Over the past few years, bitcoin miners have found novel ways to acquire cheap electricity—including buying their own power plants. Other miners have begun purchasing gas that otherw

The same can’t be said of Big Dog Energy’s operations, or of other off-grid mining operations at stranded gas wells. These are wells that have been opened and fracked but aren’t connecteise would have been flared off at oil wells in places like Texas and North Dakota to power on-site generators, using the electricity to mine bitcoin in server farms set up in shipping containers. At least in those cases, the gas would have been burned no matter what, so there are no additional greenhouse gas emissions.d to pipelines, so well owners have no way to bring the gas to market. Anyone who sets up a bitcoin mining operation at one of these stranded sites is burning fossil fuels that would have stayed in the ground, if not for bitcoin.

Miners who own gas wells can make more than twice as much money using their gas to mine bitcoin than they could selling it to the wholesale market.

There are over a thousand unconventional (that is, fracked) wells in Pennsylvania that have been drilled but never reported any gas, condensate, or oil production through 2021, according to FracTracker Alliance. It’s not hard to imagine the owners of those stranded assets bringing in generators and bitcoin miners to get the profits flowing.

In South Dakota, a bitcoin mining company called Highwire Energy purchased the mineral rights to seven natural gas wells that had been slated to be plugged.

It is difficult to assess the scale at which bitcoin mining is bringing stranded gas wells online, because these operations are, as Altenburg observed, relatively small and mobile.