Division · In development
Mining the energy nobody else can use.
Bitcoin mining is the only large industrial load that can be built at the wellhead, run on gas that would otherwise be burned into the sky, and switched off in seconds when the grid needs the power back. That makes it an energy business before it is anything else — which is why it sits inside an oil and minerals company rather than beside it.
The problem
167 billion cubic metres of gas were flared in 2025
When an oil well produces associated gas somewhere with no pipeline, the operator burns it. The World Bank’s flaring tracker put the 2025 figure at 167 bcm, up from 151 bcm the year before. That is energy with a negative value: it costs money to dispose of, it earns nothing, and it releases methane and CO₂ for no output at all.
The gas is not worthless. It is stranded — worth nothing there, because moving it costs more than it fetches. A mining container trucked to the pad turns that same gas into revenue without a metre of pipeline.
Three kinds of stranded energy
Where the power actually comes from
| Source | What it is | Why mining fits |
|---|---|---|
| Flared associated gas | Gas produced alongside oil at remote wellheads with no pipeline access | Generators and containers ship to the pad. Enclosed engines combust methane far more completely than an open flare — reported reductions of up to 63% in CO₂e versus flaring |
| Curtailed renewables | Wind and solar the grid cannot absorb, switched off and paid nothing | An interruptible load co-located with generation buys power that would otherwise be spilled |
| Grid flexibility | Capacity that must exist for peak demand and sits idle the rest of the year | Miners register as controllable load and are dispatched down in seconds when the system tightens |
The third is the one people underestimate. In August 2023 a single Texas miner was paid $31.7 million in one month — $24.2m in curtailment credits plus $7.4m from ERCOT’s demand response programme — to stop consuming during a heat wave. Being switchable was worth more that month than the bitcoin would have been.
The honest case against
What critics say, and what is fair in it
We would rather state this ourselves than have you find it elsewhere.
- The subsidy question. US lawmakers have opened investigations into whether demand-response payments to miners amount to ordinary ratepayers subsidising an industry with outsized electricity demand. That is a legitimate argument about who pays for grid capacity, and it is unresolved.
- It is still consumption. Flare-gas mining reduces emissions relative to flaring. It does not make mining carbon-free, and a project sited on ordinary grid power with no stranded-energy story is simply a large load.
- The flexibility is not guaranteed. As miners convert sites to AI and high-performance computing — which cannot be switched off the way mining can — the grid loses exactly the emergency brake that justified the arrangement. A site’s value as flexible load lasts only as long as it stays flexible.
- Price exposure is real. Revenue is denominated in an asset that moves violently, against a cost base that does not.
Where we stand
What this division is, and what it is not
What it is: an infrastructure business. Siting compute at energy assets whose output has no better buyer, and earning the spread between what that energy costs on site and what it is worth once converted.
What it is not: an investment programme. We do not sell hashrate contracts, cloud mining agreements, or participation in mining returns. Nothing on this site is an offer of participation in a mining venture, and nothing here is investment advice. Those products are the most heavily enforced corner of this industry and we will not be in it.
The same standard runs through every division: emeralds disclose their oil treatment before you buy, and gold will ship with its refiner, assay and origin named. Here it means saying plainly what the energy is and where it came from.
Status
In development
This division is not open. There is nothing to buy and no offer being made. The page exists so the thesis is on the record before the first site is built.
Related: the minerals division · talk to us · 888-296-4870