Crypto operations suck water, but Canadian governments aren't monitoring how much

Jul 3

*A technician monitors a bank of computers at the Bitfarms technology lab in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, Canada, on Thursday, July 26, 2018. Photo by James MacDonald / Canada's National Observer*

The amount of water it takes to mine cryptocurrency in Canada is on the rise, with little regulatory oversight and no disclosure requirements to track the operations’ consumption levels.

In Kelowna, B.C., that means a data centre primarily drawing power for crypto mining is expanding with no specific need to disclose its water use from electricity generation and computer server cooling.

The last known estimate was that crypto miners use about 127 billion litres per year — enough to meet the needs of more than a million Canadian households.

But this number is three years old, and while it tracks the water footprint of generating electricity for these mines to run, it does not include the amount of water used to cool these facilities.

The statistic also only counts the water footprint at dedicated crypto mines. Meanwhile, data centres — commercial businesses that house computers and servers for multiple purposes, including crypto mining — are growing in number, with no accounting of how much water or energy goes into cryptocurrency mining and transactions.

Experts say no one actually knows how much crypto mining is happening in Canada, let alone its impact on local water needs.

“The short answer is we don't really know the current situation,” said Alex de Vries, a data scientist and researcher in the Netherlands who analyzed the growing water footprint of Bitcoin mining and transactions around the world.

All reporting produced as part of this project is free to the public and is not behind National Observer's paywall.

Peter Allan

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