The Pomp Podcast - #1225 Daniel Batten on Making Millions Turning Trash Into Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Daniel Batten is an ESG analyst, and the co-founder of CH4 Capital. In this conversation we talk about a wild idea, taking waste from landfills and turning it into energy, then mining bitcoin right th...ere on-site. Why would you want to do this? Not only can you mine bitcoin with cheap energy, there is also the potential to capture methane instead of leaking it out into the environment, and make bitcoin mining a net negative methane emission. ======================= Backed by world-class investors, including Google's AI Fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up. Range delivers a tech-first experience that provides fast, high-quality, transparent wealth management services making it simple to optimize and grow your wealth.With Range, you get comprehensive services like tax optimization, investment management, and estate planning with no hidden fees. That means no AUM fees.Get started today with code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at ⁠range.com/pomp⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Daniel Batten is an ESG analyst and the co-founder of CH4 Capital. In this conversation, we talk about a wild idea of taking waste from landfills, turning it into energy and then mining
Starting point is 00:00:42 Bitcoin right there on site. Why would you want to do this? Well, other than being able to mine Bitcoin with cheap energy, there's also the potential that you could capture methane instead of leaking it out into the environment and make Bitcoin mining a net negative methane emission. That would be absolutely incredible. It's not just a pipe dream though. Daniel and his team are working on exactly this idea and that's what we talk about today. Here is my conversation with Daniel Batten.
Starting point is 00:01:07 This episode is brought to you by Range. Are you day trading, a crypto enthusiast, or a tech worker? Or are you just an overall investing enthusiast? Listen up, you need Range. Backed by some of the world-class investors, including Google's AI fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up specifically for us.
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Starting point is 00:02:12 and now it's available to all of us. Use code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at range.com slash Pomp. Again, use code Pomp15 for 15% off at range.com slash Pomp. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.
Starting point is 00:02:49 This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Daniel here with me. Daniel, I thought a great place for us to start this conversation is this idea of reducing methane. Obviously, there is a ton of talk about climate change. There's a ton of talk about the science behind it,
Starting point is 00:03:06 who's causing the rise in temperature and all of these different kind of environmental issues. You're unique in that you are a ESG analyst. You're somebody who looks at these issues and wants to help solve them, but you also are a massive proponent of Bitcoin mining. Let's maybe just start with how did those two worlds intersect and why do you believe that Bitcoin mining can actually help to reduce methane and address some of these ESG concerns? Well, thanks, Bob. Great to be here. I was a climate tech investor or had been a climate tech investor for around four years now, so run two different funds. And there came a point when we asked ourselves the question, are we doing enough through our funds?
Starting point is 00:03:45 And the answer was no. We realised that we were only looking at carbon dioxide emissions. That's not our only emission, number one. Number two, we were funding ventures that were high risk, of course, so some of the technology might never see the light of day. And the other issue was that even if they did see the light of day, it was going to take until well after 2030 before they achieved scale. So we started to ask ourselves the question,
Starting point is 00:04:07 what can we do that's mitigating not only carbon dioxide but methane, methane, which the United Nations is telling us is now our number one lever to slow down climate change. Number two, what can we do that's actually low risk? So it's using technology that exists today to find climate solutions. And number three, it's going to be very fast acting. So it's something that can happen before 2030 and using existing technology and mitigating methane.
