This is the second podcast I have had the honor to have Mark Lancaster stop by and talk about great projects in the energy, bitcoin, cannabis, and ESG space. This was a lot of fun, and even more cool information on ESG, Bitcoin, and even Cannabis. It is about using all forms of energy, in the most effective way to maximize output, and profits and with the least environmental impact. Thank you Mark for stoping by! – Stu
00:00 – Intro
00:44 – Knowing Mark Lancaster and the Logo Turning black. Gold Green
01:57 – Talks about ESG
03:27 – Talks about Natural Gas
06:57 – Talks about Flaring Gas and Pipelines
10:58 – Talks about Carbon Credit
13:54 – Carbon Taxes
15:42 – Power Generation
17:51 – What are the things that most people ask for you to help them?
20:49 – Talks about Bitcoin
22:55 – Cannabis as a Substitute for Electric power
25:48 – Would royalties be paid out from the Bitcoin miners for the natural gas that they buy?
29:20 – Whats coming around the corner for Mark Lancaster and for turning Black gold Green
31:16 – Outro
Please connect with Mark on LinkedIn here: Mark Lancaster.
Automatic Video Transcription may be edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter. – Check out the YouTube or podcast for the actual language. (I am from Texas and Oklahoma, so I talk funny).
Stuart Turley [00:00:03] All right. Hey, welcome, everybody. Today’s a great day because I get to talk to somebody on my podcast. My name’s Dudley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group, and I’ve got a great guest here. He is Mark Lancaster.
Stuart Turley [00:00:21] He’s the managing director for Turning Black, Gold, Green. And I love the logo and I love the hat. Mark welcome. Aint that a great logo turning black. Gold. Green. Hey, we got a lot of stuff going on. Mark, tell us what is going on with you personally and we’ll jump into the rest of it here.
Mark Lancaster [00:00:44] Hey, Stuart, I tell you, I was watching. Our goal at turning black, gold, green has been just that. You know, we sort of started this up four or five years ago when turning black gold into a green commodity was was important and letting people realize it’s not such a bad polluter as people make it out to.
Mark Lancaster [00:01:06] And here lately, the last two years we’ve been it’s more for monetizing the black gold or the gas and turning it into a way that money can be had. And typically this by converting wasted gas either by flared or stranded gas and turn it into crypto and Bitcoin data centers. You know, there’s a lot of different ways that you can monetize energy. And then.
Stuart Turley [00:01:35] Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I like the idea of stranded gas being turned into municipalities and in electricity. That’s ESG. And it also helps cut consumer prices down For cities that have to buy electricity, you might as well generate your own electricity. I mean, have you sold any of those?
Mark Lancaster [00:01:57] Yeah. I mean, there there are here in Texas, you know, we have something was called ERCOT and is not necessarily the most dependable form of electricity. So a lot of cities are looking at putting in their own backup or main power system where they’re depending on natural gas to go into their own generators. So they’re providing their citizens electricity and they don’t have to worry about buying the electricity from the grid.
Mark Lancaster [00:02:25] Because what happens in Texas, all of the electricity is made in the west part of the state and flows to the east. You know, Electricity, only flows one way in Texas. So if you’re in Dallas and the transmission lines get interrupted west of you, Dallas is out of electricity. You won’t get any more electricity.
Mark Lancaster [00:02:46] And so when you have such a large state as Texas is, you can have a weather event in the western portion of the state, which greatly affects the eastern portion. And if something happens in the eastern portion, who cares? It doesn’t bother us, you know.
Stuart Turley [00:03:03] But we we only have, I think, to react, I mean, to locations for nuclear reactors. But there’s four reactors in those two locations. So, man, we we need more off of that coming off of the grid for these cities, for these Bitcoin miners and everything else. So it really helps reduce the transmission of natural gas.
Mark Lancaster [00:03:27] Well, you know, the problem with natural gas as a way to create electricity is that five years ago, if you wanted to build a gas plant in West Texas, really way, you could do it. Well, the only time you’re going to operate is in the summer.
Stuart Turley [00:03:47] Oh,.
