A long-abandoned Permian Basin oil field became the unlikely target of a cryptocurrency company's acquisition strategy, exposing a new and opportunistic logic reshaping how dying energy assets are valued in West Texas.
When a junior oil company in western Texas sold the rights to a long-depleted Permian Basin oil field to a cryptocurrency firm in late 2025, it looked like a footnote. It turned out to be a case study in how the economics of stranded energy are being rewritten by proof-of-work mining. Permex Petroleum Corporation, a small operator with acreage across the Permian and Delaware Basins, had assets that produced modest quantities of oil - but also vented substantial volumes of natural gas it had no affordable way to route to market. For a conventional oil company, that stranded gas was a liability. For 360 Energy Inc., an Austin-based oilfield technology firm with ambitions in crypto mining, it was a feedstock. The deal that followed illustrates a pattern repeating itself across the American oil patch: fields too marginal for hydrocarbons, too remote for pipelines, and too cheap to ignore for anyone who can turn gas into electricity and electricity into Bitcoin.
In September 2025, Permex Petroleum Corporation (CSE: OIL), a junior oil and gas company with operations across the Permian Basin, entered into an option agreement to purchase a portfolio of producing oil and natural gas wells from an ownership group that included Navidad Petroleum and TMR Exploration. The deal was neither enormous nor conventional. For a $75,000 cash payment, Permex secured a six-month option to acquire all of the group's interest in the underlying assets for a total consideration of $3 million, composed of cash and stock with a minimum cash component of $1.75 million.
What the company was after was not oil. It was gas - specifically, the stranded natural gas that the assets were already producing, generating approximately 4 megawatts of power across more than 50 producing wells and 20,000 net mineral acres of undeveloped leasehold. To Permex CEO Brad Taillon, the acquisition represented a direct bridge between two strategies the company had been building in parallel: hydrocarbon production and on-site bitcoin mining.
"We believe this option gives Permex the ability to not only potentially expand its gas production and behind-pipe reserves but could also further Permex's strategy of co-developing hydrocarbon and bitcoin assets across producing oil and gas properties," Taillon said at the time of announcement. The assets, he added, would be "turn-key prepared for the deployment of in-field bitcoin mining operations."
A month earlier, Permex had signed a non-binding letter of intent with 360 Energy, Inc., an Austin-based oilfield technology firm that had been developing what it calls In-Field Computing (IFC) technology - an off-grid bitcoin mining operation powered entirely by natural gas, requiring no existing gas, electric, or network infrastructure. That partnership provided the operational framework for what the Navidad-TMR acquisition was designed to supply: a captive, untapped gas resource that could be converted directly into computing power and, from there, into bitcoin.
To understand the logic behind the transaction, it helps to understand what stranded natural gas actually means in the Permian Basin in 2025 - and why it has become simultaneously a financial liability and an opportunity.
The Permian Basin, straddling West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is the largest and most productive oil field in the United States. It produces enormous quantities of oil and, with it, associated natural gas as an unavoidable byproduct. That gas needs to go somewhere. If a well sits near a pipeline, the gas flows into the midstream network and is sold. But if the well is remote - 10, 15, 20 miles from the nearest trunk line - the math on building new gathering infrastructure rarely works. The gas becomes stranded, with nowhere to go except up a flare stack or vented into the atmosphere.
The Permian's pipeline system has been chronically unable to keep up with production growth. Gas production in the basin climbed roughly 12 percent per year on average over the five years from 2021 through 2025, making it the fastest-growing gas-producing shale basin in the country behind only the Marcellus and Utica in Appalachia. The Waha Hub, the Permian's primary natural gas pricing benchmark, spent 158 days in negative-price territory in 2024 - a record at the time that 2025 was well on track to surpass. By October 2025, Waha daily cash prices bottomed out at negative $8.79 per MMBtu, forcing producers to curtail up to 20 percent of volumes and delay well completions. Producers were not just forgoing revenue on their gas - they were sometimes paying for someone to take it off their hands.
For an abandoned or low-production field with no pipeline access and already-minimal economics, these conditions made the traditional oil and gas calculus almost impossible to close. But they made the crypto mining calculus suddenly compelling.
360 Energy's IFC technology converts produced natural gas on-site into electricity through a generator and uses that electricity to run Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) computers - the specialized hardware that performs the computational work required to validate transactions on the bitcoin network and earn bitcoin as a reward. The system requires no pipeline. It requires no grid connection. It requires no network infrastructure beyond a satellite data link. A shipping-container-sized module can be hauled to a well pad and operational within days.
