Bitcoin mining will use 0.5 percent of the world’s energy by the end of the year, according to newly published, peer-reviewed study.

Written by economist and PricewaterhouseCoopers blockchain specialist Alex de Vries, the paper, “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” calculates bitcoin’s current energy use and its likely direction. The findings: At a minimum, bitcoin mining — the creation of bitcoin as well as the process by which transactions are verified — is now consuming 2.55 gigawatts a year, roughly the amount of energy used by the Republic of Ireland over the course of a year.

In the paper, published in the journal Joule, de Vries emphasized repeatedly that his estimates are on the absolute low side of how much power bitcoin mining is consuming. They come from estimating the number of devices connected to the bitcoin network, estimated to be around 10,000 nodes, but each node could be a single device or a group of machines at a mining facility.

The paper does make some presumptions, with the calculation marking “the first time that bitcoin miner production has been estimated with the help of upstream [chip] production numbers,” de Vries wrote. “Given the ongoing secrecy of bitcoin miner manufacturers, this could prove to be a valuable addition to the toolkit for substantiating trends in bitcoin’s electricity consumption.”

Although de Vries tries to remain conservative in his estimates, he does believe that the amount of energy being used by bitcoin mining is multiple times higher, saying that mining operators could be sucking down as much as 7.67 gigawatts annually by the end of this year.

“With the bitcoin network processing just 200,000 transactions per day, this means that the average electricity consumed per transaction equals at least 300 kWh, and could exceed 900 kWh per transaction by the end of 2018,” de Vries noted. “Bitcoin has a big problem, and it is growing fast.”

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