Ethereum Emissions: A Bottom-up Estimate

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed bottom-up analysis of Ethereum's energy consumption and emissions, tracking the entire history from inception to the merge, improving accuracy over previous top-down estimates.

Contribution

It introduces a bottom-up methodology for estimating Ethereum's energy use and emissions, moving beyond prior rough top-down approaches.

Findings

Ethereum's energy consumption was significantly high during PoW era.

The emissions estimate varies based on mining locations and hardware efficiency.

Post-merge, Ethereum's energy use drastically decreased.

Abstract

The Ethereum ecosystem was maintained by a distributed global network of computers that required massive amounts of computational power. Previous work on estimating the energy use and emissions of the Ethereum network has relied on top-down economic analysis and rough estimates of hardware efficiency and emissions factors. In this work we provide a bottom-up analysis that works from hashrate to an energy usage estimate, and from mining locations to an emissions factor estimate, and combines these for an overall emissions estimate. We analyze the entire history of PoW Ethereum, from creation to the merge.