Methane Mining & ASIC Efficiency Economics | Hashpower Academy

Video Transcript:

Hello there and welcome to the HashPower Academy. My name is Jacob Scandalan. I’m the lead educator here at the academy and this is your place to learn anything and everything to do with Bitcoin from a fundamentals first perspective. I have a question for you. What do you think in the setup of a mining operation is the most expensive part? Is it A the energy or B the mining hardware? Take your pick. The answer is B, the mining hardware. And this is because well for the significant majority of miners they are buying their power on electrical grids. And so the majority of their cost is also the mining machines which can represent 60 70 80 even 90% of their upfront costs for an operation. It can go into multiple millions of dollars per megawatt depending on how efficient the machine that they purchase. And so you’ve got to understand that miners are making so many different decisions on the type of machine, how efficient it is, the cooling system, whether it’s air cooled, immersion or hydro sort of solutions, and the location of those machines, the uptime, the access to repairs. There’s so many different parts that you can learn about. But today’s topic is going to look at methane mining, which changes up those economics in an interesting way. What if instead of buying your power on a grid, you’re actually producing your own power. And so you have a lot more cost in the capex, the setup cost side of things. And so the economics of which mining machine you choose to purchase will actually change because everything from the energy producers to the middle of the city the energy consumers and that price of energy gradually well not in England but gradually getting more expensive uh the further away from production you are and the closer you are to consumption that is a natural phenomena. And so here’s the thing what type of mining machine do methane miners use? oil and gas sites in the middle of nowhere with methane leaking out of drill sites and they have to capture it and burn it. That’s flaring. Or they have this this new opportunity to monetize that energy directly on site by capturing the energy, the methane. uh cleaning it a bit because there can be some impurities that will cause more problems in the generators than than a lot of cleaning and also yeah running that that generator producing electricity to produce uh hash rate to produce Bitcoin blocks to flow that digital energy money into your digital wallet. Now if you are interested in these sorts of things then I recommend you take a look at the hash power academy. We learn about everything and anything to do with Bitcoin from a fundamentals first perspective. And now, interestingly enough, methane mining is that absolute vertical integration, not even from watts to SATs, but also from the natural gas coming out of the ground. So, it’s another commodity layer underneath as well in part of the equation. But the key takeaway for this video is looking at that cost per megawatt with three different types of machine. Now, here’s the thing. On the financial side, a more efficient machine will produce a greater amount of Bitcoin per kilowatt hour because these are the maths side of things on the financial outputs of Bitcoin mining, but we need to look at the energy inputs as well. And that’s going to be the focus of this video. And so here’s the thing. If you have a setup cost of say 500k um of infrastructure set up of deploying a container, a generator and that system of converting methane into electricity. Well, let’s just say 500,000 per megawatt. And then you’ve also including that price of machine on top. Now, here’s the thing. If you are producing your own power, your energy cost is actually about one to three cent one to three cent per kilowatt hour but but it’s in the middle of nowhere so you need some form of solution that can consume the power directly on site and connect to the internet and that’s where Bitcoin mining comes in and why do we burn it well because methane in of itself when it releases up to the atmosphere I think its warming effect is 80 times the strength of CO2 in a 20-year period it breaks down over time so the inevitable solution is to burn it because it’s not economical to capture it and send it off somewhere. There’s there’s more cost in that than its economic value. And so here’s the thing. Bitcoin miners can come and locate onsite, work with or buy or partner with oil and gas producers and monetize that power and also collect carbon credits. So there’s all these other economics that come into play. But yes, let’s look at the economics of the cost per megawatt of three different types of machines. So a megawatt is a million watts. So let’s divide it down. A million watts with a machine that’s producing at 30 watts per terahash, how much hash rate per megawatt are we going to have? Now, this isn’t a standard metric, but it will just help you gain an understanding of how much hash rate you’re going to earn per megawatt, which also helps you understand how much Bitcoin per megawatt you’ll earn as well. 33.3 well 33,000 33 33. So with this efficiency of mining hardware, you’re going to produce 33,000 terraash of compute, which multiply by this amount of Bitcoin