Other “behind-the-meter” operations are physically located at power plants. ![]() The report noted that because the generators and rigs are usually on trailers, the entire operation can be moved quickly, so miners can stay ahead of government oil and gas inspectors. But we’ve got thousands of fracked gas wells across the state and just simply have no way of knowing where this is happening.” Gas drilling is heavily regulated, but crypto mining itself is not.Ī recent federal investigation in Colorado found crypto mining powered by gas wells on public-lease lands, creaming energy off before it hit the grid and converting it to crypto without paying any royalties. “We’ve heard of three different companies doing it. Gas companies bring in a trailer or three jam-packed with generators, plugging one end into the well and the other into “shipping containers full of bitcoin miners,” says Rob Altenburg, the senior director for energy and climate at PennFuture, an environmental nonprofit. Some companies bypass the energy grid entirely depending on the price of gas and the price of bitcoin, turning natural gas into crypto might be twice as profitable as selling it to the wholesale gas market. ![]() So it is still very possible to make money at this game. That’s still far below their peak of almost $68,000 in late 2021, but represents a bit of a comeback from the sub-$16,000 prices of last fall. And that is a big reason crypto keeps spewing out so many emissions even during the “crypto winter”: Bitcoin prices in particular have held up, in fact they just passed $28,000 a coin. “There are miners that have been quoted saying, ‘As long as the price is over $10,000 per coin, it still can generate money,’” Elizabeth Moran, a policy advocate at the green law firm Earthjustice, told me. These companies have put a lot of money into their hardware and their physical space, and they will continue mining until they are actively losing money. And owners of unprofitable power-generation infrastructure, such as waste - coal- burning power plants, opened up crypto-mining operations to create another revenue stream. Miners set up shop in communities with low energy prices. After China clamped down on crypto mining in 2021, such computing work increased in the United States. Over time, it’s taken more and more computing power to unlock a single coin now most mining is done in large-scale operations using purpose-built mining rigs.Īnd it is America’s problem now. The method is known as “proof of work.” Once upon a time, bitcoin mining was something that people did if they had a couple of spare computers they wanted to put to work. The process involves using heavy-duty computers to grind through trillions of calculations, solving equations to create virtual coins. Mining bitcoin does not involve actually digging anything out of the ground-unless you count the fossil fuel that often powers it. Even now that the boom times are over, they have no reason to stop. ![]() Many people who’ve invested in crypto tend to have a lot of sunk costs, whether digital wallets bulging with various coins, tokens, or expensive physical setups designed to make more. ![]() That’s up from about 43 megatons a year in December, and just slightly below the all-time peak of nearly 74 in May 2021. The tracker focuses on bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with by far the largest market share, and estimates that at its current rate of “mining” new coins, bitcoin will release about 62 megatons of “ carbon-dioxide equivalent” each year-about as much as the entire country of Serbia emitted in 2019. Lots of people lost money in the crash, but from the planet’s perspective, the industry’s downfall is good news: The computing power fueling the crypto boom was so substantial that it was causing substantial greenhouse-gas emissions.Īnd yet crypto’s greenhouse-gas emissions are still shockingly high, according to an industry tracker run by the University of Cambridge. Recently, the head of the SEC warned crypto firms to “do their work within the bounds of the law” or face enforcement actions. The Wild West days of the industry may be over. “MiamiCoin,” hyped by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a new source of income for the city, is now worthless. After the FTX bankruptcy and broader crypto crash last year, basically all of the celebrities who were promoting crypto have gone silent. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’ s newsletter about living through climate change, here.Īt this point, for most of us, cryptocurrency seems like nothing more than a fad.
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