New research says bitcoin mining is sucking up more and more water, with use increasing 278% since 2020

• New research says bitcoin's water footprint has soared 278% since 2020.
• Mining operations will use 591 billion gallons this year, Alex de Vries wrote for Cells Report Sustainability.

Bitcoin's annual water footprint has been soaring as mining the cryptocurrency sucks up hundreds of billions of gallons, according to a researcher.

The peer-reviewed journal Cells Report Sustainability posted commentary last week from Alex de Vries, a doctoral candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who estimated that bitcoin's water footprint will hit 591 billion gallons this year, up 278% from 2020.

"Bitcoin's expanding water footprint must be considered in the context of escalating water scarcity," he wrote, citing growing water issues in the western US and Kazakhstan, two large crypto mining regions.

Mining operations rely on computers to solve complex calculations to unlock new bitcoin tokens. As this is energy-intensive, water is used to cool the computer servers that run them as well as air-conditioning systems. Water is also indirectly consumed as it's used to cool power plants that provide electricity for miners.

These uses cause water loss through evaporation, while adding pressure on groundwater supplies.

To estimate the indirect use, De Vries relied on Cambridge data of the large-scale bitcoin operations in the US, and compared it with the water intensity of electric generation on each specific grid.

When adding direct usage, "the total water footprint of US Bitcoin miners could be equivalent to the average annual water consumption of around 300,000 US households, comparable with a city such as Washington, DC," De Vries wrote.

To lessen mining's water impact, he suggested that miners center operations in areas that rely on renewable energy sources.

However, some uncertainty remains, as the Cambridge data sample represents only 44% of the global total in bitcoin mining.

Meanwhile, a UN study from October that relied on different data found that mining resulted in a 255 billion-gallon footprint in 2021, much less than De Vries' estimate of 415 billion for that year.