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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

One way to reduce methane emissions is to burn it and generate electricity for Bitcoin mining. It gives a direct incentive to try to contain all methane. There's an estimate that all methane that is currently flared or released would generate enough electricity to run the whole Bitcoin network 10 times over. Bitcoin mining is suitable for this, because no costly infrastructure is needed for transporting the methane (which would happen anyway if it was economical). Bitcoin miners can be located in remote areas near the oil fields.

See https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation

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But isn't the challenge actually capturing, storing, and transporting the methane? At a minimum, you'll need the first 2 even if you colocate your generator and mining rig near the methane source. I guess I would be skeptical that this is cost effective vs. other cheap electricity sources.

Most of it is already captured and burned, without using it to generate electricity. It's called flaring. And if they can get money from it, it should make sense to try to capture more.

So instead of methane that will stay ~10 year (GWP of 2.8-3.4) in the atmosphere, you release C02 (GWP of 1) that will stay ~10k year. So short term (for ~10year) you reduce warming by ~3.5, if your look long term (10k years) you increase warming by 285x by doing that.

CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O

Not sure I will call that a win for the climate. (and this energy could be put to better use than burning it on crypto)

GWP already takes into account half life. This has been thoroughly explored. Leaked methane is 11x worse than the co2 formed by burning it when half life is taken into account.

Also, our best estimate is that the single half-life for excess CO2 lies within the range of 19 to 49 years, with a reasonable average being 31 years.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

I didn't take that into account, thanks

I've been under the impression that methane is way worse for climate than carbon dioxide. And that's why most of the methane is usually flared, but maybe there are other reasons.

There's a company called Crusoe Energy [0] who develops this, and they use the energy for other computational tasks as well. However, bitcoin mining is the most straightforward and scalable way to convert energy into money.

[0] https://www.crusoeenergy.com

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