Starting point is 00:04:36 research. And long story short, we came to the surprising conclusion that using Bitcoin mobile mining units on landfills was going to make a whole stack of difference to mitigating our methane emissions. So when you think about mitigating, that I think, is something people say, that sounds good, right? Like, I think that we should mitigate the methane emissions. And let's go do that. But you will also think that Bitcoin potentially
Starting point is 00:05:04 become negative emissions which is this really unique idea describe how we get from something where people are concerned about bitcoin mining and they think it's bad for the environment to potentially being one of the only industries in the world that could claim negative emissions yeah it's fascinating so the first thing to understand is why methane and how that can make a contribution substantially so for a long time now organizations like the environmental defense Fund, the EPA has said that the best way to reduce landfill emissions is by basically doing some sort of power generation with them. So rather than what happens at the moment is methane is 84 times more warming to the earth over a 20 year period than carbon dioxide. So that's why the United Nations
Starting point is 00:05:51 has said it's our strongest lever to reduce climate change over the next 20 years. So the problem is uh and just to give a context for landfills so there's three big providers of methane to the atmosphere that come from human sources so there's agriculture oil and gas industry and landfills and until recently we've thought that landfills was our number three issue uh well that was until last year when the nasa jet propulsion unit from pasadena gave us the results of six years of satellite footage, and they showed that our landfill emissions were underestimated by a factor of 2.27. So what that means is landfills is actually our number two source of methane emissions. And then if you factor in the World Bank has said that they're
Starting point is 00:06:37 increasing at a rate of around 1.4% per year, that's faster than agriculture. They're actually going to overtake agriculture and be our main methane source by 2032. What is happening inside these landfills right in terms of like what is driving it are we just taking trash and we're throwing it in there and nature's kind of taking over or is there some process that we're running what's happening so what's happening is so when organic waste decays it can decay in two ways if it decays in the presence of air then it produces carbon dioxide but if it produces if it decays without the presence of air so in a landfill when it gets very compacted there's no air available then it decays anaerobically which basically just means without air and that
Starting point is 00:07:21 produces methane and that's particularly bad remember because methane's 84 times as warming so what's happening in these landfills is you get huge amounts of inorganic and organic waste piling together getting compressed there's no oxygen available you get massive builds up of methane and that methane for the most part at the moment around the world is simply getting vented into our atmosphere and it's causing climate havoc how do we get to negative emissions if landfills are growing at this 1.4 percent and it's the second largest uh kind of culprit there's a couple of ways you can do it the first way is what people have started doing is just simply burning it so you put up what's called a flare stack you've probably seen them on
Starting point is 00:08:05 oil fills oil fields so they exist on landfills as well so on a landfill you put up a flare stack it just burns the methane there's a couple of problems there number one it doesn't burn it completely so it only destroys around 90 percent of methane the other 10 still goes into the air but the bigger issue is these things are expensive to point up and you're actually turning a source of power and you're just wasting it so a much better option is to use that and to generate power with it now what happens there is typically when you produce power so what that means is you You get a generator on site, you purify that landfill gas, turn it into biomethane, you use that biomethane to go into a generator which converts into electricity. Now the problem is, well, what do you do with that electricity?
Starting point is 00:08:49 Now, in some cases, you can sell it back to the grid. But in the US, for example, in 70% of the cases, it's just not economically feasible to sell it to the grid because the grid cannot take it. It would need a major substation upgrade. and so these landfill owners going well I want to destroy my methane I would like to get some money for it if someone will pay me for the electricity that I can generate using that methane but my only options are I can't sell it to the grid so I've got to get someone who wants to set up shop on site on a landfill I don't know about you Pomp but I don't want to set up my business on a landfill I don't know a whole lot of people who do and so one of the few people in
Starting point is 00:09:26 world who's actually prepared to go that extra distance and actually set up a business on a landfill is a bitcoin mobile mining unit so it's a very unique sort of business that is able to take itself anywhere and utilize the stranded energy and because that bitcoin miners their major cost is electricity they care about this more than anyone else the electricity is only 5% of your operational costs, you're not going to bother. But if it's 60% plus, as it is for Bitcoin miners, you'll go to the edge of the earth to try and hunt out cheap sources of electricity. And this is why these Bitcoin miners have made ideal users of that landfill gas methane turn into power to create electricity. So it's a really natural synergy.
Starting point is 00:10:12 How much energy or electricity could be generated from a landfill? Obviously, different sizes of landfills get you different numbers. But on average, Are we talking about being able to run two or three Bitcoin miners? Are we talking about being able to run a warehouse full of 10,000? Like, give us some numbers or some way to think about this. So an average landfill will be able to generate up to eight megawatts. So one megawatt, you're probably talking around about 300 Bitcoin mobile miners. So you multiply that by eight.
