DOE/EIA settle Riot Platforms/Texas Blockchain Council suit: withdraw the emergency crypto-mining electricity survey, agree to destroy data already collected, commit to a future notice-and-comment survey

Opening

On March 1, 2024 — eight days after Riot Platforms and the Texas Blockchain Council sued and secured a nationwide temporary restraining order (see 2024-02-22–riot-texas-blockchain-council-sue-doe-eia-862-tro) — the Department of Energy and EIA filed a “Notice of Agreement” resolving the suit. Per NCLA’s own case summary (the plaintiffs’ litigation counsel) and independent Utility Dive reporting published the same day, DOE and EIA agreed to withdraw the Cryptocurrency Mining Facilities Survey (Form EIA-862), destroy all data already collected from respondents, and withdraw their February 9, 2024 Federal Register notice proposing a three-year extension of the collection. In exchange, EIA committed to instead publish a new Federal Register notice proposing crypto-mining data collection through the normal Paperwork Reduction Act notice-and-comment process, with a 60-day public comment period. The court granted the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s motion to intervene as an additional plaintiff the same day, denied the pending preliminary-injunction request as moot (given the settlement), stayed the case, and administratively closed it. Docket 6:24-cv-00099 shows a termination date of March 1, 2024.

What Happened / Key Facts

Terms of the agreement (per NCLA case summary): “On March 1, DOE and EIA agreed to withdraw the survey and destroy any information they received in response to it. They also agreed to withdraw their February 9 notice, which sought comments about continuing the emergency survey. Instead, the agencies said they would publish a new notice in the Federal Register proposing data collection and allow comments to be submitted for 60 days afterward, in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act.”

A precise word-choice distinction worth preserving: the court’s own minute entry from the February 23, 2024 TRO hearing used the word “sequestered” to describe what would happen to data already collected (“Any information previously obtained from the survey will be sequestered”). The final settlement terms as characterized by NCLA (the plaintiffs’ own litigation counsel) and by Utility Dive’s contemporaneous, editorially independent reporting both use the stronger word “destroy.” Both characterizations trace to real primary/near-primary sources; they are not necessarily contradictory (a “sequester now, destroy later” sequence between the Feb 23 TRO and the Mar 1 final settlement is plausible), but the exact operative destruction-commitment language in the settlement order itself (docket entries 24-25) was not independently retrieved as underlying PDF text for this pass — see Research Gaps.

No successor mandatory survey has been published as of August 2026. A Federal Register API search of all Energy Department and EIA documents mentioning “cryptocurrency mining” returns exactly one result: the February 9, 2024 notice tied to the now-withdrawn survey. No new Federal Register notice proposing a crypto-specific mandatory collection has been published in the two-and-a-half years since the settlement, despite EIA’s March 2024 commitment to publish one.

What has happened instead, per CRS Report R48914 (April 22, 2026): EIA made no further attempt to collect crypto-mining-specific data through 2024 and 2025. In December 2025, EIA’s Administrator was reported (Reuters) to be planning new surveys including one on data centers generally. On March 25, 2026, EIA launched three voluntary pilot field studies “to evaluate energy consumption in data centers” — explicitly data-center-wide, not crypto-mining-specific: per EIA’s own press release, the pilots cover 196 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington state, and the Northern Virginia-DC region, web-based in the first two and in-person interviews in the latter. Crypto-mining facilities that also function as data centers may be incidentally captured, but this is not a targeted crypto-mining survey. Per an April 9, 2026 letter from EIA Administrator Tristan Abbey to Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren (cited in CRS R48914 and reported by WIRED), EIA states: “Following evaluation of the pilot studies and resulting data, we currently plan to develop a mandatory survey(s) under the notice and public comment procedures of the Paperwork Reduction Act” — i.e., a possible future mandatory collection is now explicitly contingent on the pilot studies’ outcome, with no committed timeline.

Pending legislative alternative: two bills before the 119th Congress would statutorily direct data collection that the litigated-away EIA-862 does not currently provide — the Clean Cloud Act of 2025 (S. 1475 / H.R. 6179, would direct EPA and EIA jointly to collect cryptomining/data-center electricity data) and the Data Center Transparency Act (H.R. 6984, would direct EPA and EIA to report on data-center energy, water, and emissions). Neither has been enacted as of this research pass.

Why This Event Matters

This closes the loop the ticket set out to document: a mandatory federal data-collection effort was attempted, challenged in court within weeks, and abandoned by settlement — with the agency itself committing, and then not following through for over two years, to replace it through the ordinary rulemaking process. The public record supports describing this as litigated and withdrawn, not merely allowed to lapse: EIA did not choose administratively to drop the survey: it was legally compelled to stop within 24 hours of a TRO motion, and settled rather than litigate the “public harm” emergency-justification question on the merits. What comes after — whether the Paperwork-Reduction-Act promise EIA made in March 2024 is honored — remains open and is itself now trackable against a specific administrator’s specific written commitment (the Abbey letter).

Function, not intent: the sequence produces a public information vacuum on crypto-mining electricity consumption that persists to the point of this research (August 2026), regardless of what any party’s litigating purpose was. Whether that vacuum was anyone’s goal is a separate, open question this record does not resolve.

Broader Context

Connects to the state-level parallel at 2025-08-11–puct-sues-ag-paxton-crypto-mining-data and the synthesis at the-crypto-energy-data-gap. The absence this settlement produces is the specific reason bitcoin-mining-as-electricity-price-floor cannot currently be adjudicated at national/aggregate scale using government data, and why the field instead relies on Cambridge CCAF and Digiconomist’s disputed private estimates.

Research Gaps

• The underlying settlement order and “Notice of Agreement” PDF text (docket entries 24-25, W.D. Tex. 6:24-cv-00099) were not independently retrieved — only docket-summary text and NCLA’s/Utility Dive’s characterizations. Pulling the actual order would resolve the “sequester” vs. “destroy” precision question definitively.
• Whether EIA’s March 25, 2026 data-center pilot studies, if they mature into a mandatory survey, will include a crypto-mining-specific reporting category or facility flag is not yet determinable from the public record.
• Status of the Clean Cloud Act of 2025 and the Data Center Transparency Act in the 119th Congress (committee status, any votes) was not tracked in this pass.

Related Entries

• 2024-02-22–riot-texas-blockchain-council-sue-doe-eia-862-tro
• 2025-08-11–puct-sues-ag-paxton-crypto-mining-data
• the-crypto-energy-data-gap
• bitcoin-mining-as-electricity-price-floor
• ercot-miner-curtailment-subsidy
• epic-inv6-energy-systems-convergent-demand-shock