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Bitcoin mine sets up in Westlock County

Firm builds mines on abandoned or unused gas wells
Bitcoin mine web
Link Global Technologies Inc., a Vancouver-based firm, built a Bitcoin mine on an abandoned natural gas well.

WESTLOCK — A developer brought a Bitcoin mine to Westlock County, where they resuscitated an unused natural gas well to provide the necessary energy supply that run the servers. 

“It’s an energy project, in effect,” Link Global Technologies Inc. CEO Stephen Jenkins told the News over the phone March 9. 

“What we do is we look for dormant or abandoned gas facilities or gas wells and we meet with either the lease owner of the energy company and try to partner and reactivate a few of these resources. They’re good existing infrastructure and we really try to retool that.” 

Link is based in Vancouver and has two other operations across Alberta: one in eastern Alberta and another in Sturgeon County. The same energy company in Sturgeon owns the gas site west of the Town of Westlock on Highway 18, near Hazel Bluff, where Link has set up its third facility. 

In a press release in February, Jenkins wrote they plan on generating over $350,000 per month in revenue at the Westlock site alone. While it’s called mining, it has nothing to do with hardhats and the underground; Jenkins calls the machines ‘little digital accountants’ that solve difficult equations to acquire Bitcoin and make transactions inside one big network. 

Every 10 minutes, Link gets 6.2 coins and the associated transaction fees, but the network is self-regulated and raises or lowers the difficulty of the equations depending on how long it takes the ‘digital accountants’ to solve them. 

One Bitcoin is currently worth close to $71,000. 

Essentially, Link forms joint ventures with energy companies to set up these facilities, then a third company that owns the mining hardware sets it up inside sea cans on site, where the power is generated from the existing natural gas. 

The infrastructure already exists, and Jenkins says this is an “opportunity to do something meaningful with that, it’s good for everybody.” He’s not saying the Westlock well is methane-producing, but if it were, he says his facility would be 80 times better at capturing it than leaving it as a dormant well. 

Jenkins says his background is in clean energy, and has worked in West Africa on waste energy facilities before Link, and clean energy project consultancy for cities before that. 

Alberta, he says, is a good spot to place these large data centres or cryptocurrency mines — Link only does Bitcoin, and there are no plans yet to expand to other cryptocurrencies — because of energy sources and the cold winters. Mines like these create a lot of heat. 

“Everybody recognizes and acknowledges that (cryptocurrency mining) uses a lot of power. But what you’re not going to do is you’re not going to put these in areas of high demand, because supply and demand dictates you’ll pay more for power,” said Jenkins. 

Westlock County deputy reeve Brian Coleman shared the same concern in a council meeting last month: he wanted to know if they were connected to the grid, which they aren’t. Link’s development permit applications also caught staff by surprise, with the development officer saying she had to Google what a Bitcoin mine was. 

There’s also something Jenkins called “deregulated energy” in Alberta, which he says makes it easier to “form partnerships” in that industry: “Politically, I think there’s a push in Alberta to become kind of a digital society or community. All those things are kind of checkboxes for me.” 

Andreea Resmerita, TownandCountryToday.com 

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