Starting point is 00:10:42 So what's that? Two and a half thousand Bitcoin miners operating. So they're starting to get like a mid-sized Bitcoin mining operation. Coming back to that question just around the carbon negative emissions, why it's carbon negative is basically now what you're doing is you're not using solar or wind, which has zero generation-based emissions, but you're using actually a source of pollution as your source of energy, which is astounding. There's very few industries in the world that can do that.
Starting point is 00:11:12 You're using methane, which would have gone into the atmosphere, and you're stopping it from going into the atmosphere. So a real cute distinction. If you're taking it from a natural gas pipeline, then that would have stayed otherwise in the ground. So that's not carbon negative. But if you're taking methane that would have gone into the air, you're stopping it from going into the air
Starting point is 00:11:31 and you're using it to generate electricity, then that's actually emission negative. And how much do we need to do this to get to negative emissions? Is this like we hook up two or three landfills and we're good, we need to do it 100 on every continent like what's the size or kind of the scope of uh how big of an investment this would be and kind of how big of an infrastructure project are we talking here we're looking at 280 megawatts so what does that actually mean again if you think about an average landfill is eight megawatts so it's about 30 to 40 mid-sized landfills is enough to do it
Starting point is 00:12:09 depends a little bit on the landfill it depends on geographic area sometimes it may need to be a larger one but it's not a humongous amount of landfills it is absolutely feasible and the good thing is that if we look globally we have the potential like if you look at the maximum just available potential there's upwards of 15 gigawatts of energy that could come from landfill gas so this is actually a relatively small amount of the total available landfill gas power directed towards bitcoin mining and to put that in context so right now in the oil and gas industry there is upwards of 160 megawatts being used from what was previously fled natural gas from the oil and gas industry so it's not that much more than we're already doing in the oil and gas industry
Starting point is 00:13:00 we're simply doing it with landfills and there's a bit of an extra infrastructure to put in place the guest capturing collection systems when you see this opportunity there would be someone who would say let's go build a company let's raise money go build the infrastructure own 100 of it or as much as we could maybe use some debt and do it as a corporation you all seem to be taking a little bit of a different path where you're looking at it much more as from an investor seat raising funds to go and deploy and kind of fund other people who are doing this what are the pros and cons of doing it as a company versus as a fund manager well if you're going to do it as a company you really want to be a bitcoin mining specialist and you have to go deep down that
Starting point is 00:13:40 rabbit hole we are not bitcoin mining specialists we know a bit about bitcoin we know a bit about four things well i personally know a bit about four things so to do a fund like this you basically have to know a little bit about bitcoin mining economics you need to know about infrastructure finance you need to know about landfill gas power gen and you need to know about how carbon credits works on landfills as well so we've looked at these four different areas and we said okay that's actually quite a lot to understand and synthesize it's too much for any one person to really have deep domain expertise but if we build a team of specialists in these areas which we have done now we can actually start to move ahead as a fund and we can have more impact and for the last
Starting point is 00:14:22 four years i've worked out that when you're a fund manager you have the ability to deploy capital to multiple projects in parallel this is something that has a lot of personal appeal to me in terms of the amount of impact you can have so for me it was just all about how can we have more impact sooner now when you look at funding these um let's say that you get 30 or 40 landfills around the world how do you think about decentralization versus centralization we saw a bunch of miners leave china kind of unplug move elsewhere the u.s was the big winner texas i think now has 10 or more of all mining. The United States is somewhere around a third around the world. Do you think that this is more decentralization or could this actually lead to a higher concentration in
Starting point is 00:15:04 Bitcoin mining? Definitely going to be more decentralized because landfills by definition are decentralized and they're all around the world. And so what's the big factor about whether a site is a good candidate or not has nothing to do with its proximity to a major population center obviously you need a sufficient number of people there's a sufficient amount of waste but these things are all around the world and it has to do with factors which are very diverse such as how humid is it for example humidity is bad for bitcoin mining but it's really good for creating landfill gas and so geographically around the world you look at these different areas and it's not necessarily in the places you'd expect it's not always in the major population centers
