Mining Bitcoin With Gas
The Russian oil company Gazpromneft recently started mining Bitcoin with a Bitcoin mining-farm that uses carbon dioxide emissions as its source of power.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
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You probably know that mining Bitcoin requires a lot of energy. And sadly, the majority of the energy we produce also produces a lot of carbon dioxide that has a large effect on the global climate. And even the act of mining for oil itself releases many flammable gases that cannot be used by the mining equipment.
The gas that gets released most often during these processes is methane. But we at least know of a way to get rid of the methane. We can burn it and make sure it doesn’t get into the atmosphere as it is one of the most potent greenhouse gases we know of.
The methane is transformed into carbon dioxide when it's burned. Carbon dioxide is also a greenhouse gas but it is at least less potent than the methane. Yet, the heat and energy produced are commonly just wasted and Gazpromneft decided to change that.
They use the energy produced by the burning of methane to create a Bitcoin mining farm in the depths of Siberia. Gazpromneft itself is not the recipient of the Bitcoin as it rents out the infrastructure it has built to other subjects that specialize in mining and trading digital cryptocurrencies.
And it seems to be working well as one of their clients managed to mine 1.8 Bitcoin in just a month while burning almost 50,000 cubic meters of surplus gas.
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