Burning tires and bridges: US residents ‘shocked’ by firm’s Bitcoin-mining plan
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
When done properly, incineration of waste to generate electricity is probably no worse than incinerating fossil fuels, except it has the added benefit of getting rid of waste products that otherwise go to landfill. That means fitting the necessary scrubbers, and hot enough combustion to burn off dioxins etc.
My feelings on burning waste depend on whether this is done properly or not. I don’t imagine there’s anything inherently worse in burning tyres than other household waste.
The aspect that irks me is burning any fossil fuel to mine cryptocurrencies, it doesn’t sit right with me when we have a climate crisis. That concern isn’t limited to burning tyres, but any carbon-emitting fuel.
I hope that the environmental regulations are strict enough to protect the local residents air quality. Assuming the rules are as stringent as they would be in Sweden, they don’t have much to be concerned about.
States get sued by 3M for attempting to regulate PFAS/PFOS discharges into the drinking water supplies of 20 million people. I fully expect that in this case, people who live down wind are just screwed. They can take the loss on trying to sell their properties and go elsewhere, or hope they don’t get sick.
Not quite the same thing to burn them at high temperature in an industrial furnace.
Sweden has power plants burning garbage. That’s very far from a dumpster fire.
That said, this plant isn't a modern waste-to-energy plant. It's a waste coal plant burning waste coal.[0] Or, put another way, it's a remarkably less-efficient coal plant. A quick search suggests that it's likely just a conventional steam boiler system,[1] rather than a fluidized bed combustion facility or something similar that might be...slightly less terrible. In any case, the facility in question is not going to generate the sort of temperatures you'd see in waste-to-fuel plants. Nor would I expect them to invest the money needed to install equivalent pollution controls given that the plant was already struggling when they bought it.
It's just personal curiosity, but I'd love to see the internal discussions from back when they bought the plant in 2021. What kind of bitcoin mining company looks at the amount of electricity they use use and says "we should buy a struggling waste coal power plant that's less efficient than a regular coal plant, produces greater amounts of air pollution, leaves a massive amount of waste ash that still needs disposed of, will still have a higher cost per kWh produced compared to alternatives, and to top it all off, will have some fuel supply issues that require us to try and get regulatory approval to burn tires to make it all work"?
Maybe there's an odd confluence of circumstances where the math worked out. I don't know. But I'm really curious what they'd be.
0. https://www.tnonline.com/20210805/company-to-buy-panther-cre...
1. https://www.countyoffice.org/panther-creek-energy-facility-n...
It burned for two years. On the semi-ironic upside, its proximity to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the major atmospheric research center there actually proved highly useful for helping model atmospheric behavior of smoke for things like wildfires.