Starting point is 00:15:55 because they may have already turned that landfill into a source of power generation and it may have been economically viable in los angeles for example 50 megawatts that's already selling power back to the grid so typically the major cities they've had a big enough landfill that it does make economic sense to sell power back to the grid it's normally the next level down the smaller cities where this has not occurred and so it's a lot of those mid-sized landfills that we're going for so i actually think it's going to lead to a lot more decentralization let's talk economics how much for one of these mid-sized landfills will it cost to get the methane into electricity build out the bitcoin mining facilities and be able to actually mine
Starting point is 00:16:37 bitcoin are we talking on the order of magnitude of a couple million dollars tens of millions hundreds of millions billions of dollars what does it look like yeah for a mid-sized landfill so around eight megawatts you're looking at 10 to 15 million dollars and so if you want to do that let's call it on 35 about 350 to 400 million dollars you think that uh we could basically do this in a decentralized fashion and turn for less than half a billion dollars bitcoin mining into a negative emissions industry which would then put it at the forefront of the esg conversation This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.
Starting point is 00:17:17 Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. That's correct. Now, when we look at other solutions to address climate change and kind of ESG concerns, there's a recent story that's come out around paint and the ability to put white paint on the ground.
Starting point is 00:17:54 If I read it correctly, they think that as simple as just like go paint half the Sahara Desert, which, again, put aside the logistics and approvals and people's willingness or appetite to go do something like that. But one of the main arguments is how inexpensive that would be to address some of this. I think that what I've read, and again, you are an expert, I am not on this. We are talking about trillions of dollars is the current estimation to address kind of climate change in general. I don't think you're saying Bitcoin mining with less than half a billion dollars could address all of climate change. But what you are saying is that it would lead to a negative emissions for this specific industry. and so not only would it negate or mitigate the current emissions it would actually make it this positive story are there any other kind of parallels you can draw to like half a billion
Starting point is 00:18:46 dollars or less investment and it has this massive impact or do you think that most of the esg industry is just kind of bloated and they throw out these huge numbers but like maybe people don't actually understand how much this is going to cost to do yeah we'll give some context so a couple of companies that i've invested in previously so the maximum that they could ever mitigate in terms of emissions one of them was 10 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent the other one was 20 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and it would take around 15 years and that was absolutely best case scenario that's global monopoly in 15 years which almost never happens in the tech industry so with using bitcoin mining we can mitigate four million tons in the first year
Starting point is 00:19:35 just with five landfills we can achieve that within two years what it with previous technology companies i was investing in would take 15 best case scenario so so definitely in terms of one of the markers of success for this fund we said we want to maximize the amount of emissions reduced per dollar invested so that was our starting thesis so we didn't start with bitcoin and then try and rationalize why it was good we started with saying let's maximize the emissions reduced per dollar invested that led us to landfill gas firstly it led us to methane secondly it led us landfills and thirdly it led us to saying you know what it's actually going to be on-site data centers that are going to be the best way to do this and the best data center that stacks up in
Starting point is 00:20:25 terms of economics right now is going to be bitcoin mining data centers so that's how we got there in terms of white pain in the desert i i haven't looked into that um you've got to remember i'm a climate tech investor so i tend to be naturally skeptical of anything just by disposition because you have to be however you shouldn't um dismiss something just because it sounds implausible and so that particular suggestion who knows uh it could be a pie in the sky idea with a technical obstacle that no one's discovered yet or it could be a brilliant solution so what you've got to do with solutions like that you just keep an open mind and you go through very thorough due diligence in the meantime to give some context i've come across probably around
Starting point is 00:21:10 200 different climate tech ideas including some ones which sounded wonderful and at some stage in the due diligence either for some technical reason or some commercial reason you found some bug and it wasn't quite as effective and it wasn't magic bullet everyone thought it would be and i've gone through that process a few times so i would look at this in the same way i'd be open-minded to it but also i wouldn't be changing the direction of our strategy for mitigating climate change until we've thoroughly done due diligence on an idea like that what's the role of government in all of this i think the state of florida is home to uh the largest number of solid waste combustion facilities uh anyone who listens to this podcast
