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Oil and gas operators have embraced many innovations in the oil field over the years, and Bitcoin mining is a development that has the potential to add to the quiver of innovative technologies being used to decrease methane emissions from flaring. The development and use of Bitcoin as a currency is a fairly recent phenomenon, particularly as the value of a single Bitcoin has increased from cents early on to tens of thousands of dollars (reaching a high of over $60,000/Bitcoin in April 2021, although at the time of writing, the price is around $35,000/Bitcoin). As The Economist reported, "Bitcoin has gone from being an obsession of anarchists to a $1trn asset class that many fund managers insist belongs in any balanced portfolio." The Digital Currencies That Matter, The Economist, May 8-14, 2021, at 13.
What is a Bitcoin? I didn't know either (and I don't profess to be a cryptocurrency expert), but here is a basic explanation. Wikipedia explains that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, invented in 2008, which is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank and that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer network. Bitcoins are created through a process of "mining" using very sophisticated (and large) computers that solve extremely complex computational math problems. Euny Hong, How Does Bitcoin Mining Work, Investopedia (May 4, 2021). Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin as a reward for completing 1 megabyte "blocks" of verified transactions, which are added to the blockchain. As Hong explains, "[m]iners are getting paid for their work as auditors and verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions." Then, to get additional mining rewards (i.e., create new Bitcoin), you have to be the first miner to arrive at the right (or closest) answer to a numeric problem-which is to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a hash) that is less than or equal to the target hash. Because it's essentially guesswork (with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions), miners need a lot of computing power and use a graphics processing unit (GPU) or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) computer to run the calculations. Id.
As Bitcoin mining grows, the energy usage by the computers running the mining algorithms...