This article overviews the partnerships that are leading the merge between bitcoin mining and oil companies, and it offers some summary analysis into the specifics of why these corporate unions matter.

In August 2021, for example, Giga Energy co-founder Matt Lohstroh said Exxon was already selling some gas to miners.

ConocoPhillips is also supplying gas to bitcoin miners,

Marathon Oil, a multi-billion-dollar oil company based in Houston, also powers co-located bitcoin mining operations with its gas. On its website’s page about emissions control, Marathon indicates it uses gas “that would otherwise be flared due to lack of a gas connection or gas takeaway capacity constraints [to] generate electricity to power co-located computing and data centers used for Bitcoin mining.”

EOG Resources, another American oil company, is also rumored to be dealing with miners by members of the industry.

And Texas Pacific Land recently signed a deal with two mining companies, Mawson and JAI Energy, to begin what JAI Energy co-founder Ryan Leachman called “the biggest bitcoin related announcement in oil and gas to date.”

A subsidiary of the Russian oil giant Gazprom has been planning and building its own bitcoin mining venture on its oil drilling sites since late 2020.

Oil wells in remote areas of Australia are being used by Canadian gas company Bengal Energy to power bitcoin mining machines

Exxon and others are sprinkling legitimacy on a historically maligned, misunderstood and shadowed industry. These are some of the biggest names in oil and gas production working with companies who manage computing power for a barely-decade-and-a-half-old magic internet money industry.

A future where every major oil producer is also a bitcoin miner — or at least operates a bitcoin mining arm — is very easy to imagine and could become reality soon.