In the fall of 2021, a coal plant, just north of the Crow Reservation, near Hardin, Montana started burning coal.

This was strange because just a few years before, the plant was as good as dead, until suddenly it came back to life.

We were watching the plant slowly die.

It just wasn't operating very much.

They were looking desperately for any buyers and the state to bail them out.

Nobody was willing to do so.

So we thought the plant was really going to go away very soon.

And then crypto happened. And with the, you know, introduction of the use

of crypto at the plant, its operations have been nearly full bore over the course of the last year.

It's just shocking to see so much climate pollution going into the air suddenly from a plant that was about to go by the wayside.

That's Anne Hedges, the Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs at Montana Environmental Information Center, or M-EIC.

After working to shut down this plant for more than 15 years, she found herself losing ground.

It felt like one day we woke up and started noticing that the plant was operating an awful lot.

And somebody said, have you seen Marathon Digital Holdings website?

And so we looked and that's when we found out what had happened and that it had been made

available to this crypto operator who was purchasing what are known as miners in huge quantities.

It's dramatic by the numbers.

If you look in 2020, the plant operated for 48 days. If you look in

2021, the plant operated for 323 days. That's a giant increase. So I went out there last fall just to have a

look. And what you see out there is the coal plant operating, lots of steam and

pollution coming out of the stack. But in the back end, you see this really big building.

That didn't used to be there. That's where they're putting the miners. And that's where they're operating this crypto operation.

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