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Jackie Sawicky recalls the day she got seriously pissed about bitcoin mining. It was April 27, 2022, when Riot Platforms announced it would be building a one-gigawatt facility in Navarro County, seven miles outside of Corsicana, and about an hour south of Dallas. 

Jackie, a lifelong Texan who lives in Navarro, had been looking into the bitcoin bubble and crypto waste. “I watched the Netflix documentary Trust No One on Quadriga, and literally that week, we found out about Riot building the largest bitcoin mine in the US.”

Corsicana’s then-mayor, Don Denbow, had invited citizens to attend a special announcement at the city’s library. [Letter, PDF]

Jackie watched a live stream of the event from her home. Her curiosity turned to horror when Denbow introduced Chad Harris, the executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Riot at the time. 

“We turn energy into opportunity,” Harris said with his best salesman smarm. (Harris is no longer with the company.) Riot would create jobs — hundreds of them — and bring tax revenue to the county. This was good news for Navarro County! [Facebook, video; press release]

Riot already had an existing bitcoin mine in Milam County. This new project was an expansion on a grander scale. 

A voice in the crowd asked but why Navarro? “You have two very valuable resources,” Harris responded. There’s the Navarro switch — meaning Riot could plug itself directly into the state’s power grid — and plenty of fresh water for cooling.

“He told us from the beginning we are coming here to exploit your resources,” Jackie said.

Riot got national attention when it got $31.7 million in energy credits in August 2023 for not mining bitcoins. That money came out of ordinary Texans’ pockets. Welcome to the future of bitcoin mining. 

Radicalized by bitcoin

A self-described environmentalist, Jackie lives “on six acres in the boonies” in Navarro County. She loves Texas for “its natural beauty and the amazing state parks.”

Jackie understood bitcoin’s use case — money laundering and fraud — and the huge threat bitcoin mining poses to the environment. She was shocked to learn a massive crypto mining facility was setting up shop in her backyard: “I lost sleep that weekend.” 

She wasn’t alone. “In the live stream, you can see people reacting in real-time,” Jackie said. She started the Concerned Citizens of Navarro, a group to oppose bitcoin mining in the county. Soon Jackie and her mom were out pounding the pavement and putting flyers on cars to gather support for the cause.

Why Texas?

After China kicked the crypto miners out in mid-2021, the miners looked for other places in the world where they could get cheap energy. China has the cheapest electricity in the world — but the US and Canada have the second cheapest.  

Texas Governor Greg Abbot rolled out the red carpet for the bitcoin miners later in 2021, making the state especially attractive to the industry — at the expense of the people who live there. [Bloomberg, archive]

Jackie thinks Texas is into bitcoin specifically because of crypto mining’s unlimited appetite for power. “They are driving up demand for fossil fuels, and Texas is a fossil fuel state.” A Bloomberg report on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, concurs: “Everything depends on Bitcoin.” [Bloomberg, PDF]

Bitcoin miners in Texas have negotiated deals with the state for power as cheap as it was in China — 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Miners in Texas are subsidized by the taxpayer. For comparison, the going rate for electricity in New York state is 12 to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“When we found out that Texas is number one in bitcoin mining, we changed our name to the Texas Coalition against Cryptomining because it is so much bigger than just Navarro County,” Jackie said. 

Off to fight: SB 1751

In May 2022, Concerned Citizens of Navarro went to Austin to support SB 1751, an unfortunately failed bill to bar tax exemptions for crypto mining facilities. [Texas Legislature]

SB 1751 would have prohibited tax abatements, capped miners’ participation in ERCOT subsidies to large companies to 10 percent, and mandated they register with the state. “This bill would have been the nail in the coffin to this industry here,” said Jackie.

The bill passed the Senate unanimously in April 2022, but the session ended with the bill stalled in the state’s House committee. Jackie hopes to get it back on the agenda for next year.

Riot and Corsicana 

Riot’s plans to expand to Navarro County didn’t come out of nowhere. “We found out through records requests that they had actually been working behind closed doors with the city for five months, so it actually started in December 2021,” Jackie said. 

Jackie and others who oppose the Riot project have tried to reach out to Corsicana city council members and John Boswell, Corsicana’s economic development director. The city says they can’t do anything about the Riot facility because it’s outside of city limits in unincorporated Navarro County. Yet Corsicana city council members are the very people promoting the project.

Riot already has one of North America’s largest bitcoin mines — a 750-megawatt plant in Rockdale (though currently running only 450 megawatts), an hour outside of Austin. The Corsicana facility would be even larger — with a maximum capacity of one gigawatt.

One gigawatt is roughly the size of two coal-fired power plants — enough energy to power 750,000 homes. The proposed plant would put an enormous strain on the state’s already fragile power grid — and the cost would be passed on to ordinary Texans.

