Jessica Morrison
Bitcoin flickers and flares Last year’s decline in natural gas consumption has fired up some in the oil and gas industry to explore a different kind of resource extraction—one that uses computers to mine for digital currency. Quartz reports that since the pandemic began, a handful of gas companies in the western US have tapped excess flare gas—an environmentally contentious by-product of oil extraction that’s typically burned off—to power generators that supply cheap electricity to data centers that mine bitcoins, a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency mining, which involves using computers to solve cryptographic equations, has been criticized for its outsize energy requirements. According to researchers at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education , bitcoin mining consumes more than twice the energy required to mine an equivalent value of copper, gold, or platinum. EZ Blockchain, a company that sells digital mining infrastructure to gas companies, says its model offers a way