Crypto miners are looking for unused factories, cheap land, and industrial infrastructure that can be easily repurposed. SophieHaigney reports on the race for post-industrial space
A World War II–era airplane hangar in Texas has been converted into a bitcoin mine. Photo: Courtesy of Compute North Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains near Marble, North Carolina, there’s a 250,000-square-foot factory building that used to make denim for Levi’s jeans. Starting in the 1960s, Levi Strauss built many plants like this across the American South — and then shuttered almost all of them in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it moved its manufacturing operations overseas.
In the last year, cryptocurrencies like these have hit wildly high prices on crypto exchanges, leading to a craze that has spawned a host of new currencies, and given rise to feverish speculation on blockchain-backed NFTs. The high prices have also led to a boom in mining operations — and a hot new real-estate market for former industrial spaces to convert into mining facilities.
It’s not just denim mills and aluminum smelters. Around the country, mining operations have cropped up in an ex-steel mill in Calvert City, Kentucky; an ex-Gateway Computer industrial campus in South Dakota; a power plant in Hardin, Montana; a former airplane hangar in Big Spring, Texas; and old fruit warehouses in Eastern Washington State. The hulking abandoned palimpsests of American industry are, almost overnight, turning back on.
Some of their concerns are highly specific, local environmental problems related to the Greenidge plant, like the potential warming of Seneca Lake, where water heated during the mining process is being put back into the lake at high temperatures. But they’re also accompanied by broader concerns about the carbon emissions and energy use associated with blockchain; by one estimate, bitcoin as a whole consumes more electricity annually than Austria.
Crypto mines have moved into a variety of old industrial spaces, including this World War II–era hangar. Photo: Courtesy of Compute North Despite concerns raised by lawmakers and environmental groups, many states are eager to attract miners. North Dakota and Wyoming both passed laws that give tax breaks to oil producers that provide gas to crypto mines that would have otherwise flared. The governor of Kentucky recently passed a tax break for any miners coming into the state.
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