Several oil producers and Bitcoin miners have been holding weekly meetings in the North American state of Texas. Among his plans is to capture most of the hash rate that China has dropped since the country imposed a ban on cryptocurrency mining, which caused the closure of large farms.
A car depot in the Texas city of Houston has become a meeting place for Bitcoin enthusiasts, miners, and oil and gas executives to explore growth opportunities for the digital mining industry.
Texas has great potential to offer clean and cheap energy required to mine cryptocurrencies . This is because in the state, located in the south of the United States, there are many oil wells that expel natural gas in excess, a fossil fuel that is now being wasted.
Instead of wasting gas, Bitcoin mining can take advantage of it, considering that natural gas can be used to feed mining operations that are installed in the vicinity of each well . In fact, plans are already pointing in that direction, as pointed out by the CNBC media.
This deployment will benefit both miners and producers, even the environment, as by using natural gas from drilling sites to mine bitcoin ( BTC), the carbon footprint of the oil industry is reduced.
Texas can become the world capital of Bitcoin
Bitcoiner Parker Lewis is emerging as one of the de facto ambassadors promoting the bitcoin adoption in Texas. Everyone knows him and bitcoiners refer to him as the future mayor of the capital of Texas, Austin, as the note of the American media points out.
Lewis has no doubt that, if the The area begins to host good meetings to discuss the future of the pioneering cryptocurrency, “Texas can become the world capital of Bitcoin,” as he highlighted.
His efforts are thriving because The meeting held at the end of August had more than 200 attendees from across the state of Texas, as well as from California, Colorado, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Australia and the United Kingdom , add the note.
Using natural gas as an energy source to mine bitcoin is a smart and financially sound move, as explained by Adam Ortolf, who leads business development in the US .of Upstream Data, a manufacturer of equipment for mining Bitcoin with natural gas.
What Ortolf pointed out, is something that Hayden Griffin Haby III certifies, who told CNBC about his experience merging these two worlds, that of mining of Bitcoin and that of natural gas production. “I couldn’t take my eyes off this when I saw that so much money could be made from gas thanks to a Bitcoin miner who takes advantage of the gas that is usually released into the atmosphere to burn,” he said.
One of the main goals of this Texas oil man is to grab the attention of numerous Bitcoin miners who still want to relocate their businesses after being kicked out of China.
However, many of these meetings are still clandestine and are not open to the public. Some offers are protected by nondisclosure agreements, while others do not want to talk about their relationship because it could give their competitors an advantage in the field.
Still, Texas already has the attention of big of the industry, such as Marathon Digital Holdings. According to what was reported by CriptoNoticias, this company will build a new farm in the state that will house approximately 73,000 specialized ASIC equipment, although until now it is unknown if it estimates to use gas to extract the cryptocurrency.
What is known is that the data center would begin to be built in October 2021 and would begin operations in March of next year.
On the other hand, last May the mining companies cryptocurrency firms formed the Bitcoin Minning Council (BMC), along with MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
In their efforts to change the narrative on using energy to mine Bitcoin, BMC has collected data. They estimate that the share of renewables in the global Bitcoin mining industry was around 56% at the end of the second quarter of 2021, making it one of the ‘greenest’ industries in the world.
Digital mining with methane gas: good for the environment
In the US, billions of liters of natural gas are burned each year, wasting fossil fuel and emitting greenhouse gases without generating
In Texas alone, state regulators have allowed companies to burn more than one million cubic feet of gas every day since 2019. Combined, that would be enough natural gas to meet the annual gas needs of 15 million homes, according to a recently published report.
Fossil fuel companies choose to burn natural gas instead of capture and sell it for a variety of reasons. The most relevant is that the construction of the necessary infrastructure is not economically viable for relatively small reserves. Therefore, normally, these reserves are simply burned without generating anything from them.
When natural gas is burned, methane is converted into carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere. But flares often don’t burn out completely or don’t light, causing the methane to vent directly into the air, an even more potent contribution to climate change, something bitcoin mining can fix. .
