Today's Feature Story -- June 29, 2021

The link sent to me by a reader. I would have missed it. Great story. Pretty amazing. 

Link here.

By-line: Sidney, MT.

Archived.

A Bitcoin mine operating out of an old mill building near Missoula, for example, attracted criticism after county officials said it was using as much power as a third of the households in the county. Additionally, researchers at the University of Cambridge estimate that Bitcoin currently consumes nearly 94 terawatt-hours of power a year globally, more than the combined consumption of the 108 million people who live in the Philippines.

The server containers on the Kraken well site are owned by Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems, a venture-capital backed startup founded in 2018 that markets itself as a partner for oil companies looking for an economical way to cut back on their flaring. In eastern Montana, Crusoe buys otherwise stranded gas from Kraken, pipes it into the onsite-generators, and uses the resulting power to crack Bitcoin free from the ether.

Cully Cavness, Crusoe’s co-founder and president, said in an interview that the company also makes its server farms available to people who need other computationally intensive work performed, such as training artificial intelligence models or rendering computer animations. He said the company has donated computing power to Folding at Home, an organization that helps research on COVID-19 and other biochemistry topics by simulating the atomic interactions at play in protein molecules.

Bitcoin mining, however, is Crusoe’s main effort at the moment. The company, Cavness said, has a dedicated network engineering team that works out how to connect each well-pad server farm to the rest of the world, using satellite internet, microwave transmissions or, in some cases, custom-built fiber optic lines that can also bring broadband service to nearby rural customers.

The company isn’t the only ongoing effort to leverage well pad natural gas for Bitcoin mining in the U.S., but Caveness said Crusoe is the largest startup in the space. He said the company currently has about 40 data centers in operation, mostly on the Bakken in Montana and North Dakota, but is also operating in Colorado and Wyoming and plans to expand into other oil-producing areas.

“We’re growing it pretty quickly today. We’re looking to be at about 100 within months,” he said.

Caveness said he considers the company’s model an effective answer to the environmental concerns around cryptocurrency’s energy consumption, both because flares don’t necessarily burn all the methane present in well pad gas and because generating mining power off the gas offsets power usage that would otherwise have to come from somewhere else.