With all the fracking in the USA, literally exponential growth, one of the things they do is gas burn off for months, sometimes years at all the sites

Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters?

(and why not build the datacenters at the Bakken formation)

You can see the burnoff from SPACE and it's for months at a time at each location, tell me that does nothing to global temperatures?

(look at the date on these photos, two decades of burnoff wasted energy)

* https://www.cnbc.com/2013/01/28/shale-gas-boom-now-visible-f...

* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...

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NDlurker a day ago | parent | next [-]

We're getting a data center just north of Fargo, on the other side of the state from all the oil. I agree with you, not sure why they don't build out west instead.

Pretty sure the flares aren't anything like that anymore because some regulations changed where they can't flare so much, but yeah that was a crazy time period.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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iAMkenough a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why not use all that wasted heat energy to power all these datacenters?

Probably not profitable enough to set up the infrastructure to capture, store, transport, and sell that as a product. Profit potential is the only factor that matters to decision makers.

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Symbiote a day ago | parent [-]

Search "datacentre district heat Denmark" and you'll find several examples, such as Facebook's datacentre in Odense.

Or one in Copenhagen, I didn't realize some small amount of my hot water (and heating in the winter) came from a datacentre. Neat.

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iAMkenough a day ago | parent [-]

That makes sense for existing infrastructure, taking waste heat from data centers and piping it through existing public systems. Especially for government environments like Denmark.

I wonder what profits would need to be for a private energy company to install additional equipment at a remote fracking site to capture the burn off energy to then sell to a data center to then use.

	▲	Symbiote 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The problem is finding a well-located user of the waste heat. Homes and offices are great in colder countries. Some industry can use it, but the examples I can think of (food/drink, heat for drying paint, making paper, some chemical/drug processes) aren't usually sited in the middle of nowhere.