Mark Lancaster [00:03:48] Because in the winter, nobody needs electricity for for for heating their homes most people are on natural gas. So the problem I run into as us all now is now who’s going to make an economic investment into something that’s going to run for five months of the year and just sit there the rest of the time.
Mark Lancaster [00:04:06] So now here these Bitcoin miners come along and now they’re taking all that excess space when the plant would normally be down and they’re buying the electricity so the plants running 24 hours a day all the time. So now the plants are able to be profitable.
Stuart Turley [00:04:22] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:04:23] Which helps the community. I mean, because now the people have there’s more jobs.
Stuart Turley [00:04:27] Oh, yeah.
Mark Lancaster [00:04:28] More Dollars being spent.
Stuart Turley [00:04:29] And Mark, I’m going to give a little inside baseball here for our listeners, and that is I truly enjoy watching all your activity in social and LinkedIn. And I mean, you’re you are really trying to solve problems. And I really like that when you say, Hey, I need this. Does anybody have a pad? I’ve got a client that needs this. And I’m you’re truly a matchmaker and a solutions guy in this area.
Mark Lancaster [00:05:00] But, you know, I’ve got. Over 28,000 connections on LinkedIn. Right. So when somebody needs something, all they do is they let me know what it is they need and I usually find an answer for them that day or something.
Mark Lancaster [00:05:13] So I try to help them out because there’s a lot of people on LinkedIn maybe have two or 3000 connections and.
Stuart Turley [00:05:19] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:05:20] And the more you have, the better off, you know, to talk about the strain and gas. The other other aspect of that, the oil industry’s, let’s say, 70, 80 years old.
Stuart Turley [00:05:30] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:05:31] Well, 20, 30 years ago, they were drilling oil wells and they made no concern about where the gas would go. Yeah, I’m sure most people in your audience understand that gas is a byproduct of oil production. And the reason why the gas comes out of the ground is it forces the oil to the wellbore and then you have to take the gas off the wellbore to relieve the pressure so the oil will flow to the surface.
Mark Lancaster [00:05:59] It’s almost exactly the same as when you go to McDonald’s and you get a Coca-Cola and you take a straw and you stick it in that cup. As soon as you do stick that straw on that cup, Coke comes out the top. That’s because the pressure inside of that straw is less than the pressure that’s in the cup.
Mark Lancaster [00:06:20] And so the reason why they want to get the gas out is so that they relieve the pressure inside of that straw or the oil tubing. And so the fluid will flow will flow more freely. So once that happens, now you now you have a vented gas event. Right. Which is.
Stuart Turley [00:06:36] Now.
Mark Lancaster [00:06:37] Considered bad.
Stuart Turley [00:06:38] Over the last ten years. The oil companies in Texas, I’m proud of the Texas oil companies and they have been doing an excellent job getting rid of that flaring on their own. And, you know, they’re they’re having the adding the pipelines and everything else and then effort through the Bitcoin and stuff. The amount of flaring has dropped dramatically.
Stuart Turley [00:07:01] I mean, you take a look at the EMV operators in the U.S. versus Iran, Iraq, and you see all these plumes of smoke and everything else over there. You look at our stuff and we’ve got a lot of great things going on.
Mark Lancaster [00:07:16] Well, but once again, you get into the problem of the infrastructure,.
Stuart Turley [00:07:20] Right? I mean, they’re. Yeah.
Mark Lancaster [00:07:22] And in the Middle East, the reason why they flare the gas is they have to take the pressure off the well and they have no way to take it to a consumer. Right. Unless they bottled it, you know. You know, that’s the only choice.
Mark Lancaster [00:07:39] And so what I was talking about earlier was like, so we’ve in a 60, 70 years ago, we drilled all these wells. No one ever built the infrastructure to have pipelines going all the way out because it wasn’t a necessary thing.
Mark Lancaster [00:07:51] And so now these wells that might have been in your family or someone, your family for 20 or 30 years, they’re getting yelled at because they’re venting or flaring their gas and that’s it and that’s a bad thing. And so that’s where I go in and say, hey, you know, you have X amount of gas. I’ll buy that from you. I’ll convert it to another form of money.
