitcoin miner got socket with a fine big enough to confiscate his profits because he failed to obtain a power production license (required in Alberta). The noise could be heard for miles around. Be a good neighbor - or else.