A WASTE COAL-BURNING, CRYPTO-MINING PIRATE SHIP SETS SAIL
In March 2017, Bill Spence got suddenly, catastrophically sick. A part of his pancreas died. His gall bladder failed. When he got to the emergency room, the doctors found kidney cancer. “Let’s see if you can make it 48 hours,” his doctor told him.
Just a few weeks earlier, Mr. Spence, a cheerful tower of a man whose signature ponytail had been updated to a gray man bun, had walked into the Scrubgrass waste coal plant that he had just bought and hung a black pirate flag in the office. The coal plant was a pirate ship, he announced. “We sink or profit together.”
The power plant and the mountains of waste coal that it burns were now in the hands of this group, not the large corporations and hedge funds that had owned it until then. Then, all of a sudden, the captain of the ship was on death’s door.
When Scrubgrass’ general manager, R.J. Shaffer, learned the news, he printed out a photo of the Venango County power plant and delivered it to Mr. Spence’s hospital bedside. The picture had two pirate flags, the signatures of the crew, and was captioned: “The ‘Power’ of Healing.”
“I knew it would be an inspiration for him to get better,” Mr. Shaffer said.
And Mr. Spence did. The recovery left him homebound for several years, but it also left him with plenty of time to
