Other oil companies, including ConocoPhillips in North Dakota, see the energy-hungry cryptocurrency as a way to offload some of their climate footprint and maybe make some cash in the process.
If a company lets that methane escape into the atmosphere, which they are embarrassingly frequently guilty of doing, methane would trap heat with 80 times as much power as CO2 over the next 20 years.
Not releasing gas in the first place would be best — but releasing CO2 is marginally better than letting more potent methane float up into the atmosphere.
The downside to this — apart from adding to a climate crisis that’s killing people and making entire communities unlivable — is that burning methane is kind of like rolling up a wad of cash and smoking it.
A more attractive option is to put that gas to work on-site near the oil well so there’s no need to build a new pipeline to make use of the gas.
Luckily for Exxon and companies like it, Bitcoin mining rigs can be set up pretty much anywhere there’s a cheap, abundant power source — like, say, an oil field where Exxon has so much extra gas it’s just burning it up willy-nilly.
Exxon is working with a company called Crusoe, according to CNBC, whose sole purpose is to help fossil fuel companies deal with their waste gas by using it for cryptomining or other computing projects.
Crusoe crunched its own numbers and came to the conclusion that cryptomining cuts down CO2 emissions by a whopping 63 percent compared to flaring.
But if another company burns the gas from Exxon’s oil fields for Bitcoin mining, who do the associated greenhouse gas emissions get assigned to — the Bitcoin miners or Exxon? The answers are still murky, Mahdavi says.
There’s one last catch with Exxon’s cryptomining, and it’s a big one.