Nobody is desalinating their own water at home using waste heat. Oil wells are often located in an area where it would make no sense to transport a bunch of water to desalinate (perhaps that's a good idea for sea-based wells though).
I don't know enough about co2 extraction or electrolysis, only that those also don't sound like things people are likely to do at home.
> Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
This is incorrect because a mining-based heater will be new and use electricity as its fuel source. You can't compare with an old electric heater because a replacement will obviously be new. You can't compare with hydrocarbon heaters, because you need to convert to electricity to run a computer. That means meaning we need to compare with a new electric heater. That comparison is unfavorable, however, because it will probably be based on a heat pump. Heat pumps have efficiency much greater than 100% (usually around 200%) by takng heat from the outside air or ground.
A better example would be something like an electric oven, which typically does just use resistive heating. However, this sort of undermines the argument, since the energy spent on heating food isn't that much compared to things like residential and commercial heating.
There's nothing that makes the idea specific to Bitcoin mining. That's just the implementation they chose for their first product. The idea is to recapture heat generated by computation and use it for another purpose.
1. Flared gas from oil wells. Natural gas is a byproduct of extracting oil from the Earth. In the past this was vented straight to the atmosphere, which is a huge waste of energy and causes horrible air pollution. Capturing this gas isn’t useful for many applications because it happens in remote areas, but if there’s a network connection it can be harnessed for mining Bitcoin.
2. Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
Neither of these is specific to Bitcoin, because the general concept is running a computer at full load for an extended duration. Bitcoin mining just happens to be the most logical (and profitable) application of that concept at present.