Bitcoin mines are huge, ugly, noisy things — warehouses or container buildings full of rows and rows of mining rigs, small servers that guess numbers to win the bitcoins. Texas is hot and humid — not the best climate for a mining farm. The low-frequency sound generated by the fans cooling the rigs can travel up to a mile.

It’s hard to appreciate the immensity of this eyesore of a facility until you look at the videos. Riot broke ground at its 265-acre Corsicana site in October 2022, digging up a section of the pasture and woodland and filling it with concrete and conduit. Riot plans to take the site live with 400 megawatts next year. [YouTube; YouTube]

^{Riot’s Corsicana facility will displace 265 acres of nature.}

Unlike Riot’s Rockdale facility, the planned Corsicana facility is in a residential neighborhood. Residents living near bitcoin mines in other parts of the US liken the sound — produced by the fans used to keep the rigs cool — to a highway, the roar of a jet engine, or an idling semi-truck. The sound is pervasive and unrelenting — because bitcoin mining never sleeps. [Washington Post, 2022]

We asked Jackie if anyone had talked to homeowners in the area.

“​​A Reuters reporter came down here last July,” she said. “He and I knocked on doors but nobody answered. People around here are scared of retaliation, rocking the boat, the local government, etc. There’s a massive chilling effect over the entire county. I’ve been ostracized for being so vocal and confrontational. When we had our first protest at the site, only about six people showed up, even though this project is overwhelmingly opposed by all residents in the county.”

Riot’s Corsicana plant has been pushed back several times. According to a June press release, they are expecting 33,280 MicroBT mining rigs to be delivered in December. Deployment of the rigs, which will provide initially 400 megawatts, is currently set to begin in the first quarter of 2024. Riot expects the rigs to be fully operational by mid-year. [press release]

Job creators

Corsicana and Navarro are poor — Navarro has a 16 percent poverty rate and 17 percent of the population are seniors, likely to be on a fixed income. Thirty-two percent of family households are single parents.

When a city gives breaks to a large business, the pitch is usually jobs. Corsicana already has a candy factory and an iron smelt, but more industry is always welcomed — if they bring jobs. 

Riot’s April 2022 press release told the public that the facility would create 270 jobs when it has 400 megawatts operational — less than half its capacity. In a Cana Girl Speaks podcast, Cody Muldner, Riot’s operations manager at its Corsicana site, said that “when it’s complete there’s going to be 900 full-time employees.” [press release; YouTube, 15:00 on] 

However, in investor presentations, Riot said that Navarro was only two hours away from its existing Rockdale mine and that the Navarro facility would use existing talent. Riot is not becoming part of the town in the same way the candy factory or the iron smelt are.

“They have their own electric company and their own construction company,” Jackie said of Riot. “They are not going to be creating jobs here. When I spoke with Colleen Cox, Chamber of Commerce, she’s like, it’s not 250 to 900 permanent jobs, it’s at some point in the project, along the way, there would have been these things.”

Anyone familiar with crypto mining knows that Bitcoin mines don’t bring a lot of jobs to an area. Once up and running, they typically employ only a handful of workers to monitor the rigs and swap out dead rigs to throw in the huge pile of e-waste out the back.

The Texas Blockchain Council told the Texas Senate that SB 1751 endangered 22,000 jobs in Texas. Council president Lee Bratcher breaks that down as “directly employs about 2,000 people across the state and another 20,000 people for indirect jobs” — which we still find implausible. Lobbyists, maybe. [Twitter; Decrypt]

“One of the most enraging things that Chad Harris [Riot] did was use very predatory language saying they hire single moms and pay single moms great,” said Jackie. “And I was like, 250 jobs is like .002 percent of the county. And every single mom is going to see higher electricity bills.” [Facebook, video, 20:00 on]

Water

Environmental concerns about bitcoin mining tend to focus on power requirements and hence the CO2 generated. But even crypto people tend not to be aware of how much water-cooling proof-of-work mining actually needs.

At an economics development meeting on June 7, 2022, Eddie Moore, a Navarro County commissioner, said he visited the Riot Rockdale plant and it was “as quiet as it is right here in this room,” because the facility uses immersion cooling — bathing the rigs in oil coolant rather than using noisy fans. “It reminded me of a turkey farm,” he said. [video]

Jackie says this isn’t what’s happening in Navarro. Riot often implied the Corsicana mine would be fully immersion-cooled — something promoters kept referencing as the reason for no noise pollution. “One of the lies they told to get their foot in the door here is that the Navarro County mine is all going to be immersion-cooled. But Riot’s own investor deck says that only 40 percent is going to be immersion-cooled,” she said.

