A huge Yorkshire gas field is set to be used for Bitcoin mining instead of helping boost Britain’s energy supply. The Telegraph has more.
Reabold Resources has been awarded a licence to carry out “gentle” fracking in the West Newton field near Hull, which is estimated to contain up to eight billion cubic metres of gas.
That would be enough to meet more than a tenth of the UK’s annual needs and makes it one of the largest onshore fields discovered in Britain, with the potential to bolster energy security for years to come.
However, Reabold instead plans to construct a small gas-fired power station on the site and use the energy produced to “mine” Bitcoin.
“A private gas supply means we can run a data centre to mine Bitcoin relatively cheaply,” said Sachin Oza, the co-Chief Executive of Reabold Resources, which has just been given a drilling licence by the Environment Agency.
“Initially, this would help fund the further development of the gas field and prove the concept – meaning it could become the precursor to a far larger data centre.”
The scheme has angered environmental groups opposed to new gas fields and fracking in particular.
It is also likely to raise questions in the Government after the war in Iran prompted fears of fuel shortages in the UK.
Bitcoin mining is one of the most energy-intensive of all digital activities. A power station would need to burn around 150,000 cubic metres of gas – the volume of 50 Olympic swimming pools – to generate the electricity needed to create one Bitcoin.
Reabold’s West Newton gas field is so large that it could theoretically power the creation of 50,000 Bitcoins.
Alternatively, it could help provide gas for the whole of the UK. The drilling site lies within a couple of miles of National Gas’s transmission pipeline and so could easily be connected. …
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, imposed a ban on full-scale fracking last year. The process involves injecting high-pressure water laden with chemicals into rock to create cracks through which gas can flow. …
Despite this, the rules still allow lower-pressure fracking of the kind planned at West Newton. …
The search for Bitcoin is becoming one of the most profitable and energy-intensive global activities, last year estimated to consume 160 terawatt hours of electricity. That’s about 50% of the UK’s entire annual consumption.
Worth reading in full.
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Pretty much sums up the UK. Let’s allow energy extraction, but only for something completely pointless and abstract, which doesn’t feed people or give them jobs. Meanwhile the serfs can make do with benefits, scarcer and scarcer energy, and a constant diet of bullshit.
The UK is basically an intensive people-farm, with no “animal rights”. As long as some big fish is making money…
Can anyone explain simply what “mining a Bitcoin” means? Whenever I have asked anyone who claims to know about bitcoins I have been left more ignorant than before.
Basically completing millions and millions of calculations, most of which go to keep the coin blockchain ledger up to date as transactions occur. You have to have some ‘work’ of value involved in creating (mining) the currency to give it real value, otherwise people could just create them from nothing. At the start the calculations involved were a massive order of magnitude simpler, therefore it took less calculations to mine it… over time the requirement is doubled, then again and again. There is a maximum number of 21m if memory serves…
Thanks for the reply, but I’m obviously missing a vital conceptual building block. I thought money was meant to stand for a tangible value, not just an entry on a pyramid scheme.
“150,000 cubic metres of gas – the volume of 50 Olympic swimming pools” is meaningless unless pressure and temperature are specified.
Why doesn’t Miliband advise them to use cheap solar and wind power for their computers. Set an example.
Because these are business people who know their arse from a hole in ground whereas Miliband is an ideolically ignorant moron. They know wind and solar are very expensive.
To say nothing of mining needing to operate consistently whilst wind and solar are very random.
It’s an interesting question – of all the likely compute use cases Bitcoin mining could actually be one that could ebb and flow with varying power input, as long as you had intelligent enough power systems to throttle back etc… it’s still not preferable due to the cost as others have said, and not maximising your hardware investment all the time, however it would be doable due to the distributed nature of bitcoin transactions…
It’s absolutely staggering that we are being pushed towards net zero and extortionate energy costs to “save the planet” and at the same time private gas fields are being licensed to provide cheap energy to mine bitcoin. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Does anyone know what happens when the BTC issue-limit is reached? If there’s no more mining, how does the Blockchain survive?
Reward for transactions.