Landfill Gas Bitcoin Mining Trash Money – Bitcoin Magazine
Daniel Batten is a climate technology investor, author, analyst and environmental campaigner who previously founded and led his own technology company.
Why a climate engineering investor got excited about gases from garbage
Since 2013, climate technology has grown at a similarly astonishing pace as bitcoin itself: up 210% in the past year, and up 20,933% since 2013. In fact, climate technology now represents 14 cents of every venture capital dollar invested.
Now the two worlds are merging as Bitcoin mining emerges not only as the way the world’s future financial system is secured, but also as one of the world’s most important climate technology proposals. In terms of the ability to tackle our most pressing emissions problems on a large scale today, it’s amazing the best positioned climate technology solution.
A little background: Climate technology is the fastest growing area of venture capital for a reason. In the technology sector, you are commercially rewarded for solving the biggest pain points. The proliferation of climate technology suggests that, collectively, humanity may have finally woken up to the fact that our real problems are not a lack of retina screens, but a lack of a clear path to a safe climate.
Climate technology companies are somewhat similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: some are focused on the most urgent, urgent problems (like “food, water, and shelter”) in Maslow’s hierarchy. Others are more about the nuances higher up the pyramid.
When I explain Maslow’s Hierarchy to people, I often say “If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, self-actualization is unlikely to be your highest priority.”
About a year ago I realized that unless we have sorted out the “survival technology”, the higher layers of climate technology will be too late to help us.
Based on the fact that a technology ready today has a more immediate effect than one ready in a decade, and the fact that methane emissions are 84 times stronger than carbon dioxide emissions, we can get a sense of what Maslow’s pyramid looks like for climate technology.
Layer 4 climate technology: local emissions impact; a project to clean up local rivers.
Layer 3 climate technology: able to reduce carbon emissions on a large scale globally.
Layer 2 climate technology: able to reduce methane emissions on a large scale globally.
Create 1 climate technology: technologies that reduce methane emissions on a large scale globally and are ready today.
Most investors cannot be trusted to invest in the most important areas of climate technology.
For example, the PwC State of ClimateTech 2021 report found that of the 15 technology areas analysed, the top five, representing over 80% of future emissions reduction potential by 2050, received only 25% of recent investment in climate technology.
The report itself didn’t mention methane, but since UNEP’s statement that “cutting methane is the strongest lever we have to slow climate change over the next 25 years,” I’d be surprised if it isn’t a new focus area in 2022.
So, to put things simply: To counteract climate change, we have to work with all four layers at the same time.
Examples of Tier 3 companies include two very promising companies we recently invested in: Hot Lime Labs, which is decarbonizing the world’s greenhouses, and Zincovery, which is decarbonizing the world’s zinc recycling process.
Examples of Layer 2 companies include BlueMethane which has a promising technology that could one day remove 1 billion tons of methane from the world’s hydroelectric dams, rice paddies and wastewater. Another example is Cetogenix, which can improve the efficiency of methane extraction.
All four of these examples can have a significant global impact on emissions. Likewise, all four will require a few more years to achieve the scale necessary to realize their potential impact.
Just like Maslow’s hierarchy – unless we can use technologies that are ready today to reduce methane emissions on a large scale globally: the sobering reality is that these other promising technologies will be ready too late, because we have already tipped over 1.5° C at the global level. heating.
About a year ago I realized that all the projects we were investing in were Layer 3 technologies. We did nothing to reduce methane emissions, which was a more immediate problem. Second, we did nothing to invest in technologies that were ready to work at scale today.
The more I researched methane emissions, the more I realized that we don’t have time to wait for technologies that are ready to scale in eight years. We also need to get started with technologies that are ready today; these are our Layer 1 projects, or what I call “survival-tech.”
Our biggest methane emitters are animal agriculture, oil and gas reserves and landfills. I believe that the best way to reduce animal agriculture involves behavioral change in our eating habits – less meat and dairy in our diet. No fancy technology needed there. However, the other two cannot be tackled by behavioral change. Landfills created in the 1970s, for example, are still emitting methane today, and will continue to do so for years to come regardless of our current behavior.
Of the 300+ climate technology ideas I’ve seen in the last decade, the best Tier 1 climate technology I’ve seen is also the most low-tech: Capturing methane and using it to generate electricity, then using that electricity for location-agnostic customers who don’t need expensive gas pipelines or pylons to deliver that electricity to the doorstep. For most of these dumps, Bitcoin mining was the only such location-agnostic customer that made economic sense.
It’s a very simple, crude and devastatingly effective way to solve our most pressing emissions problems.
The added benefit of landfills is that you won’t be disturbed by people criticizing you for working with oil and gas companies. All profits go to municipalities, the community. So it ticks the environmental and social boxes right away.
The uninformed will still respond that “we should use that methane to fuel something more useful,” a statement that conveys both “I haven’t considered how useful Bitcoin is to the two-thirds of people who live under autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes without solid economic systems’, and ‘I haven’t looked at the viability of alternative uses of that energy’ at the same time.
The reality is that unless your landfill is in a very large urban center, there is no economic way to use the gas produced: gas pipelines can cost ~$5 million per mile to build, and creating a power station only makes sense on a large scale. For three-quarters of the world’s landfills, the unique location-agnostic feature of Bitcoin mobile mining devices provides a solution to two-thirds of our world’s most pressing Tier 1 problem (landfill and oil field emissions).
It can be scaled quickly, and it turns a liability – the costs of installing and maintaining flare stacks – into a resource for the municipal landfill, and thus the whole community.
Currently, Vespene is leading the charge. Because of the times we live in, it is no exaggeration to say that this makes them one of the most important Layer 1 climate technology companies in the world, and therefore one of the world’s most important companies of our time.
This is a guest post by Daniel Batten. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
