Bitcoin’s thirsty appetite for water has soared over the last year as the energy-intensive process of cryptocurrency mining pulls up billions of gallons. Alex de Vries, a doctoral candidate from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, published a paper releasing an estimate that bitcoin’s annual water footprint will hit 591 billion gallons in 2021. This marks an unprecedented 278% increase compared to the previous year.
De Vries touches upon the serious consequence of water disruption due to the mining process. These issues include ground water pressure and loss due to evaporation, along with intensified water shortage problems in already desert-prone regions where amounts of crypto-mining activity is increasing, such as the Western United States and Kazakhstan. The electricity used to power mining operations adversely affects these regions too, as De Vries estimates based on Cambridge data that “the total water footprint of US Bitcoin miners could be equivalent to the average annual water consumption of around 300,000 US households”, which is equivalent to what a city such as Washington D.C. consumes on a yearly basis.
It may come as a surprise that lowering Bitcoin’s water usage could be as straightforward as locating mining operations in areas that rely on renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar power, to avoid pressures on otherwise water-starved areas. De Vries warning has yet to be looked into further however, as the research sample size only captures 44% of the international mining footprint. Meanwhile, a UN study estimates the footprint to be much less at 255 billion gallons due to different data sets.
