Exxon Plans Using Excess Natural Gas To Mine Bitcoin

Oil and gas giant ExxonMobil Corp is testing a program to use excess natural gas for mining Bitcoin rather than burning it. The company may take its pilot to multiple countries after using 18 million cubic feet of gas per month for this purpose.

According to a Bloomberg report, the pilot is being conducted in collaboration with Crusoe Energy Systems.

The company is planning to expand operations to Alaska, Nigeria, Argentina, Guyana, and Germany. The process involves utilizing natural gas from a Bakken shale basin oil well for the operation of on-site mobile generators. These mobile generators host Bitcoin mining servers.

"We continuously evaluate emerging technologies aimed at reducing flaring [burning off] volumes across our operations," Exxon spokeswoman Sarah Nordin told Bloomberg. However, she did not comment on the pilot project.

Proof-of-Work mining, the underlying concept of Bitcoin, has been under the radar for being environmentally unfriendly due to its large amount of power consumption as compared to other methods of blockchain validation, such as Proof-of-Stake.

A recent report has also shown that Bitcoin mining revenue rose 206% in 2021 despite many countries cracking down on crypto mining and China even banning it. The US has become the nation with the most Bitcoin miners.