23-year-old Texans earned $4 million the previous year mining bitcoin
Key takeaways:
- Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh are drilling bitcoin off flare gas from oil drilling.
- Their firm, Giga, sets a shipping container full of thousands of bitcoin miners on an oil well, hindering the natural gas into generators, which convert the gas into electricity utilized to power the miners.
- According to a Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems study, the method relieves CO2-equivalent emissions by approximately 63% compared to continuous flaring.
$4million of profit for Texans from bitcoin mining:
When Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh were sophomores at Texas A&M University, they chose to get into mining bitcoin in the oil areas of East Texas. The year was 2019, and at the moment, the idea of oil and gas firms joining forces with bitcoin miners was deemed both avant-garde — and a significant taboo.
But Whitehead, an engineer hailing from a household with a lengthy history in oil and gas production, and Lohstroh, a finance major with a bitcoin addiction, ignored the doubters and dropped all the money they had made from their high school side gigs in lawn care and landscaping into Giga Energy Solutions. This firm mints bitcoin from left natural gas.
For years, oil and gas firms had struggled with the issue of what to do when they accidentally struck a natural gas formation while drilling for oil.
Whereas oil can readily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery needs a pipeline. If a drilling location is right next door to a channel, they chuck the gas in and take whatever money the customer on the other end is ready to spend that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers usually burn it off or flare it. That is why you will generally see flames rising from oil fields.
Outside the environmental importance of flare gas, drillers are also, in consequence, burning money. It was a significant issue to these two 23-year-old Aggie alums with an obvious answer.