Portable Extraction Equipment
Several projects have in the past year raised money to develop so-called “mobile mining rigs”. These rigs can be effectively placed where energy production is cheapest and most environmentally friendly. Specifically, the new mining rig can utilize natural gas, which comes off the ground as a by-product of oil recovery.
For the oil companies, this gas can be a cost, because cleaning and incineration plants cost money, while at the same time the environmental requirements are becoming stricter. Today, this environmentally hazardous gas is either released into the atmosphere or burned.
“Cryptining can be the x-factor that solves the problems for the oil industry, but can also act as a smoothing mechanism that offers energy where there is surplus”
Roughnecks
North America has become a net oil exporter as a result of massive oil field development from Texas to Montana. Pipelines have been built for export, and production has increased by almost 1 million barrels a year.
This happens at the same time as new oil fields are opened in the North Sea, and marginal fields are emptied using new technology. Common to both is that the by-product of oil drilling is natural gas. What if you could utilize that gas for something that made money? Then the price of drilling would fall and the environment would be saved as the gas is converted into energy. Mobile data centers can use energy that would otherwise have been lost.
The Pioneers
Crusoe Energy and Upstream Data already have products in the market on this technology. They convert surplus gas into oil fields into computer power.
Crusoe Energy recently picked up $ 4.5 million from the Winklevoss brothers and is now rolling out its facilities in several locations in Texas. The company says that they are in talks with some of the largest oil companies in the United States and expect to convert millions of cubic gas into energy as early as 2019.
Upstream Data is a Canadian company that sells its first rigs to the oil industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Wall Street Journal has written an article about the company entitled “Bitcoin in The Wilderness”.
“These companies propose solutions, where others see problems.”
Environmental Debate
Today, some argue that bitcoin extraction is environmentally hazardous, as it requires a lot of energy to verify and recover new bitcoin. Yet, another way to angle it, may be that mining solves the problem of bottlenecks in the energy industry, and can even out price fluctuations that occur when there are occasionally negative electricity prices in Europe due to too much wind. If one can also put in mobile rigs where there is surplus gas, oil extraction and bitcoin extraction can help to utilize the resources in a better way, and thus create an environmental benefit.
The cryptograph has previously written about how 74% of the world’s Bitcoin mining comes from renewable energy.