Stuart Turley [00:08:13] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:08:14] And so that works out for everybody. And a lot of times what happens is that the kind the government is not really granting new pipeline construction because they’re too difficult. So even if you wanted to put in a pipeline, you’d have difficulty, you know, and we have customers that come to us where the, you know, just had a recent guy in Montana where they had a 16 mile pipeline that the end of the pipeline were connected to a larger pipeline.
Stuart Turley [00:08:43] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:08:43] Got flooded out. So like a mile and a half of the pipeline was destroyed because of the flood.
Stuart Turley [00:08:49] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:08:51] So the person that owned the pipeline, well, they didn’t want to go and invest $2 million and all the hassle would going to take to rebuild it. So they just plugged it.
Stuart Turley [00:09:00] Oh, man.
Mark Lancaster [00:09:01] Now, all the operators on that 16 mile pipeline are gone. But what do we do?
Stuart Turley [00:09:07] I mean, do we just, like, not drill holes?
Mark Lancaster [00:09:10] Well, so so they have to cap their their bit so they can they still produce some oil, but not at the same rate that they were before. But wait, you came in there and tapped into that pipeline, capture all that gas, turn it into money, and now these guys will make $40,000 a month where they weren’t making anything. You know, they’re able to make more oil.
Mark Lancaster [00:09:31] So that’s what we look for. You know, there’s a lot of situations like that where the older oil fields and gas that’s available, but there was no way to market it, you know, and even in the even in the marketing of gas, if you are selling gas to a midstream plant, well, you normally had one midstream player to sell to and that guy could say, well, you know, we have way too much gas today we’re going to turn up the pressure and you’re going to have to. To compressor on your gas to get it in the line or we’re going to just pay you.
Stuart Turley [00:10:06] Yeah,.
Mark Lancaster [00:10:07] I mean, cause the you know, they had a monopoly on buying a gas if you’re going in there. And so now you give them a choice you know we’re at the world really capitalism. And now we can say, hey, you can sell that gas to that pipeline.
Stuart Turley [00:10:20] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:10:20] With all the things that comes with it. Or you can sell it some other way.
Stuart Turley [00:10:24] I got a two or three. I got a lot of these questions for you. And with our discussion of finance and ESG and carbon credits and all of this kind of stuff, all folds in together. And so what are your thoughts on the carbon credits as they’re coming in?
Stuart Turley [00:10:44] And we’ve got all of finance. You know, everybody’s worried about the banks and everything else, and they’re really looking to [00:10:50]alternative investments [0.8s] and in these things. So do you want to start with the carbon credits and how that applies into this area?
Mark Lancaster [00:10:58] Well, it’s really pretty interesting because we’re able to for me, a [00:11:02]carbon credit [0.5s] is basically whenever you take a form of carbon and convert it into something else that’s not harmful.
Stuart Turley [00:11:10] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:11:10] And what we do is we take C for methane, the natural gas, and convert it from a form that it was released to atmosphere would be considered a greenhouse gas and we convert it into electricity.
Stuart Turley [00:11:24] Right?
Mark Lancaster [00:11:25] And once we convert it into electricity, then we can do a lot of different things with that electricity. We can clean water, we can run equipment, we can run data center, we can do a lot of stuff. And then at the same time, we can also take, if you consider the flare gas or stranded gas, a waste stream from the oilfield.
Mark Lancaster [00:11:46] The waste stream that we have when we create electricity is our exhaust coming off of our generators. And the exhaust heat is at 700 to 900 degrees.
Stuart Turley [00:11:57] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:11:58] And so now we can take another waste stream from the oil company, which is our produced water, because another another aspect of the oil is that you get water out of the ground and we can just simply evaporate that water. And the only thing that’s going to evaporate is pure H2O, and it just goes up in steam and goes up into the atmosphere, will come back down somewhere as rain.
Stuart Turley [00:12:19] You’re talking about our whole complete enclosed system for air. That’s pretty darn cool, man.
