An article in the Telegraph this week claims that a “giant Yorkshire gas field” is to be exploited “to mine Bitcoin instead of boosting British energy”. At issue is a stake that energy company Reabold Resources has in the West Newton gas field in northwest England. Reabold plans to extract the gas in a process similar to fracking but at much lower pressures than the Guardian would call “controversial”. The Telegraph, however, is not against generating a bit of controversy itself. It highlights the seemingly frivolous use of electricity from gas to make cryptocurrency, rather than, as the article suggests, to “meet more than a tenth of the UK’s annual need”. Nonetheless, confected ‘controversies’ aside, the story does highlight some important issues.

The creation of the controversy that produced the headline is owed to a comment by co-Chief Executive of Reabold Resources, Sachin Oza, who is quoted as saying: “A private gas supply means we can run a data centre to mine Bitcoin relatively cheaply.” This gives the cue to the idea that the entire gas field will support a cryptocurrency operation. “This would help fund the further development of the gas field and prove the concept – meaning it could become the precursor to a far larger data centre,” adds Oza. Yes – “could”. There might be more data centres. Or, “alternatively, we could also sell the gas to one of the adjacent industrial centres or connect it to the national gas grid”, explained Oza’s colleague Stephen Williams.

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