Stronghold owns the Scrubgrass cogeneration plant in western Pennsylvania which generates power from abandoned coal mines.

Stronghold Digital Mining has raised $ 105 million through two private equity placements for its Scrubgrass Generation Plant power generation facility in Venango County, Pennsylvania. The utility converts waste coal from abandoned mines in the area to generate electricity on the scale of a large-scale hydropower plant. Stronghold uses this energy to mine cryptocurrencies including bitcoin. (Yahoo Finance)

Investors in the private equity placements include MG Capital, various family offices, and Greg Beard, a former senior partner at the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Beard is also listed as Stronghold’s co-chairman and CEO.

Scrubgrass Generation Plant

Scrubgrass eliminates 200 tons of waste coal for each bitcoin mined by Stronghold. According to state regulators, waste coal is a Tier II alternative energy source that has an environmental impact equivalent to that of hydropower.

Scrubgrass has reclaimed previously abandoned waste coal sites across Pennsylvania resulting in the cleansing of miles of Pennsylvania waterways that were formerly unable to sustain aquatic life due to pollution from waste coal acid drainage (AMD). Rain or snow mixes with the sulfur in these coal wastes and the resulting solution seeps into waterways, threatening ecological life.

Waste coal at these sites was the result of coal mining operations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and according to Stronghold, it has already reclaimed 1,000 acres of “once-unusable” land.

Stronghold takes the waste coal, converts it to energy for use in mining cryptos like BTC, and then returns the cleaned-up land to local communities.

Clean mining of bitcoin

“Our ownership of the Scrubgrass Plant [in Kennerdell, Pa.] combined with the environmental benefits which accrue to the region allows us to mine bitcoin at what we believe to be some of the lowest costs in the industry while making a transformational contribution to the environment,” said Greg Beard.

“Coal waste fires have been wreaking havoc in my home state of Pennsylvania for the last hundred years,” Stronghold co-Chairman Bill Spence said in a statement. “Simply put, we employ 21st-century crypto mining techniques to remediate the impacts of 19th and 20th-century coal mining in some of the most environmentally neglected regions of the United States.”

Stronghold will use the funds raised to continue its clean-up activities in Pennsylvania, purchase additional crypto mining hardware, and develop new facilities to clean up waste coal if required.

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Images credit: Scrubgrass