Mark Lancaster [00:12:27] Yeah. I mean, and then then we can condense that steam back into water if we wanted to. In some places, we can take our exhausts. Like in Canada, they take the exhaust and they run it into greenhouses, and they can farm year round.
Mark Lancaster [00:12:41] They grow strawberries in Alberta at 12 months of the year. You know, that’s the strangest thing when you think they get 15 feet of snow on the ground and they got all these strawberries from, you know, and but that’s what the environmental people wanted to do. So they thought they’d put a tax on anything that created carbon. But then they allow you to have a credit if you convert that carbon into something else.
Stuart Turley [00:13:06] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:13:06] And so a lot of companies are talking about being green are net zero emissions. That’s what they do. They still make the emission, but then they go buy driving credits. So then they can say, well, we’re net zero. We might be doing doing X over here, but over here we’re doing Y and it balances out that.
Stuart Turley [00:13:28] That to me is just amazing considering the cost of carbon taxes. Before the show we were talking about how much the taxes are going to be on the carbon, the output. It’s just amazing. And in that the stage in carbon taxes that you’re going to start having there some real incentive to cut those down.
Mark Lancaster [00:13:54] Well, you know, the whole the whole goal of the current administration is to minimize fossil fuel consumption. Is the e minimize fossil fuels by making it more expensive. You know, but unfortunately, when you don’t have another choice, you’re going to have to pay that expense and not buy something else.
Mark Lancaster [00:14:13] I mean, the goal of the Obama administration was to have nitrogen gasoline be 350 to $4 a gallon, which they thought would make more people go on to electric cars. You know, But I was watching a there’s a TV show on CBS on Monday night called the the Neighborhood. And one of the characters had a bought a car, an electric car.
Stuart Turley [00:14:36] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:14:38] And he was begging his dad to letting plug it in, plug his car in. He’s going to have to go somewhere. And the only place he can charge it is going to take 2 hours and and it was just funny. I mean, so, you know, a lot of non electric cars may be interesting in some places, but it’s not the the thing for everybody.
Stuart Turley [00:14:57] Right. My father in law just took a trip from. Oklahoma City to California. And it was a Goat Roat. I mean, in Texas and Oklahoma, we can say Goat Roat. And I mean, it was awful. They kept having to recharge and they had to wait in line.
Stuart Turley [00:15:16] And for long haul roads, it’s tough to do a thing on that. So I like the idea. But 70% of the electricity in the U.S. is made by coal and fossil fuels and oil. And, you know, the back east is oil. So, you know, it’s a little tough. You can’t.
Mark Lancaster [00:15:40] Yeah, we’re selling a lot of power generation into California because a lot of those companies are they’re seeing the fact that their grid is just not going to have the electricity, you know, because there’s just too much demand and not enough supply will ever be there. So they have plenty of natural gas supply.
Mark Lancaster [00:16:00] So we’re putting in natural gas engines on everywhere they can so the different large companies can produce their own on their own micro-grid, which is really great, you know, because that allows more of that electricity to go back to individuals that can’t.
Stuart Turley [00:16:14] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:16:15] We’ve got three different electric vehicle charging stations that we’re building.
Stuart Turley [00:16:21] Right Nice!
Mark Lancaster [00:16:23] All of them are going to be hooked to a natural gas generator that’s going to be burning either propane or natural gas to create tricity or electric vehicles. So.
Stuart Turley [00:16:35] I’ll tell you, I love propane. I’ve got one of my places up here, and I love propane just because you don’t have to have the electricity if it goes down. You got he love I love propane. And then my generator for all the cabins here, I can flip a switch and run propane. I can run gasoline or I.
Stuart Turley [00:16:58] So I like having that redundancy in the different generators that can run on multi fuel. So I’m sold, you know, I’ll take two. Now as those carbon credits come around and we we sit back.
Stuart Turley [00:17:14] What’s the number one thing more people are asking for you right now because you’ve got this whole breadth of solutions for power and your Bitcoin is probably going to go through the roof here in the next bit for people getting off of the grid.
