Wolgemuth adds greenhouse to bitcoin proposal

Chuck Vandenberg, Pen City Current Editor

LEE COUNTY – The much-maligned developer of a proposed bit coin center has offered up a new way to possibly address the concerns Fort Madison residents have around the project.
Dustin Wolgemuth presented Lee County Supervisors with a new idea that includes aquaponics and a greenhouse to help capture emissions from a bitcoin mining facility that he still wants to build on Burlington Hill just east of Fort Madison.
The property is technically in the county, with the exception of two small parcels that the city has hung onto, despite requests by Wolgemuth to annex into the county.
Wolgemuth said he’s already approached the city with his new idea and wanted to present it to Supervisors to show nothing is being hidden from the public.
The new idea is to build a greenhouse near the bitcoin mining container that he said would contain up to 270 computers. The greenhouse would be used to capture the heat and CO2 coming off the mining container and use it to grow a variety of vegetables and shrimp.
Wolgemuth said nothing has been kept from the county on the project and he’s been working with the county since 2025. He said there were groups on the sidelines for the project to take life, but he’s not even close to that.
The county has put the project under a one-year moratorium while the county sorts out what an ordinance regulating those types of high-impact projects would look like. Wolgemuth wants the county to look at his new plans and allow a pilot project to go forward.
“We’ve been working on something that will work in every state, and I believe in every situation, to alleviate a food problem, and a political and environmental issue to use wasted heat,” he said.
The greenhouse is sitting in Gulfport waiting to be assembled and another container would sit on the property as a “grow room” for vegetables.
“It’s Iowa. So we’re gonna say vegetables and fruit,” he said.
He said the total space would be about 200 x 200 feet and would be nestled up against the hillside to reduce visibility and help with noise.
“This would be an initial pilot. One container and the decibel inside the container will be about the sound of a vacuum cleaner. You have 14 fans on top of the dry chiller. You can see somewhat the same operation in Des Moines County by the ethanol plant,” he said.
“Ours would be a dialectic coolant which reduces the heat and then is pumped through the chiller and cooled,” he said.
The only noise you would hear from this would the 14 fans on top of the chiller.”
According to the Florida Water and Pollution Control, a state where Wolgemuth has other growing operations, Bitcoin mining doesn't produce toxic chemical wastewater, but it creates two massive water-related challenges, including thermal pollution from open-loop liquid cooling systems (which discharge hot water into local ecosystems) and massive evaporative water loss from cooling towers. Wolgemuth’s project is proposed with a small footprint and doesn’t currently include cooling towers.
Many water-cooled Bitcoin mining operations pull cold water from local lakes or rivers and discharge it back at temperatures up to 98°F (37°C). This triggers harmful algal blooms and kills local fish populations. Instead of dumping hot water into nature, the closed-loop cooling system routes the heat directly into the aquaponic facility. Aquaponic systems require precise, warm water temperatures (especially for resilient fish like Tilapia or Arctic Char). The Bitcoin "waste heat" keeps the agricultural water at the perfect temperature year-round without requiring separate, expensive heating systems.
An aquaponic system would retain about 95% of the water because it remains in the closed loop system with only about 5% being evaporated. The closed water loops act as a radiator absorbing the nutrients and dissipating the computer heat, ultimately returning cooled, clean water back to the mining infrastructure and the fish. He said the fish waste would then be extracted and moved through the water loop back to help fertilize the plants in the grow room.
The new system doesn’t address the electrical usage, which Wolgemuth said would be less than 2.5 mw as it is currently proposed. Wolgemuth said Alliant Energy has shut down communications with him on the project until the county sorts out either zoning or an ordinance. But he said there is capacity on the former prison site for upwards of 13 megawatts from their transfer station so no new infrastructure would be needed. But, he said if it was mandated, he could bring in his own substation.
The noise pollution he said he’s trying to mitigate with some internal cooling techniques including the aquaponic system, which would reduce the noise emissions to the 14 fans and he said he does not yet have a decibel reading from his research vendors on what that would be.
Wolgemuth said after the meeting that he knows there is skepticism to overcome with the project, but he hasn’t hidden anything once the project became public knowledge.
“This was my retirement. This was just for me and wasn’t for the public, but I’ve been upfront with you about this project since I started,” he said.
Wolgemuth provided Pen City Current with a copy of an email to County Engineer Ben Hull from Aug. 11 of 2025, where he acknowledges his ownership of Octopus Investments LLC and his ambitions to install a bitcoin mining operation at that location, 2201 Hwy. 61.
He said he wanted to originally use natural gas to provide his own electricity. In that email, he said his plans are to build out to a 10MW facility using solar batteries. After digging deeper into the natural gas options, Wolgemuth said there wasn’t sufficient supply so he moved the project to electrical.
Wolgemuth began landscaping the property and taking down a good portion of the timber exposing the hillside and creating a couple service roads. That work isn’t considered construction so it doesn’t fall under the moratorium, but Wolgemuth cannot currently move any concrete or other infrastructure onto the property while the moratorium is in place.
Wolgemuth said he has applied for grants through the state to help with the new idea and aquaponic system. He is also working with experts in environmental engineering with Iowa State University to evaluate the plans.
“I have a professor who I have email confirmation that they want to sign a contract and send a grad student down. We want to do a three-year concept to bring this to fruition down here.”
The email outlines a budget cost of $75,000 for the assessment and the scope of the work and comes from Lu Liu, PhD., ENV SP, an assistant professor of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at ISU.
He said the university would like to quantify the recoverable thermal energy available across multiple scenarios; evaluate greenhouse and aquaponics thermal energy demands across the seasonal and operational scenarios; assess the potential for waste-heat utilization to offset conventional heating requirements for the fish and plant production; and develop preliminary energy balance models for integrated mining-agricultural systems.
“This means we put it in the corner, we turn it on and run it at 50%, 60%, 70% to get thermal output off the chillers. When these scale, they do produce heat and we believe there is enough heat to provide ambient temperature in the greenhouse and provide humidity inside the greenhouse and use that and pump it back into the grow room,” he said.
Wolgemuth said he would never use Air Mining because that would absolutely be a burden on the neighborhood.
“The big guys are what everybody is worried about. Now the air mining would be obnoxious. I would hear air mining at my place on Avenue B so I would never do that,” he said.
He said all the negative publicity around the project forced him and his partners to revisit the concept and consider what has been working at facilities in Florida.
“We got push back from that so we knew had to come up with another concept. But our Florida project has natural gas, and our cultivation in Illinois we actually pay to have natural gas to be pumped in for a CO2 burner, which is basically a generator to pump out C02 and, in cultivation,that makes your product 30 to 35% larger.”
“This has been our concept in Florida for some time now and, after my business partner brought it up, I said he was crazy. ‘We don’t need to do this, there’s no zoning up there’. And he said we were going to have to do this here,” Wolgemuth said.
He said giving organic food back through a non-profit is a way he can give back to the community.  When asked how he overcomes the negative publicity that’s accompanied the proposed project he said this is it.
“I think I’m here,” Wolgemuth said. “Giving the food and the byproduct away to schools and food banks and helping us grow our own food.”