To optimize the chance of earning coins, the top mining operators run hundreds or thousands of miners 24/7. But mining machines aren’t used on occasion. That’s about equal to the energy consumption of a microwave oven. One of the most popular machines, Bitmain’s AntMiner S15, draws about 1,600 watts of power. The process consumes enormous amounts of energy, and cheap electricity is a must. (Operators sometimes combine into profit-sharing collectives known as pools.) The more mining machines you have, the better the odds of winning. Successful crypto miners use custom machines that solve the puzzles required to build a blockchain and unlock the limited supply of bitcoins that become available roughly every 10 minutes. At least not for anyone who wants to make a profit. But that hasn’t been the case for a while. More than 1,000 jobs vanished, sending Rockdale and surrounding Milam County, population 25,000, into a nosedive.īitcoin mining conjures the image of a college sophomore pecking at a laptop while taking rips from a bong. The Alcoa smelter was shuttered in 2008, and an adjoining coal-fired power plant closed last year. More recently, though, prosperity has eluded Rockdale. “What makes us feel best of all,” Sessions-Perry continued, “is that we’re making a sizable pile of something that the nation needs.” The women wear cocktail dresses, and the men wear ties. “Pete” Coffield and the mayor hosting a party for new Alcoa employees on a patio surrounded by a lush garden. A photo accompanying the Post story shows resident millionaire H. Seemingly overnight, Rockdale’s population doubled to 5,000. “Others merely went off and lay down in an effort to regain their composure. “At the mere mention of somebody blowing into town with $100,000,000 to spend, many citizens were seized by attacks of vertigo,” wrote local author George Sessions-Perry. But green ammonia could also be burned in existing coal-fired power plants to quickly reduce their CO2 emissions, the study notes, or in plants customized to run entirely on ammonia.In 1952, The Saturday Evening Post christened Rockdale, Texas, “The Town Where It Rains Money.” An estimated 100 million tons of lignite coal lay buried a few miles south of the city limits, and Alcoa had just swooped in to build a $100 million smelter that would use the cheap energy source to produce aluminum for fighter planes, skyscrapers, automobiles, and more. According to the International Energy Agency, ammonia will need to account for 45% of the global energy demand for shipping in 2050, for net zero scenarios to realize, which means it’s an essential component of a greener future. The shipping industry made up nearly 3% of global CO2 emissions in 2018. (This) means an investment of this nature with a number of jobs that are going to be created, it’s going to be very big.” For us in the Eastern Cape, the unemployment rate is sitting at over 50%. “A number of jobs were lost in South Africa. “We were hit very hard by Covid,” says Asanda Xawuka of the Coega Development Corporation, the entity in charge of bringing employment to the region. It will be a welcome development for the area. Google Equiano: Internet giant bets big on Africa with latest megaproject It will be powered by a nearby solar farm and will get its water - of which vast amounts are needed to make ammonia - from a local table salt factory that desalinates seawater.Īt least 20,000 jobs will be created in the region over the lifespan of the project, according to Loubser.Ĭourtesy Desert Pearl Photography/Paratus Projected to start operations in 2026, the plant will cost $4.6 billion. It’s a completely green process,” says Loubser. You’re not using fossil fuels, coal or gas to make it. “The process of making it green is that you’re using renewable energy for this. The hydrogen and nitrogen are then combined to produce ammonia. Electrolysis is used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and an air separation unit extracts nitrogen from the air. The process to make green ammonia is quite simple, Loubser says, requiring just water, air and energy. That will become the fuel of the future, particularly in the maritime industry,” says Colin Loubser, managing director of Hive Energy Africa, which is building the plant. “It’ll start replacing heavy fuel oils on ships and it’ll replace diesel. It is what the Mandela Bay plant will focus on. Prominent among them is the use of ammonia as fuel, which could help decarbonize the shipping sector. But by using renewable energy, “green” ammonia can be manufactured, slashing the carbon footprint of agricultural production and opening up the compound to further uses. Currently, its production mainly involves fossil fuels and is responsible for 1.8% of global CO2 emissions. Ammonia is also used to manufacture explosives for the mining industry and is a key ingredient in many pharmaceutical and cleaning products.
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