Starting point is 00:21:50 will be like pop definitely read that on the internet somewhere and i did in preparation for this conversation but given that they have so many of these specific facilities is it something where you need either government approvals or government participation to kind of accelerate these plans or can the private sector do it without the participation or partnership of the government so it involves local government so typically you're dealing with municipalities so municipal solid waste so it doesn't need central government approval doesn't need federal government approval it needs participation and enthusiasm definitely you want that but the relationships and with the municipalities having said that in the future i believe that to do this really well
Starting point is 00:22:35 it would be advantageous to have the buy-in of central government and of local governments as well for a very simple reason and that is long term we don't really want to be doing the financing of the gas capturing collection systems it would make much more sense for us to do partnerships with government where we said look you've got a vested interest in reducing emissions we have a solution which can help you do that can bring back money to local municipalities it's good for the community it's good for the local environment it's good for the global environment you fund the component at something like 20-year treasury rates for the gas capture collection and we will fund the bitcoin mining operations so we can see collaborations such as
Starting point is 00:23:17 that that may occur in the future how much are they making off these facilities now like when they sell that power uh to somebody who would come and hook up to it um are they really making that much we're talking like three four cents a kilowatt hour or like what does that look like and then what is the potential um you know economic upside with bitcoin mining and really what i'm trying to get at is like eventually are the municipalities incentivized just to do this themselves if they can figure out kind of logistically and expertise wise how to do it yeah so if you look if you exclude landfills and you look at some of the cheapest available sources of electricity excluding landfills um i i've seen as cheap as 25 a megawatt so 2.5 cents per kilowatt
Starting point is 00:23:58 hour and so if you're going into landfills it has to be a whole lot cheaper than that again because you can't just it's not like a solar plant or uh hooking up to the grid you can't just do it immediately you've got to invest some infrastructure is going to be delays so typically it's going to be around half that level of the cheapest available otherwise but for the landfill i know that can be a substantial monthly revenues that can be tens of thousands of dollars coming in every single month to a landfill owner and remember they don't have to pay anything to achieve that revenue either so it's simply a negotiation where you make sure you set up your site in a way which isn't going to interfere with the heavy machinery you go and do your thing they are mitigating an
Starting point is 00:24:39 environmental problem which is positive for them because it keeps a regulator off their back and they're getting a source of money that otherwise they wouldn't have access to because remember we're targeting landfills which have no option to sell it back to the grid so there's no other competing user for that electricity so for them and for the bitcoin mining unit it's alchemy it's turning trash into digital gold when the governments start to get involved in this um there is this weird balance of uh you need them they have usually control of the facility they have in some states subsidies or ways that they can actually change the economics and the people who are converting the waste to the energy or the people who are going and taking the energy and
Starting point is 00:25:23 kind of consuming it um but also there's this weird dynamic of like bitcoin kind of was built outside the system bitcoin was uh you know to some degree um a parallel system how do you balance that in your head and like are there risks maybe um with that public private partnership that you guys have identified uh or maybe even on a broader standpoint you know kind of the the esg conversation and and the people in that industry with the bitcoiners i don't think most people are like oh those people obviously all get along and you know get in bed with each other so like how do you think about risks or challenges with some of the the more kind of soft skill weird things that are that are at play here yeah you're absolutely right there's a lot of people who are going to
Starting point is 00:26:05 come together who may not naturally uh be people who would meet with each other and do business with each other so again we see it a couple of ways firstly with the municipalities if you look at some of the companies out there such as nodal power such as festbean who are doing great work already the epa you know really like what they're doing because they're solving a problem for the epa and that problem is that they drastically want to reduce methane emissions but there's been no good way to do that and so for the regulators for central government it's they recognize particularly the people who are in the Environmental Protection Agency, that yes, whilst they're regulators, and yes, they do have the stick called
Starting point is 00:26:44 we will fine you or we will regulate you if you don't do that, they'd rather not have to use it. It's much easier for them if there are economic incentives. So a private industry can come in and offer a carrot. That's much better than them having to use the stick. And they know that. And so that's why they've been very supportive of these sorts of on-site power gen possibilities.
