El Salvador will use energy from volcanoes to mine bitcoin

Posted:

June 13, 2021 15:01 GMT

According to the head of the Central American country, geothermal energy will be cheap, completely clean and renewable.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, announced Wednesday plans to use energy from volcanoes to mine bitcoin, agreed Recently like Legal currency In an attempt to strengthen the national economy and protect it from the potential effects of the inflation of its paper currency.

Bukele announced that he has tasked the head of state-owned geothermal energy company LaGeo with planning to regulate bitcoin mining at his facilities using energy from volcanoes, which are “very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable and zero-emissions.”

“Our engineers just told me that they dug new wellwhich will provide approximately 95 megawatts of geothermal energy from our volcanoes, 100% clean and zero emissions,” the Salvadoran president later said, sharing a video of the thick steam coming out of the well in question adding that it had already begun to design a bitcoin mining center around it. .

The 90% of the land El Salvador is made up of volcanic material. At present, only some of the more than 170 volcanoes located in the country have continuous activity, such as emitting gases or ash: Santa Ana volcano, San Salvador volcano, San Miguel volcano and Izalco volcano, according to data Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN).