A Business Intelligence Application for Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrencies

Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies create electricity demand globally, but their carbon consequences depend on where the electricity is generated. This study presents CryptoCarbonApp, an open-source R Shiny business intelligence application that expresses network-level energy and emissions estimates for four PoW cryptocurrencies through the electricity system of Jordan, whose generation mix averages about 0.39 kgCO2/kWh. The analysis reports network totals with conditional sensitivity ranges and examines an assumed spatial allocation of mining activity with a 20,000-replication Monte Carlo procedure. On Jordan’s mix, Bitcoin’s network demand corresponds to about 66 MtCO2 per year (50–83 MtCO2 for a ±25% change in network consumption); because this demand is roughly eight times Jordan’s national electricity supply, the figure is an intensity benchmark, not a forecast. A 50 MW facility would emit about 154 ktCO2 per year. The allocation procedure cannot identify actual mining hotspots, and raising the renewable share of supply from 10% to 60% reduces emissions by 55.6% under static accounting. At the September 2025 hashprice, efficient hardware breaks even at about USD 0.12/kWh before other costs, below Jordan’s business tariff of USD 0.169/kWh. Energy labelling at supervised virtual asset service providers is therefore proposed as a conditional, demand-side complement to mining-side instruments.