Ethereum Emissions: A Bottom-up Estimate

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.