Iran’s potential in extracting cryptocurrency from flare gas

According to the exclusive report of Energy Press, companies across the United States, using waste gases from fossil fuel production activities to extract power, have launched cryptocurrency mining activities alongside existing oil and gas bases. But this is becoming more and more difficult as the government seeks to go green and some states impose strict regulations on digital currencies.
Now, many digital currency companies are looking to set up similar activities in Argentina and strengthen the country’s weak currency. For example, Giga Energy Solutions is looking to develop cryptocurrency mining activities in new markets. Argentina’s Mendoza province is home to the world’s second-largest shale gas deposit, Vaca Muertara, which could provide cryptocurrency miners with large amounts of wasted energy. Giga actively participates in reducing global methane emissions by collecting flare gas to power data centers in energy-intensive computing.
The impact of cryptocurrency mining on the energy sector
Many people around the world know Bitcoin only as a virtual digital currency, but few people associate digital currencies with the issue of energy demand. It should be noted that digital currencies such as Bitcoin do not have a central bank to issue and manage them, so there are problems in terms of lack of communication with central banks. In addition, digital currencies suffer from other crises as they are vulnerable and insecure to price fluctuations and are almost vulnerable to cyber-attacks, fraud, deception, money laundering and tax transactions.
Also, digital currencies such as Bitcoin represent problems in the field of electricity. In fact, cryptocurrency mining puts a lot of pressure on power grids and alone represents a huge problem, the power consumption of which is still very vague.
Therefore, most countries in the world, with the exception of two countries, still deal with digital currencies with extreme caution and between prohibition and restriction. El Salvador is the first country to recognize it as an official currency for payment alongside the dollar in September 2021. Then the Central African Republic applied the same policy in April 2022. But the recognition of these two countries has drawn widespread criticism, not only from the perspective of financial and banking risks, but also because the Internet capabilities in these two poor countries are weak. For example, the percentage of people who can connect to the Internet in Central Africa does not exceed 4%, while the operation of encryption and mining of digital currencies requires a high-power Internet connection and very strong power grids.
Also, Venezuela was the first country to introduce a digital currency called the Petro, which aimed to facilitate financial transactions for citizens instead of carrying large amounts of paper currency. It should be noted that the national currency of Venezuela, the Bolivar, collapsed due to US sanctions. At the time, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that the official digital currency would be backed by oil reserves to encourage citizens to use it. Of course, the US Treasury announced its opposition to it, because this currency affects Washington’s sanctions. Therefore, the mining of digital currencies can probably have political goals as well.
But the main challenge related to digital currencies is in the field of electricity and the environment, because the calculation of electricity consumption in this process is still not accurate and major countries are trying to create methods to calculate the electricity consumption in the process of mining digital currencies. Therefore, the Bitcoin mining operation consumes huge amounts of electricity. The UK’s Cambridge University – the creator of the first systematic index to calculate Bitcoin’s electricity consumption – estimates that global cryptocurrency mining will consume between 67 and 240 terawatt hours of electricity in 2023.
As you can see, the average electricity consumption index in cryptocurrency mining is very variable, and this shows the lack of rational calculations about the consumption volume, because the average consumption is about 120 terawatt hours and is between 0.2 and 0.9% of the total world demand. which is equivalent to the consumption of a country like Greece or Australia.