Methane Is a Big Climate Problem That Bitcoin Can Help Solve

Methane Is a Big Climate Problem That Bitcoin Can Help Solve

International and Arab News

“ExxonMobil is mining Bitcoin.”

That unlikely headline was recently splashed across major business publications. In a project that began in January 2021, Exxon teamed up with the startup Crusoe Energy Systems Inc. to use excess gas from its North Dakota oil fields to mine Bitcoin.

Here’s why: The oil production process gives off gas as a byproduct. For logistical reasons, not all of the gas can be captured and transported. Common industry practice is to burn the extra gas. Called “flaring” in industry parlance, the practice is very bad for the environment.

By one measure, flaring is responsible for 1% of man-made atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions globally. Even worse is the release of methane: As Scientific American put it, “while CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.”

Crusoe is able to use the excess gas in a process it calls digital flare mitigation. The startup has built dozens of mobile data centers that are placed onto oilfield sites where flaring takes place.

“People have tried to solve flaring for a long time,” Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller tells me. “But the standard chemical engineering approaches