Thursday, January 21, 2021
VOLUME 3 I ISSUE 30
MERIDIANSOURCE.CA
Lloyd bitcoin miner hits pay dirt GEOFF LEE
WRITER
.................................. Business is booming for Lloydminster bitcoin miner Upstream Data Inc. in sync with the rising price of the digital currency. Their fabricated modular Ohmm bitcoin mining datacenters are flying off the shelf with the price of one bitcoin hitting a high of about $42,000 USD on Jan. 8. “Our sales are hitting records for us and that’s because of the bitcoin price,” said company president and CEO Steve Barbour. “We have about 60 sold and already deployed all across North America and about 20 to 30 in the fabrication queue right now.” Upstream Data bought out Calroc’s fabrication shop on 40 Ave. and took over the lease on Nov. 1 after renting the space for more than a year. They also fabricate legacy oilfield buildings and offer a range of natural gas gensets. Gensets can be used to generate electricity
to power bitcoin mining computers linked to the Internet. The company has gone from Barbour as the sole employee in 2018 to 11 employees as of Jan. 11. “I think we’ll be doing a lot of hiring this year,” said Barbour. “The phone is literally ringing off the hook. Our sales are going through the roof, everything’s good.” Most of his customers are oil and gas producers who see bitcoin datacenters as a way to use and monetize stranded natural gas that would be otherwise vented and flared into the atmosphere. “That’s what’s getting most of our customers excited,” said Barbour. “With carbon taxes coming and already here and emissions rules already here, that drives a lot of our growth.” Barbour says Upstream Data is the only option on the market that allows a producer to actually use the gas and make money with bitcoin, as opposed
Supplied Photo
Steve Barbour, second from right, president and CEO of bitcoin mining company Upstream Data Inc., is pictured with a Christmas tree of bitcoin computers that his growing team can install with one of their mining datacentres that use stranded natural gas to generate electrical power from a genset for the mining computers.
to just wasting money in a flare stack or a combustor. “It’s another revenue stream,” said Barbour, who came up with the corporate slogan “stop burning, start earning.” He estimates tying a bitcoin mining datacenter to a facility that is venting natural gas will generate five to 15 times the market rate
and reduce emissions at the source. “The amount of emissions we reduce for the dollars spent beats anything out there on the market, and it’s scalable, said Barbour. “We can reduce over 10,000 tonnes of carbon per year off one or two engines on an oil well.” Barbour says produc-
ers are really interested in emissions reduction and cost-efficient options to combustion along with a growing demand for acquiring bitcoin from their energy and holding on to it. He thinks bitcoin will go to $300,000 by 2025 and maybe higher. Barbour admits the idea of solving the prob-
lem of venting gas with bitcoin mining was a hard sell in 2018 when he was a one-man show and bitcoin was not well understood. “I went to a few meetings in Calgary where I know they thought it was a joke because they hadn’t heard of it before,” he said. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2