Study: Nearly a quarter of Russia’s mining capacity runs on associated gas

Analysts at Vygon Consulting have calculated that 10 mining enterprises using the energy of oil fields consume 85 MW, which is 23% of the power of mining farms in Russia.

In July, the revenue of mining farms using the energy of associated petroleum gas reached 400 million rubles at an average BTC exchange rate of $20,000.

Vygon Consulting experts predict that from July 2022 to July 2023, at the same rate, annual revenue will amount to 4.8 billion rubles. Analysts calculated that mining centers with new devices using free energy of associated petroleum gas pay off only at a BTC rate of $21,600. If you mine on equipment that has already paid for itself, then at a price of this gas of 1,000 rubles per thousand cubic meters, the cost of mining will be $12 000 for BTC.

Back in 2019, Crusoe Energy Systems announced the development of mobile modular data centers that can be used to mine cryptocurrencies by consuming excess gas left over from oil production. In Russia, the extraction of cryptocurrency on the associated petroleum gas began to be carried out by Gazprom Neft three years ago. Until 2020, these were pilot projects. Now this practice of mining cryptocurrencies is already used in three regions of the Russian Federation. In 2021, oil companies submitted to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Central Bank of the Russian Federation a project involving the extraction of cryptocurrencies in oil fields using associated gas. In 2022, Gazpromneft and the mining company BitRiver entered into a partnership to mine cryptocurrencies using such fuel.