This week we discuss Wyoming's plan to bury blades in sealed coal mines, a Chinese patent that seems linked to subsea attacks, and a ruling that threw out the possibility of train-transported liquified natural gas in the US.
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Allen Hall: Wyoming gets creative with turbine blade recycling while concerns mount over submarine cable security in European waters. Plus, a federal ruling on LNG transport poses new challenges for East Coast energy plants. This is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines.
com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now, here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
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Phil Totaro: We have currently more than 100 attendees representing more than 50 different companies, and we've got more than 40 speakers, um, who are, or panelists who are going to be talking about a diverse array of topics, including, uh, things like lightning, Uh, damage and detection and prevention, uh, damage prevention, um, uh, insurance, uh, implications of, uh, operations maintenance in Australia, um, uh, leading edge erosion.
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Allen Hall: Well, before the Biden administration left office, they approved decommissioned wind turbine power. Blades as fill material in coal mine reclamation. Uh, that approval came after nearly a four year review within the state's proposal. So the state of Wyoming had a proposal to do this, but it needed to get, uh, reviewed by the federal government.
That. The Wyoming proposal had already passed in the Wyoming legislature in about 2020. So it's been sitting in quite a while for the feds to make a decision. So they made a decision before they left office. This solution, uh, addresses both mine reclamation needs and obviously the challenge with what to do with all the wind turbine blades.
So it kind of goes like this, uh, you can fill the hole essentially where the Coal mine was, I think there's a maximum limit as to the height that you can fill there, but it has to be all above groundwater, right? So you can't put wind turbine blades in someplace where it'd be in the groundwater. And you have to note it, mark it.
There's a bunch of paperwork things that happen there, but there's a lot of blades can fill a mine, Joel, because those mines in Wyoming are huge.
Joel Saxum: I think this is a good use of, uh, of Uh, of that facility simply because there's a lot of rules in place EPA environmental protection wise for these reclaimed coal mines because they don't want anything that's in that mine or as a part of that mining operation to leach out, leak out, move out, either way.
So putting wind turbine blades in as a part of this process, like what we know about turbine blades is they're, you know, mainly inert. There's not a whole lot of things that can leach into the ground anyways. But there, if there was, they're being basically put into a base in a bowl. That's there where nothing can get out of it anyways.
So I think it's a good use. We have a lot of wind turbine blades. We know we're working on all kinds of cool projects within the industry to recycle these blades, but capacity is limited, right? We know that we can't run 200, 000 tons of blades, you know, in a year through all the capacity that we have out there to chip them up and use them.
So. If we got to put them somewhere, why not put them in, into these, uh, reclaimed coal mines? I think it's a great use. Um, I mean, Phil, have you ever been around a coal mine? Have you ever seen these things? So
Phil Totaro: yeah, I, I haven't been, um, uh, directly involved in, in coal mining, uh, or extraction, but, um, I, back in 2018, I first had a conversation with somebody about this kind of a proposal to, uh, store disused blades in coal mines.
And I think a lot of people have the incorrect impression that we're just going to like toss these things into some kind of, you know, tunnel or something, um, and, and bury over them, uh, and just forget about them and, and leave them there indefinitely. And the reality is when what we're talking about with coal mines is we have more open cast mines than, than anything else.
And so we can use these open cast mines just as temporary storage for the blades, um, until we do develop that Um, physical capacity to do the blade shredding, uh, where we repurpose it for, for things like concrete or other materials. Um, and we're starting to get some chemical processes developed now where you can actually chemically decompose some of the polymers in, um, these, you know, legacy fiberglass blades where they weren't developed with, uh, uh, recyclable resin, uh, material.
And we're, we're gonna have, you know, within the next five years or so, we're going to have the ability to chemically decompose a lot more blades than what we have the ability to do today. So, um, using mines as temporary storage for disused blades, not a bad idea. I, I like this one.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Seamus Gamesa just had an announcement about that, Phil, where they are using some sort of process to pull fiber out of old blades and reuse it.
I don't know if you saw that, but it was probably a week or so ago that I saw the first news of it, and I think you're right, I don't think it had anything to do with recyclable resin. I think they were using existing resin systems and breaking them down. Which is interesting, right? And I think that's a cool technology.
So a lot of things happening right now.
Joel Saxum: I think at the end of the day, the most important thing here is that we know we want to dispose of blades in a proper way, but we have to do it economically. And all of these new processes are great, but do they make sense economically and financially? This one of putting blades in the, in the coal mines does.
I don't know if. Heating liquids and chemical processes and stuff for each blade does make sense right now.
Allen Hall: Yeah, the Siemens Gomezza process is a pyrolysis process. So you're heating the blade up to remove the resin.
Joel Saxum: Energy intensive, slow.
Phil Totaro: And that's the thing, Joel, is at least we've got the ability to have some place for storage of the blades until that chemical process can be made cheap enough where we can, we can do it.
So I don't, You know, I don't see that being a problem either way. You know, once, once we've got enough cost, um, enough, uh, economies of scale with the chemical decomposition process, um, then, you know, we, we know where the blades are, we, we stuck them over there in this open cast mine. So, you know, it's, I think it's, uh, an easy enough conversation to have.
Joel Saxum: As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let's face it, difficult. That's why the Uptime Podcast recommends P. E. S. Wind magazine. P. E. S....
