Update on REFRESH Project – New LCA Study on Wind Turbine Blades
- Ned Patton
- 12 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A few weeks back I wrote a couple of articles, one about this project (REFRESH) and another about a company in Norway (Gjenkraft) that has gotten seed money to build a plant to recycle wind turbine blades using their pyrolysis process. And of course the day after I wrote the article the REFRESH project posted the results of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that they had performed by a consulting company in Italy by the name of RINA. RINA was originally the Registro Italiano Navale which was the Italian version of the American ABS or the Norwegian DNV for those of you that know what these certification agencies do. RINA entered into the industrial field in 1970 and has since morphed into more than just a ship certification agency. According to their website, they “perform assessments, inspections, certification and research into materials, projects, technologies, products and installations.”
In any case, RINA performed an LCA on the processes that had been developed through the REFRESH project to recycle and reuse the composites from end of life wind turbine blades. They took a look at three different processes for recycling the fiberglass in the blades:
1. A mechanical recycling process that is much like what several others have done which grinds up the blades and uses the ground fiberglass for incorporating into other materials like concrete or sheetrock,
2. The Pyrolysis process developed by Gjenkraft, and
3. A microwave assisted pyrolysis process developed by CIRCE Technology Center in Spain that has been demonstrated with REFRESH funding that focuses microwave energy on the resin component of fiberglass and breaks up the crosslinks in the resin.
The results of the LCA performed by RINA were quite promising, demonstrating that once the three technologies have been developed and implemented at scale there is a good possibility of having a solution that provides a completely circular economy for end of life wind turbine blades. The report suggests that there is a 70% reduction in climate change impacts over the life cycle of the blades. Of the three techniques, only the mechanical recycling method was graded low in positive environmental impact. This is a reasonable result, because in mechanical recycling the continuous nature of the fibers that made the fiberglass worthwhile to use are lost. Both of the thermal recycling methods maintain the continuous nature of the fibers and also retain nearly 100% of the resin in the form of pyrolysis oil or gaseous hydrocarbons that can be condensed out of the exhaust stream from the processes and reused.
I thought that this was a particularly good example of how to look not only at the overall life cycle of a wind turbine blade, but composite parts and devices as a whole. The difference between a circular and a linear economy is entirely summed up in the two dashed arrows at the top of this graphic. Most often what happens to wind turbine blades at end of life is what I have written about and talked about now for some time – large composite parts, especially used wind turbine blades, have so far been mostly just stacked up or chopped up and buried in a landfill.
What is pictured in this image is what is most common today and is most probably why the last two arrows in the REFRESH graphic are dashed. This is exactly the scenario that the LCA done by the REFRESH project focused on and demonstrated that significant savings in carbon emissions can be fairly easily realized. Given that Europe adopts these strategies and we get to the point here in the U.S. where these sorts of strategies become the norm, we may be able to solve one of the large pieces of the climate change puzzle. And what the LCA also demonstrates is that now that several strategies for separating the fiber from the resin in large fiberglass parts like wind turbine blades have been successfully demonstrated, together as a recycling technology sector they are economically viable and can even be profitable.
And that is good news for companies like Composite Recycling and their machine manufacturer Fiberloop, Vestas with their chemical solution, Fairmat with their ability to separate uncured resin from prepreg scrap, as well as several others that have already demonstrated technologies like these or closely related that separate the fibers from the resin and keep both components. What the LCA really resulted in was a determination that if the composite material in the wind turbine blades was recycled in a manner that kept both the fiber and the resin and returned them into the industrial composite precursor stream, the majority of the benefits in lowering the carbon footprint of the wind turbine blades was realized.
For those of us that have been in the know about this business for some time this comes as very little surprise. What it does, however, is to remove one of the major arguments that the detractors have about the wind energy business. This was an entire life cycle assessment of the most difficult to recycle component in the wind energy business. Most of the arguments put forth against wind turbines has been the difficulty in recycling the blades because they need to be changed out every 20 years, and there is an enormous amount of installed capacity that will soon age out. The pile of used blades in Sweetwater Texas doesn’t help the reputation of the wind industry at all. I have written about that pile on a number of occasions and unfortunately there is a lot of blame to go around, which of course is what prompted the lawsuits about those blades.
My hope is that here in the U.S. we will adopt some of the strategies that have been adopted and are actually operating at industrial capacity in Europe just to handle the onslaught of waste that is coming from end of life wind turbine blades in the next 10-15 years here in the U.S. And hopefully the pile in Sweetwater will be an anomaly or just a big bump on the road to success.
That’s about it for this week’s post. And it is about time I got off this soap box anyway. I’m sure I’ll revisit it fairly soon. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts. The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed.
My second book, which may be out before the end of the year (fingers crossed), is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell. At least McFarland announced it in their Fall Catalog. And this time it is under a bit different category – Science and Technology. Maybe it will get noticed – as always that is just a crap shoot.
As I have said before, my publisher and my daughter have come to an agreement about the cover. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post. Let me know whether or not you like the cover. Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it. And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged. We need all the help we can get.
Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book. “The String and Glue of our World” pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available August of 2023 and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.
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