Run‑of‑river hydro sites in Africa, plugged into Bitcoin mining as an always‑available buyer, can beat the long‑term profitability of a productive oil well, creating decades of high‑margin, non‑depleting energy revenue that simultaneously powers local development.

If we were to take a 1MW run-of-river hydroelectric generation site, this site would produce a daily volume of nearly 15 barrels of oil. (Assuming you don’t trust my math, 1,000 kW times 24 hours = 24,000 kWh per day of energy. 24,000 kWh divided by 1,620 kWh per barrel = 14.8 barrels of oil per day.) If I wanted to have a site that produced 100 barrels per day then I would need 7MW of generation capacity. Now, based upon my brief research, a single land-based well that produces 100 barrels per day is a pretty good money maker for the oil industry (roughly $6,000 per day in income).

A run-of-river hydro site in Africa would likely achieve an LCOE of $20/MWh or better resulting in a break-even cost per barrel of $32 or less.  More importantly, once the initial investment is recovered on a run-of-river site - which can happen in less than 5 years, the marginal cost of production is around $4/MWh giving a cost per barrel of $6.  By comparison, the marginal cost of production of a barrel of oil in the Texas Permian Basin is around $35 per barrel.  This means that a typical hydro site in Africa will have an all-in cost lower than just the marginal cost of production in Texas. Once a hydro site is developed, the ongoing cost of production will be lower than the best oil producers in the world.

It is estimated that Africa has 400GW of hydro energy potential.  In oil barrel equivalents that represents 6M barrels per day of production.  This would place Africa’s hydro resources at 4th in the oil production list just behind the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.  A little less than 300GW of new production would exceed the total production of the famous Texas Permian Basin that Billybob Thorton was fighting for in Landman - of which he had just a small piece.  A little less than 50GW of new production would exceed the total energy production of the Basin’s largest oil company, Exxon.  If we looked at it on a revenue basis, the Gridless Energy model would require only 9GW to match Exxon and on a gross margin basis, around 4GW.