ExxonMobil Mining Bitcoin (BTC) with Excess Natural Gas
ExxonMobil is reportedly running a bitcoin mining pilot program that involves the use of excess natural gas from its North Dakota oil Wells, reports Bloomberg on March 24, 2022.
ExxonMobil Turning Excess Gas Into Bitcoin
The oil and gas giant, which is the largest oil producer in the United States, says it plans to replicate the natural gas-powered bitcoin mining pilot across other parts of the world, including Africa.
ExxonMobil in its agreement with Crusoe Energy Systems Inc. is set to take gas from an oil well in the Bakken shale basin to power mobile generators used to run bitcoin mining servers.
The pilot project, which was first introduced in January 2021, was reintroduced and expanded last July, and it uses up to 18 million cubic feet of gas per month that would otherwise have evaporated into the atmosphere or flared, due to the unavailability of enough pipelines.
According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, ExxonMobil is considering similar pilots for Alaska in the United States, the Qua Iboe terminal in Nigeria, Vaca Muerta in Argentina, and also in Guyana and Germany.
“ExxonMobil will continue to evaluate emerging technologies that are aimed at reducing flaring volumes across our operations,” and Exxon expects to meet the World Bank’s call to end routine flaring by 2030,” Sarah Nordin, a spokeswoman at the firm told Bloomberg She, however, declined to comment on rumors and speculations regarding the pilot project.
World leaders are united in their quest to keep the environment clean by the year 2030 as the demand for clean energy remains a very skeptical topic the world over.
Gas producers are in turn faced with stifling pressure from regulators and investors to reduce their carbon footprint to help fight the menace of climate change. That includes reducing the amount of gas they flare and at the same time, there is a rush of miners trying to use cheap gas in oil-producing fields to fuel their crypto mining data centers.
Authorities Wary of Bitcoin Mining
A lot of uncertainties still surround the global bitcoin mining ecosystem due to its insatiable energy demands. While some jurisdictions are still deliberating on whether to outlaw crypto mining, nations like China have since made mining illegal within its shores.
Researcher Alex de Vries in a recent study has revealed that Bitcoin has become ‘less green’ since China ousted miners.
According to the researcher, the share of renewable energy used for bitcoin mining fell from 41.6% in 2020 to 25.1% last August as miners moved to the United States, where gas supplies a good amount of their electricity.
Due to the growing energy concerns of proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies, a proposal to outrightly ban PoW mining was recently presented to the European Parliament
but the bill fell through after members voted against it.
The draft was deliberated upon during the meeting of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, which saw 34 members voting against the proposal while 24 voted in favor of the bill.
In the past, China accounted for up to 70% of the global bitcoin mining hashrate. However, with the country’s clampdown on all things crypto, including mining, miners have now moved to jurisdictions like North America, Vietnam, and a host of others with cheap energy.
In related news, crypto.news reported earlier in March that Hive Blockchain has entered an agreement with Intel to purchase its newly launched energy-efficient blockchain accelerators, which could boost its renewable energy-powered bitcoin mining hashrate by 95 percent.