Starting point is 00:27:04 So I actually see some natural synergies with governments where we're solving problems for central government, which otherwise would go into the too hard basket. And it's done in such a way that it's actually stopping regulation. So I see this as positive. And the other sort of regulation that will stop is by partnering and working in a cooperative way by central government. Then it really takes a lot of the steam out of the whole emphasis for some more draconian regulations which have been proposed for the bitcoin mining ecosystem because if the white
Starting point is 00:27:38 house for example has said look we like this idea of using methane and destroying it in order to power bitcoin mining and they have said that in their report and then they see some evidence of that actually occurring they've also said in the white house ostp report that if more of this occurs in this area that would help give them comfort that bitcoin can be a net positive for the environment so whilst they have uh the white house has been in some cases very critical of bitcoin mining they have also said that we're open to being dissuaded we're open to seeing otherwise so we can see evidence these strong movements that are climate that are positive for climate then we can change our viewpoint on this so i think there's a chance for cooperation here
Starting point is 00:28:24 talk not only about the infrastructure like you were mentioning earlier you know when you generate waste to energy the energy is hard to move right and sometimes the grid can't take it because there's a surplus and and there's things that we've talked about in prior episodes uh with people on this podcast i think the audience probably understands now like it's really hard to move this energy but also not just moving the energy bitcoin mining provides a persistent buyer of energy and so how does that kind of play it's almost like this like beautifully designed thing that people kind of discount or don't understand the persistent buying or persistent demand is maybe one of the most important components to being able to help solve a problem
Starting point is 00:28:59 like this? Definitely. If you've got someone who you know is going to buy energy 24-7 whenever it's available, that's the best sort of customer you could possibly get, particularly if they don't care about moving to where the energy is. So whether it's a landfill, whether it's a new wind farm whether it's a solar farm one of the biggest problems you have is you're in the wrong place geographically it's not easy to hook up to the grid and even if you do hook up to the grid you've got to transmit power a long way so again what bitcoin mining companies are doing not just with landfills but with solar farms and wind farms we're seeing them come in early and we're seeing that even for example let's take the solar farm before it gets connected up to the grid you've
Starting point is 00:29:50 major problem right now first problem is how do you get funding and you know as someone who gives funding to infrastructure i'm unlikely to give funding to something if your value proposition is it's going to take me 3.7 years to get good interconnected and in the meantime i've got no revenue and i want a whole lot of money but if i must to give funding to something and it's now a solar farm and they say we've got our first customer i say okay i'm listening and they say yeah and they guarantee us a steady price at this base level so there's a floor price established for that electricity i'm saying okay i'm listening more and they say and they want to buy a power whenever it's available and by being that customer now i'm looking at an equation and suddenly the
Starting point is 00:30:33 economics are starting to stack up i'm much more likely to fund it so having a constant buyer of that electricity who doesn't mind when and they don't mind where so in other words they're location agnostic and they are time of day agnostic is a tremendous advantage whether it's a solar farm wind farm or a landfill or any sort of potential power provider and we've never had a customer like that ever in the history of the planet and a lot of people don't realize just how unique bitcoin mining is because of these accidental features where it doesn't care when and it doesn't care where it locates to get that electricity and i think the third thing is people don't realize is because we've also never had a user
Starting point is 00:31:14 where their electricity cost is such a high percentage of the total expenses. And what that means is that you're going to do everything in your power to get cheap electricity. That makes you the ideal customer of anyone who provides electricity because the value proposition of getting that cheaply is just so important to you.
