Context : The solar coronal heating problem has been an open question in the science community since 1939 .
One of the proposed models for the transport and release of mechanical energy generated in the sub-phorospheric layers and photosphere is the magnetic reconnection model that incorporates Ohmic heating which releases a part of the energy stored in the magnetic field .
In this model many unresolved flaring events occur in the solar corona , releasing enough energy to heat the corona .

Aims : The problem with the verification and quantification of this model is that we can not resolve small scale events due to limitations of the current observational instrumentation .
Flaring events have scaling behavior extending from large X-class flares down to the so far unobserved nanoflares .
Histograms of observable characteristics of flares , show powerlaw behavior , for both energy release rate , size and total energy .
Depending on the powerlaw index of the energy release , nanoflares might be an important candidate for coronal heating ; we seek to find that index .

Methods : In this paper we employ a numerical 3D-MHD simulation produce by the numerical code Bifrost , which enable us to look into smaller structures , and a new technique to identify the 3D heating events at a specific instant .
The quantity we explore is the Joule heating , a term calculated directly by the code , which is explicitly correlated with the magnetic reconnection because it depends on the curl of the magnetic field .

Results : We are able to identify 4136 events in a volume 24 \times 24 \times 9.5 \textrm { Mm } ^ { 3 } ( i.e . 768 \times 786 \times 331 grid cells ) of a specific snapshot .
We find a powerlaw slope of the released energy per second equal to \alpha _ { P } = 1.5 \pm 0.02 , and two powerlaw slopes of the identified volume equal to \alpha _ { V } = 1.53 \pm 0.03 and \alpha _ { V } = 2.53 \pm 0.22 .
The identified energy events do not represent all the released energy , but of the identified events , the total energy of the largest events dominate the energy release .
Most of the energy release happens in the lower corona , while heating drops with height .
We find that with a specific identification method that large events can be resolved into smaller ones , but at the expense of the total identified energy releases .
The energy release which can not be identified as an event favours a low energy release mechanism .

Conclusions : This is the first step to quantitatively identify magnetic reconnection sites and measure the energy released by current sheet formation .