In January of 2021, Energy Giant ExxonMobil started a pilot program to test the efficacy of using excess natural gas

that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere as an accidental byproduct of oil well pumping

to power mobile generators, which would in turn power Bitcoin mining servers on site.

Natural gas tends to aggregate in the same underground pockets

that contain oil and is often burnt, which is what causes those gas flares atop many such

oil wells, or in some cases it's just allowed to seep into the environment. Since natural gas is

mostly methane, that's very not good for the environment.

Methane is more than 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.

And though it's shorter-lived in the atmosphere, it causes a lot more on-the-ground heating compared to other greenhouse gases.

And its concentration in the atmosphere has ballooned over the past two centuries as oil exploration

has resulted in a lot of these gas pockets being released into the air, and the pumping of natural

gas through leaky pipelines has added to that overall atmospheric contribution. The idea here,

then, is that since oil wells are producing excess natural gas anyway,

and natural gas is an energy source, why not hook up generators at these oil pumping sites,

so something productive can be done with that gas,

rather than just burning it off with no gain,

or allowing it to seep into the atmosphere and cause a whole lot of harm.

So this concept comes with two theoretical benefits, the first being that when gas is burned, it releases CO2 and water vapor into the air,

which isn't ideal, as CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but it's less bad in many ways than releasing straight-up methane because of that

aforementioned warmth-trapping potency. The second is that you can potentially earn some serious

money if you use that excess essentially free after initial infrastructure costs are paid,

energy in a prudent way. And the solution they came up with, or rather the solution that was

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