The $2.8 billion coal miner has also been mining Bitcoin.

A coal mining company has revealed that it has been quietly mining Bitcoin for over three years.

Alliance Resource Partners, listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol ARLP, disclosed its cryptocurrency initiative during its first quarter earnings call.

“It was an opportunity we saw because of the fact that we have a plethora of power in our mining operations,” Cary Marshall, Alliance’s senior vice president and CFO, said in a transcript of the call released Monday.

The search for ways to monetize these spare resources led the company to purchase Bitcoin mining equipment in 2020 and 2021, during one of the largest periods of price growth in Bitcoin history.

Marshall said the Boulder, Colorado-based company currently has 425 BTC on its balance sheet, worth $25 million at the time of writing. ARLP’s market capitalization is $2.8 billion, up 6% over the last five trading days.

This disclosure means the Alliance has been involved with Bitcoin for as long as MicroStrategy, the world’s largest Bitcoin holder, which first purchased BTC in August 2020.

“We’re not actually buying bitcoin or anything like that,” Marshall said. “We are mining Bitcoin with the miners we have.”

Marshall’s claims are supported by the company’s first quarter 8K report filed with the SEC. The report states that its balance sheet includes $30.3 million worth of “digital assets.”

The Alliance’s acceptance of Bitcoin is an example of how BTC mining, even if through non-renewable resources, can benefit the energy industry as a whole. Digital currency mining is location-independent and dynamic enough to scale back quickly when market conditions become unfavorable, making it a flexible means of demand response.

“Alliance Resources’ foray into Bitcoin mining is a logical step given the economic benefits and the ability of the process to harness underutilized power,” Nishant Sharma, founder of Bitcoin mining research firm BlocksBridge, told Decrypt. .

“Over time, we expect to see more Bitcoin mining pilot projects launched by other well-known energy companies,” Sharma added.

The Alliance claimed that its miners were utilizing “already paid for but underutilized power load,” implying that the company was not burning additional coal to mine more BTC. But some believe the alliance’s disclosure could still be a bad look for Bitcoin, which has been criticized by nonprofits and regulators for polluting the environment.

Daniel Batten, co-founder of CH4 Capital, is hesitant to draw any hasty conclusions about the company until further research is conducted, but acknowledges that the Alliance’s involvement “doesn’t help” the cause of Bitcoin environmentalists. I did.

“Given the low bar of analysis of Bitcoin’s environmental impact by GPUs and to date by many traditional media outlets, I think nuance will be lost,” Batten told Decrypt. “I’m still not sure if it would have burned down anyway.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.