Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling

James Timmins, VP of Engineering at Everpoint Services, joins to discuss how recycled wind turbine blades become BladeBlok, a drilling fluid additive for oil, gas, and geothermal wells.

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Allen Hall: James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. There has been a lot of activity at EverPoint Services. So I wanna back up first because if you’re not familiar with EverPoint Services, they are a recycler f- for renewable projects. 

James Timmins: So we’re a, a renewable energy service company that specializes in, um, decommissioning and remediation services for, uh, wind and solar assets.

Allen Hall: So when a solar farm gets hit by hail and the panels are broken, EverPoint comes up and cleans up that mess to, to allow the repair to happen. 

James Timmins: Correct, yes. 

Allen Hall: And on the wind turbine side, you’re t- decommissioning wind turbines, but you’re also taking the [00:01:00] blades. 

James Timmins: Yes. So it’s our responsibility to haul off the damaged, I guess, the scrap.

And, um, obviously there’s a very healthy market for scrap steel that you find in the tower base- Yes … but the fiberglass is a little less straightforward when it comes to disposal and/or recycling. 

Allen Hall: So typically with the fiberglass blades or any composite that’s, that’s being recycled, th- there’s really two techniques that are being implemented right now.

Uh, well, really three. Let’s go over three of ’em. One of ’em is you can just bury them. They’re c- essentially construction materials, so you can bury them. Not ideal, but it has happened in the past. The second is they grind up the, the blades and use ’em in, uh, c- the cement-making process, where they’re burning some of the things that are combustible there and using it for fuel, but also the fiber can help with the cement.

Does, does that sound right? Correct. And, and then the third one I’ve seen is just as a reinforcement product. [00:02:00] So it’s, uh, they chop up the fiber in different lengths, they clean it up, and you can u- use it as an additive to different products. Yes. And, and that generally has been the marketplace in the blade re