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.

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.

When selecting new sites, Crusoe makes sure it’s not creating new demand for gas. Typically, the startup takes on projects where gas is a byproduct of an existing oil well operation.

[Bitcoin] has two key attributes that can help transition the world to cleaner energy:

Distributed operation: Bitcoin mining is highly distributed. [...]

Interruptible workload: Mining operations can turn on and off at a moment's notice, which helps to stabilize energy grids. [...]

“Few industrial use cases can use lots of energy like Bitcoin and shut down in 5 minutes. You can’t do that for an aluminum smelting plant.”

Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining operations could also conceivably subsidize the build-out of renewable energy sources.