Gas flaring is a combustion device. This device is used in all production facilities like oil rigs’ coal plants and refineries all around the US. Why? Well, those facilities have tons of excess gasses and liquids, to get rid of them those facilities use gas flaring. This process releases the atmosphere’s gasses like carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide. Of these three, methane is the most harmful with carbon dioxide from flaring representing around 0.6% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. So why not use it for Bitcoin mining?
Wasted Gas For Bitcoin
The generation of these greenhouse gases could lead to environmental problems such as acid rain and global climate change. For donkey years, flaring excess gas has caused more harm than good to humanity, animals, and nature but it seems like a company in Utah, United States has found a solution.
Wesco Operating Co., an oil producer near Moab, Utah is a popular natural gas producing company. Like every other oil-producing company in the world, the company flares excess natural gas – a common way of increasing carbon emission.
But as the world is embracing green technology, Wesco has stopped flaring excess natural gas and can no longer ship it to the market – a decision that has reduced carbon emissions and increased profits. One would ask, what happens to the excess gas? Wescon is now using it to mine bitcoin. Wesco claims to have found a bitcoin solution to a years-old problem. Rather than wasting excess natural gas by burning it off, the company is now converting it into electrical generators which are used to power bitcoin mining rigs. Is this innovative or problematic? Find out more!
Wesco’s move isn’t new; in fact, it is popular among oil producers seeking to capitalize on excess gas rather than wasting it. They are left with no choice but to eliminate the flare due to a lack of financial incentives to capture it. With bitcoin, things are changing. The stranded power is burned more efficiently [reducing emissions] and still used to power high-energy generators for mining bitcoin. According to what Wesco representative Steve Degenfelder told The Salt Lake Tribune, since February, the company has flared almost zero gas after investing huge capital for bitcoin mining operations. It is such a unique opportunity that very few companies are leveraging.
bitcoin introduced to us the way of leveraging stranded energy and capturing the toxic polluted waste. Thanks to bitcoin we minimizing our carbon emissions and drastically increasing profit margins. It’s a very big game-changer and nobody was surprised that the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and mining rewarded Wesco for the revolutionary solution they implemented.
Hopefully, in the next coming years, we would see other oil companies follow the same route as did Wesco.
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