that you’re going to earn per terahash per day. You can multiply that out and you would get well $65 per megawatt. I get that right. Now, uh, on the 20 watts per terahash machine efficiency, you’ve got, uh, a million divided by 20, which is 50,000. So, you’re earning 50,000. You’re producing 50,000 terraash per megawatt. And there’s a point to this. Uh, with the 10 watt, we can just double that 100,000. So, you’re producing a 100,000 terraash per megawatt. That means that you can with these machines, you would have a greater quantity of machines with that same megawatt uh site. Now, here’s the thing. Different machines have different prices based on their different efficiencies. So if we uh if we multiply the uh $4 per terahash upfront capex multiplied by the amount of hash rate we need to obviously consume one megawatt. Well that is $133,000.33.3 okay $133,000 per megawatt with the least efficient hardware. And this is the next one. 700,000 700k and uh the most efficient machines producing the most amount of hash rate per megawatt earning the most amount per kilowatt hour. It sounds like the right decision, but here’s the thing. It’s 2 and a half 2.4 2.4 million $2.4 $4 million to purchase enough machines to be consuming one megawatt. And here’s the thing, mining is an opportunity to accumulate a greater quantity of Bitcoin over time. So, if you buy uh machines at $4 a terraash, you want that one terraash of compute, you can scale it to the machine amount. You want to produce $4 worth of Bitcoin at this rate. And this means effectively if you’re just looking revenue without adding and without removing the electrical cost side of things um trying to reach $4 from earning four call it 5 cent per day. Uh that’s a lot easier than uh having the most efficient machine uh that’s costing $24 a terraash and that obviously extrapolates out to the amount of cost per megawatt. So when you combine your setup cost of your generator, container, networking, infrastructure as well, all those pieces all as a flow of uh methane producing electricity to produce compute to produce Bitcoin, you got your $500,000 setup cost combined with one of these three. And so what happens is uh producers of energy will typically buy the more old uh less efficient mining hardware because they just have less capex and also they have extremely cheap power or wasted power in a lot of cases. And so the economics make sense where they’ll make a lot more money by buying the more inefficient machines. And there’s a second reason to this. This requires a high uptime to to to truly achieve that break even point. You’ve got the combination of also the uptime of the machine. And here’s the thing, in a environment such as the middle of nowhere oil and gas field, there might be times where machines go down, get dusty, and all those sorts of things. And so you need a solution to or sorry, you need to choose a machine that has a shorter payback period because machines will just go down. they will get broken. Whatever the reasons are, that’s just the dayto-day of mining. You can keep them really clean, change the filters all the time to prevent as much thermal damage as possible, but you inevitably are going to deal with the the forces of the real world. And so you don’t want to be putting the latest, most efficient mining machines worth millions of dollars in volume on a site that doesn’t have great uptime, has great economics, but those economics aren’t your concern because you’ve got cheap power. Now, I think this will also translate across to those eyeing up the idea of combining say um a solar battery setup, say at home or your off-grid community in the middle of the jungle, whatever it is. If you have access to producing power, the economics of buying the most efficient machines don’t make sense unless you have extremely high uptime. That is the 95 to 100% which call it the 95 to even 99 percentile. You get the gist. Now the other side of that is you also get carbon credits. So you’ve got this yield of earning carbon credits which is based on your energy consumption. you get you combine it with the cheap machines to produce a good amount of Bitcoin even when deducting your your energy costs or your staffing costs which could be say 2 cent per kilowatt hour um when comparing it to the electrical side of things. And this is the key variable here. The network determines what we are paid for exporting that energy onto the internet. And so having the carbon credits aspect, but also this lack of control of our true amount of income per terahash per day, it means that you want to reduce your upfront cost as much as possible. I think I’ll leave it there. Um, if you want a video looking at say the economics of solar battery um, as an upfront setup cost combined with a cheap machine or a really efficient latest generation machine. Um, that’ll be another video, I believe. Um, and also if there’s any of you out there just putting out to the universe that have oil and gas fields, um, and you want to explore methane mining as a potential solution for you and you want some crazy Brit to come and do some content and storytelling and even potential business, you just let me know. And uh, yeah, I’ll leave it from there. Hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.