Argentina's State-Owned Energy Company Moves Into Crypto Mining
YPF is currently supplying power for a 1 megawatt operation and plans to launch a second project eight times larger before the end of the year.
Oct 3, 2022 at 9:00 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/LQMGWA76FFH6LHFOFLNTMEA3TM.jpg)
Energy production in Vaca Muerta, Argentina. (Ricardo Ceppi/Getty Images)
YPF, Argentina's state-owned energy company, is supplying power to an undisclosed international crypto mining company, the firm said on Sunday.
The renewable energy arm of YPF – YPF Luz – three months ago commenced a 1 megawatt (MW) pilot operation that provides power generated from waste gas left over from oil production, YPF Luz CEO Martín Mandarano told the national news agency Télam.
The project is located in southern Argentina, in an area known for its shale oil and gas resources called Vaca Muerta (Dead Cow).
The company plans to open a second pilot – this one 8MW in size – before the end of the year, Mandarano said.
“We started to develop this generation pilot for cryptocurrency mining with a vision of sustainability and business from flare natural gas, which cannot be harnessed during exploration and at the beginning of the production of an oil field,” Mandarano added.
In June, Crusoe Energy, a privately held U.S. company that pioneered bitcoin (BTC) mining by using wasted natural gas as a power source, announced it was expanding to Oman and Abu Dhabi after receiving investments from the sovereign wealth funds of those two countries.
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Andrés Engler is a CoinDesk editor based in Argentina, where he covers the Latin American crypto ecosystem. He holds BTC and ETH.
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