Stuart Turley [00:17:31] I mean, even if that tax that the Biden administration has in his budget doesn’t get passed, you know that once it’s mentioned, it’s going to keep being brought back up and you know how the politicians do that. But what are you seeing are the big, big draws right now that people want to call you for?
Mark Lancaster [00:17:51] Well, it’s mainly converting natural gas that doesn’t have a value and do something that does have value.
Stuart Turley [00:18:00] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:18:01] You know, and we try to do it in such a way where that the oil company gets a good price, the Bitcoin company gets a good price, and everybody’s happy, you know, So some Bitcoin miners, they want to get the gas for free because it’s like, well, you’re not selling it for nothing now.
Stuart Turley [00:18:17] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:18:18] Well, you know, that’s that’s true. But, you know, you know, everybody should make out on this deal, you know but I get 6 to 7 calls a day from people wanting to buy stranded gas and probably 4 or 5 calls a day for people wanting to sell stranded gas.
Stuart Turley [00:18:36] Nice.
Mark Lancaster [00:18:37] So we go and the people under contract say, okay, tell us what your specifications are for what you want to design. We’ll design a build the facility for you and then match that up with the location that’s going to have the right quantity of gas for you.
Stuart Turley [00:18:53] Now, when you say describe I sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, Mark, but last time we talked, you can go cradle to grave and I mean that is bitcoin farm to electrical to on a pad delivered in rolling, correct?
Mark Lancaster [00:19:07] Right.
Stuart Turley [00:19:07] Yeah. Because I just want everybody understand that it’s a one stop shop because sometimes that’s a little confusing when you say what kind of servers do I need, you know, and how much power is this server going to do? And you can walk in and drop the whole thing there.
Mark Lancaster [00:19:23] Yeah. And but we try to do it so that everybody that’s involved is a workable piece, you know, because like, we’re we’re putting these sites out on oil field locations. And oil field locations are typically built to a certain standard.
Mark Lancaster [00:19:37] So we try to build our pads to match that standard, try to be a good neighbor for the the leaseholder, the person that owns the land for the neighborhood, you know,.
Mark Lancaster [00:19:48] And a lot of times, you know, stranded gas by definition is usually out in areas where there’s no utilities already. So they’re usually out in the in the smaller, smaller rural parts of the Country.
Mark Lancaster [00:20:01] All of those generators and equipment requires employees. You know, so there’s a lot of people that are required to be hired. You know, and then, you know, if you hire seven people now, those seven people, they have to go eat once or twice a day. And so they have a restaurant. And then that restaurant employs people, you know, I mean,.
Mark Lancaster [00:20:22] So it’s just a big boom to a lot of economies and a lot of areas because the oil well, when it’s out there after it’s been drilled, they don’t do a whole lot more to it. Everything’s pretty much automated.
Stuart Turley [00:20:35] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:20:36] And and so now we’re just bringing in more economic growth for that area. You know, when people are looking at being a business development person for a city or whatever, bringing in data centers as a Bitcoin miners is a big deal. Fort Worth is has been doing it for a while.
Stuart Turley [00:20:54] Yeah.
Mark Lancaster [00:20:54] We’ve been talking to the city of Odessa, where they have a lot of facilities that in the downturn the manufacturing companies just say, well, we can fill those up with Bitcoin miners, bring in the electricity, start mining them, growing hydroponic, hydroponic vegetables, all sorts of other different things, employing people and turning an eyesore of a dilapidated building into something that could be really nice and good looking. We’re even looking at doing it in east of Houston is Houston has a really large opportunity zone,.
Stuart Turley [00:21:27] Right,.
Mark Lancaster [00:21:28] And an opportunity zone basically for the first ten years, you pay zero tax on any capital gains that you have.
Mark Lancaster [00:21:37] So if you’re making Bitcoin at $20,000 a Bitcoin and in seven years from now it’s worth $90,000, well, that 70,000 is not taxed as capital gains,.
Stuart Turley [00:21:50] Right?
Mark Lancaster [00:21:50] You know, because you made the investment to build something in an area where the city has really been really dilapidated. You know, oil is hiring people you know, there’s programs like it, University of Texas, a lot of different community colleges for training people to work on computers.
