Methane is a big climate problem that Bitcoin can help solve

moneycontrol.com:

Trung Phan

“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 percent 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 like compression or liquefaction don’t make sense economically.”

Enter Bitcoin: The digital asset maintains its record of transactions through a process that requires a lot of computing power to solve math puzzles. Bitcoin miners receive rewards for solving these puzzles. It is this incentive that provides the economics for Crusoe to deploy a technology able to divert gas from flaring.

Last month, Crusoe raised $350 million in a Series C funding round. It already operates in North Dakota, Wyoming and