Methane is an 84x more warming greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. It is now contributing as much to climate change as CO2. Combusting methane that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere is widely recognised as a simple and effective path to becoming carbon negative. Unlike using renewable power sources, which are carbon neutral, using methane as a power source has a much stronger environmental benefit because it actually reduces the net amount of greenhouse gasses that would have gone into the air.

In order to achieve half of the UNEP’s target of a 45% reduction in methane emissions, the Bitcoin network would need to grow (in hashrate) at a 40.2% higher rate than today’s 46.7 Exahash (EH) per year network growth and deploy 80% of all new mining to methane abatement programs. It would take until 2045 to achieve this target, and require a small contribution from other Proof-of-Work based crypto-mining to achieve this.

Under the more conservative scenario that landfill gas powers 24% of the future Bitcoin network from 2023 forward, this would fall a long way short of meeting half of the UNEP’s methane emission targets. It would however provide sufficient carbon-negative hashpower to make the Bitcoin network carbon negative 7.7x over (in other words, reduce 7.7x more carbon than it produces). Because of the difficulty other technologies face in utilizing methane from landfills and other remote places far from a grid interconnection point, it is probably that this figure that is likely to exceed all other technologies, monetary networks and nation states.