Mark Lancaster [00:22:08] There’s a lot of different things that the Bitcoin data center industry helps write a lot more than it hurts from the standpoint of using energy. The energy is used. Using is not normally something that anybody else is using to begin with.
Stuart Turley [00:22:23] You know, I just I was sitting here thinking one of my clients is trying to solve the opioid addiction by looking at cannabis as a substitute. He’s got a patent on that whole process and everything else.
Stuart Turley [00:22:40] And boy, a a farm sitting next to one of your solutions would actually be pretty good. You use the CO2 in there to grow the cannabis and you also get your electricity at a lower price.
Mark Lancaster [00:22:55] Yeah, well, what you wind up doing is that you can like a lot of containers, miners are put into like a 40 foot container.
Stuart Turley [00:23:02] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:23:03] And so you have the miners down one side of the container and you have the cannabis down the other, you know. And so you’re.
Stuart Turley [00:23:09] Already you’re already doing that.
Mark Lancaster [00:23:11] Yeah. So you get the heat off of the off the miners because they create heat. The main thing in cannabis CBD help all of that stuff. If they if they’re out of light for like 30 minutes, they immediately go to Bud. And when they go to Bud, they’re no longer a valuable, valuable commodity.
Stuart Turley [00:23:32] Wow.
Mark Lancaster [00:23:33] You know, and so that’s the reason why I don’t know. Back in the day when you’re in college, you know, I always had these guys in the charity house. They’d have these grow lights put into the closets and grow and grow, grow and stuff.
Mark Lancaster [00:23:48] And that was why Because you couldn’t just allow the sunlight to grow on. Because as soon as you got dark, well, they go to Bud and Flower and then you didn’t have did have a crop, you know. So they have to always be under light or grow light or something like that. So they’re always constantly just growing and not flowering.
Stuart Turley [00:24:07] Right. How fun. See, Mark, I’m so disappointed you’re already there. I mean, and I’m over here. Think I’m about to break my arm, bat myself on the back on. This is a good use for it because your strawberry story out of Canada was right in this same line.
Stuart Turley [00:24:24] And I’m like going, hey, because you got to look at the grow in the cycle and in Oklahoma, I don’t know if they just passed that law, but Oklahoma turned into the Wild West, you know, with the medical, their laws and stuff. So I’m surprised you don’t have an do you, if you had any, growing up in Oklahoma.
Mark Lancaster [00:24:45] Well, you know, but but it’s a big win win because let’s say growing the cannabis, you can locate that anywhere.
Stuart Turley [00:24:53] Right?
Mark Lancaster [00:24:54] You know, so you want to locate it wherever you get the most most effective economical form of electricity. You take a generator and you locate it where you find the most economical form of electric power.
Stuart Turley [00:25:08] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:25:08] Down the middle field where this well’s burning, 50 MW of gas, 100 inside the gas. Now you convert that to electricity, use the electricity to do bitcoin mining for heat. You’re making good profit off the bitcoin mining but then using the exhaust etc. to create cannabis. Cannabis, Hemp all that other shit.
Stuart Turley [00:25:28] Hey, I got a question for you because Mark, I don’t know the answer to this. And when you’ve gotten that stranded natural gas and you have the royalties in the owners of that, would royalties be paid out from the Bitcoin miners for the natural gas that they buy?
Mark Lancaster [00:25:48] Usually the landowner is got a contract with the oil company to get a certain percentage of whatever he sells as gas for.
Stuart Turley [00:25:55] Right.
Mark Lancaster [00:25:56] So the oil company pays that.
Stuart Turley [00:25:57] But the royalty owners are interested in having those Bitcoin mines on right there, because that’s going to be they don’t get paid for flared gas on royalties, but they get paid if he gets paid. Is that correct?
Mark Lancaster [00:26:13] In theory, in most states, in a lot of states, they’re supposed to get paid no matter what happens. But as a flare, I mean, but I was talking to a oil operator and and they visit their gas because they don’t have anywhere to put it. And when it comes to telling the state how much gas they may, they say zero.
Stuart Turley [00:26:35] Ohhhh… Right!