Starting point is 00:31:35 It is your core business when it comes to the expense side of the ledger. So it's going to incentivize not only a lot of these landfills being mitigating the methane, it's also going to incentivize a lot more renewable energy getting onto the grid sooner, getting funded better. And then when it's on the grid, of course, we already know the story here. It's helping with the load balancing and reducing curtailment. Before I let you go, talk to me about CH4 Capital.
Starting point is 00:32:00 You all obviously have a very specific point of view in the world. How do you think about that firm and allocating capital in the way that you guys do? Yeah, so we had to make a decision a little while ago about whether we went very broad or very narrow. We've chosen to go very narrow with our focus. So we're only focusing on methane mitigation, we're only focusing on landfills. And then even within landfills, we're only focusing on the ones that are currently venting all of their methane into the air.
Starting point is 00:32:28 And the reason for that is that those are the ones that can make the biggest difference. So if we take a landfill that's currently venting landfill gas into the air, and we stop that occurring that has a massive climate benefit it's going to be millions of carbon dioxide equivalents reduced per landfill and so our philosophy is we want to start off so we're creating this 400 million dollar fund over the next three years but starting off small with 50 million and that can be enough for us to do 32 megawatts so that's around four to five landfills starting off small we've got some sites identified we start to mitigate that and then we achieve scaled afterwards we're also wanting at the same time to be really helping more bitcoin mining
Starting point is 00:33:09 companies to come into the space what we found is that there's a lot of great bitcoin mining companies out there but their major problem has either been just identifying what's a good candidate landfill how do i even tell the ones that make economic sense and there's a lot of learning there we've already done a lot of that learning so rather than a whole lot of bitcoin mining companies having to do that individually we can help reduce that learning curve so we're we're actively encouraging people through an accelerated program we've just recently launched to start moving into the sector. So what we're doing is really pairing up three things. So the capital, the Bitcoin miners, and the ideal candidate landfill sites. When you think about
Starting point is 00:33:49 five, 10 years from now, could you all be behind 30, 40, 50 of these landfill operations? Do you you think that it's you kind of you know have the bullhorn you get people excited about this and then you need a bunch of other people to kind of run run alongside and and it's kind of more teamwork how do you look at how this plays out yeah very much teamwork yeah we certainly don't want to be doing this alone uh there's a lot we can do with one fund however uh one of the things that's great about the Bitcoin ecosystem is that we're on the same mission and we all want to cooperate I've had a phone call today with someone who is very excited about this just talking about how we could potentially collaborate uh they're particularly interested in fled landfills that are flaring
Starting point is 00:34:34 their gas and stopping that flaring because whilst that doesn't mitigate quite as many emissions it still reduces some and it's actually a much simpler proposition in terms of the amount of infrastructure so we're talking about collaborating all the time we we can't say who but we know that one of the large publicly traded bitcoin mining companies is looking to aggressively move into the space and and there's also we've got the two existing ones but we've got a pipeline of about another 15 bitcoin mining companies who are looking specifically these are smaller bitcoin mining companies who are looking to move into the landfill gas mitigation space and the more people who are providing funding to them the more people are providing asics for them more people who are
Starting point is 00:35:13 providing uh services to help them to gain carbon credits the more people are helping them identify the right landfills the better the thing here is that there are no shortage of landfills around the world we can't tackle them all alone so we we welcome other people coming to the space where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about the firm so best way for me personally is on twitter at dspadden and then you can find out more about ch4 capital ch4 that's the methane capital.com uh so those are the two best ways to get hold of us thank you so much daniel i always enjoy talking to you i always learn something uh this is just freaking cool to be honest uh yeah we think so yeah we're pretty happy i wish you all the luck
Starting point is 00:36:00 and uh and i'm cheering for you so we'll definitely do it again in the future look forward to a pump.

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