^{Riot says in its investor deck that only 40% of its Corsicana rigs will be immersion cooled.}

We contacted Riot in September asking about all of this — what type of immersion coolant they planned to use, if they’d done any environmental risk studies, how they planned to cool the rest of the facility — but didn’t get a reply. It’s worth noting that oils tend to be flammable. Immersion cooling also carries the risk of leakage, which can cause environmental problems.

“The other 60 percent is going to be traditional fan-cooled,” said Jackie. “So what they do is they need a ton of water — and they feed it through these porous walls and they use fans. It’s like a swamp cooler.”

The water gets quite hot — over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — and that hot water needs to go somewhere. Where will it go?

Jackie hasn’t been able to get a clear answer, but she has concerns. “The property Riot purchased here in Navarro Country feeds into Richland Creek and Richland Creek feeds into Richland-Chambers Reservoir, and that’s the tap water for Arlington-Fort Worth.”

Worse things can happen. “One of my worst-case scenarios is they actually get it up and a fire happens and all these toxic metals leach into the water table and some of the biggest cities in all of Texas have their tap water contaminated. There was never an environmental study done.”

Corsicana will sell Riot the water. Jackie only discovered how much water Riot needed via records requests. “They asked for 1.6 million gallons a day in the height of the summer, and we are all being told to conserve,” Jackie said.

“When Riot tells people they are going to be wasting 1.6 million gallons a day, more than the iron smelt, more than the candy factory, they are going to be the number one user of water,” said Jackie.

This could put a huge strain on other industries. In 2022, a record number of local cattle ranchers had to sell off their herds early — because the price of hay skyrocketed due to the drought. [Corsicana Daily Sun, archive]

But in the June 7 economic development meeting, Boswell, Corsicana’s economic development director, said: “We have enough water to supply the water needs today without any upgrades to our system. We can supply the water to them today and have room for growth. No expansion plans are needed for our treatment plant to be able to meet the needs today.”

Boswell said, in an early email to a Navarro county commissioner, that the Riot facility would end up using 1.4 million gallons of water per day when the site was fully up and running — though he later told the Dallas Observer that the number would be smaller. [Dallas Observer, 2022, archive]

However much the facility will end up needing, Boswell said, the city will be selling water to Riot. All the water that’s sold throughout Navarro County — parts of Hill County, parts of Ellis County — is produced by the city of Corsicana and sold through wholesale water utilities throughout the area. “So, if anything goes on here, it will have an impact on water sales for the city,” said Jackie. 

We are skeptical that Riot will maintain any significant oil immersion cooling for the facility. Bitcoin mining rigs are poorly manufactured disposable hardware with a productive lifetime on the order of 18 months. We expect Riot will overwhelmingly use conventional fan-cooled rigs.

Money for nothing

Riot is a publicly traded company. Its stock (NASDAQ: RIOT) has virtually flatlined, having lost 99 percent of its value from its all-time high in November 2021 during the bitcoin bubble. [Yahoo]

As we’ve discussed, bitcoin mining is not a profitable business. In 2023, Riot is a bitcoin miner that makes most of its money from not mining bitcoins.

Instead, Riot is subsidized by Texas. Bitcoin miners can enroll in demand response programs, which pay them for reducing or shutting down power when called to do so — so they literally get paid to do nothing. [ERCOT, PDF]

During the Texas heatwave in August 2023, Riot made about $9 million from selling bitcoin — but it got $7.4 million in demand response credits from ERCOT and $24.2 million from selling pre-purchased energy back to TXU, the retail electricity provider for ERCOT. [CNBC; Bloomberg, archive; press release; press release]

Riot did the same thing in July 2022 and received $9.5 million in power credits. [press release]

Ordinary citizens don’t get paid to turn up their thermostats and conserve energy — but Riot does.

How you can help

If you’re fired up about what’s going on in Texas, there are lots of ways you can get involved in the fight against bitcoin mining.

In partnership with Greenpeace, the Texas Coalition Against Crypto Mining is having a week of action, starting October 24. The week kicks off with a public town hall meeting on Tuesday, followed by an action event at the Riot site in Navarro on Wednesday, and a press conference on Thursday.

“If you live anywhere near FM 709 and the Navarro Switch, we would really love you to show up and talk to the media,” Jackie said in a tweet. “They are very interested in what you have to say and how you feel about this project.” [Twitter, archive]

If you live in Texas, join the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining group on Facebook. As well as news updates, they have monthly Zoom meetings. [Facebook]

There is also a separate Facebook group for the National Coalition Against Cryptomining. [Facebook]

At a national level, support Senator Ed Markey’s (D-MA) bill — the Crypto Asset Environmental Transparency Act, which would require miners to disclose their emission levels. [press release; bill, PDF]

At a local level, stay vigilant. “Keep your eyes out for ‘data centers’ coming to your community,” said Jackie. If you live in a county with a bitcoin miner, reach out to one of Jackie’s Facebook groups. “We can help you form a local chapter.”