Mark Lancaster [00:26:35] You know, And so that’s where a lot of the problem happens with royalty owners is that, you know, if it’s vented or flared, they don’t get credit for it more often than not anyway, You know, so if it leases pass through way that creates electricity, there’s there’s no trail.
Stuart Turley [00:26:50] There’s no meter and there’s no paper trail. You just nailed it! That’s right!
Mark Lancaster [00:26:54] Yeah. Now, some oil companies have gone in and said, well, listen, what we want to do, instead of getting paid for the gas, we’ll take a percentage of the Bitcoin know. And we do that in some spaces where we’ll provide the gas in exchange for, you know, 15 or 20% of the Bitcoin.
Stuart Turley [00:27:12] Right.
Stuart Turley [00:27:13] And so it works out really well today. You know, if Bitcoin price goes up tomorrow, well, it works out even better. So.
Stuart Turley [00:27:20] I think it was what, 24k yesterday or today?
Mark Lancaster [00:27:24] I $24,881.
Stuart Turley [00:27:27] Yeah. So it was up quite a bit and I think the bank scare is kind of like got people a little nervous and looking for alternative investments.
Mark Lancaster [00:27:37] I guess two weeks ago it was 20,000 and then SVB did Digital Thing and then Signature Bank, which also had been involved in it, and cryptocurrency, they did their deal.
Stuart Turley [00:27:51] So you know, oh, what’s his name from Shark Tank He said if you’ve ever wanted to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you ever want to invest in banks don’t get out now. So yeah, if somebody wants ESG funds, they can call you and you can you have places that you can direct them to, right?
Mark Lancaster [00:28:14] Yeah. I mean, there are actually some funds that I know of where they they invest all of the money into getting the oil that’s converted into crypto, you know. And so.
Stuart Turley [00:28:28] Yeah, Oxy was the number one Fortune 500 last year. And I like the way that they’re leading into that carbon capture market. So Oxy’s really done a good job and then market the European market they went in green.
Stuart Turley [00:28:44] You know, BP used to be beyond petroleum, I think it was last week or the week before Loony came out and said, Oh, we got to get away from that. So they’re going to cut their renewables down because they can’t make any money on it and the other guys did better.
Stuart Turley [00:29:02] So, you know, hey, Mark, we’ve got about five more minutes. What is your last thought? You’ve got the last word in here and we want to hear what’s coming around the next for turning black, Gold, green. I love that had I love your logo, but tell me what’s coming around the corner for you.
Mark Lancaster [00:29:20] Well, looking at larger and larger sites where there’s just let’s say in Colorado and Kansas, these are places where people drill 20, 30 years ago oil wells because there was no infrastructure, no pipelines they never opened up the gas formations.
Mark Lancaster [00:29:37] There’s a lot of gas that’s sitting in the ground that we can convert into electricity and monetize it. And we’re going after quite a lot of that right now. And so that way we can monetize a wasted resource of the planet and turn it into a beneficial resource, which is the electricity, cash flow, employment, all the things that come when you move money from one. Another. So we’re doing a lot of that.
Stuart Turley [00:30:03] Nice. You know, this is exciting, especially from the standpoint that the United States grid has got some problems coming around the corner.
Stuart Turley [00:30:13] And it you know, when you put the renewables on here and you I’ve talked to all people and you have the additional requirements for having reserve energy so that you can run it through you got to put 180% extra renewable energy on there or storage, which drives the cost and more coal is being used in, you know, more nuclear.
Stuart Turley [00:30:39] So we’ve now got a paradigm shift because renewables are too expensive. You’ve got a way to turn as back years. Your expertise is very much needed in in all the kinds of area. Did I compliment you? Sorry.
Mark Lancaster [00:30:55] And I say it again. My Effort. I appreciate the opportunity. Stuart. I love listen to your show.
Stuart Turley [00:31:03] I will. Thank you very much and Mark, I cannot wait till our next one goes. If you’ve got an update, we want to hear it.
Mark Lancaster [00:31:10] Sounds Great!
Stuart Turley [00:31:10] So Thank You
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