The economics are striking. According to 360 Energy's own published data, IFC deployments have generated gas netbacks ranging from $7 per Mcf to $44 per Mcf over the past five years, with a three-year average of $21 per Mcf. At a moment when Waha spot prices were trading at negative $8 per MMBtu, the contrast was stark. Taillon cited an estimate that IFC units could capture natural gas realizations of up to $10 per Mcf from assets that would otherwise be flared, stranded, or sold at a loss.
Permex was not operating in a vacuum. The firm it partnered with, 360 Energy, had by late 2024 attracted an equity investment from Halliburton Labs - the accelerator arm of Halliburton, the second-largest oilfield services company in the world. At the time of the investment, 360 Energy was operating 285 petahashes of bitcoin mining infrastructure across wellsites in Texas, all powered by otherwise stranded or flared natural gas. Halliburton framed the investment as a validation of IFC's potential to scale across upstream operations in the United States and abroad.
Chris Alfano, CEO of 360 Energy, stated that the Halliburton partnership would allow his team to work across the full oil and gas operating model to deploy IFC services at upstream companies in the US and internationally. The company offers producers multiple engagement structures: a zero-capital-expenditure option where producers simply sell their gas for a fixed price per Mcf, or a more active partnership arrangement where the producer shares in the upside of bitcoin mined. For frontier basins with limited midstream access - exactly the kind of asset Permex was assembling - the technology effectively removes the infrastructure barrier that made those assets uneconomic to begin with.
The Halliburton endorsement signaled something beyond 360 Energy's specific business. As industry analyst Chris Alfano observed at the time of the investment, leading publicly traded upstream oil and gas companies had for years been selling on-site natural gas to bitcoin miners. The next stage - crypto companies going further by directly acquiring the underlying oil and gas assets themselves - was a logical extension that the Permex transaction exemplified. 360 Energy's IFC system had by then been deployed at 14 sites across the US, including in Texas partnerships with Norwood Energy and operators in the Barnett Shale, with the company actively expanding operations across the lower 48 in 2025.
The deal Permex structured was unusual in another dimension: it treated an oil field less as an energy production asset and more as a computing power substrate. Taillon's language in the announcement reflected this framing clearly. The assets would be "turn-key prepared" for IFC deployment. The rationale for diversifying away from Permex's oil-heavy portfolio was not to find more oil - it was to secure a stable supply of gas that could be consumed on-site, without a counterparty, without a pipeline, without a price dependent on the Waha Hub's increasingly dysfunctional dynamics.
The $3 million total deal value - a figure modest even by junior oil company standards - underscored how far the market had repriced assets with stranded gas profiles. Fields that once commanded premiums based on their reserve bases were now being acquired on the logic of what their waste stream could power. The 20,000 net mineral acres of undeveloped leasehold in the deal, while noted in Permex's announcement, was secondary to the immediate monetization opportunity represented by the 4 megawatts of in-place gas production.
Ryan Dusek, a commodity risk advisor at Opportune who has studied the convergence of bitcoin mining and Permian Basin oil production, has described the relationship between the two industries as "one of the very few true symbiotic relationships there are." Producers get an outlet for gas they cannot flare. Miners get power at costs well below grid rates - typically between $0.02 and $0.05 per kilowatt-hour from wellhead gas. Neither party needs a pipeline. In a basin where gas has been selling below zero, that arithmetic carries real weight.
No accounting of this story is complete without confronting its environmental dimension - which is genuinely contested.
The affirmative case is straightforward. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, has a greenhouse warming potential roughly 80 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. When gas is flared, it is combusted to CO2 - a significant improvement over direct methane emission, but still a loss. Open flare stacks typically achieve only 92 percent combustion efficiency, meaning some methane escapes uncombusted regardless. IFC generators, by contrast, achieve near-complete combustion - 99 percent or above - while simultaneously converting the energy into something economically productive. Research cited by Crusoe Energy, a pioneer in the space, suggests its operations reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by roughly 63 percent compared to continued flaring.
The skeptical case is also straightforward. Attaching economically viable new uses to abandoned or low-production gas wells is likely to extend the productive life of those assets and potentially delay the decommissioning of fossil fuel infrastructure that would otherwise be retired. Environmental groups studying similar dynamics in Pennsylvania concluded that wellhead crypto mining appeared to follow a predictable pattern: fields sat inactive, were acquired cheaply, saw modest resumed production, and were then attached to cryptocurrency infrastructure a few months into their productive life. Whether the net effect of a given IFC deployment is better or worse for the climate than the counterfactual - which might include eventual well plugging, not just continued flaring - is a calculation that depends heavily on assumptions about what happens to the wells absent the intervention.
The Permex transaction is not unique - but it is a useful crystallization of a strategy that is becoming more systematized. As the Waha pricing crisis deepened through late 2025, …