To MidAmerican Energy, the wind turbines being taken down and dismantled at its Highland wind farm in O’Brien County, Iowa, are junk. To Brian Diesselhorst, they are the mother lode.
Diesselhorst is chief executive of Paladin EnviroTech, a recycling company eyeing a new role as a supplier of rare-earth metals. The U.S. is trying to reduce its reliance on China for rare earths, which go into everything from drones to MRI scanners. Paladin is among a few ventures betting that the quickest route to new supply goes through the junkyard. MidAmerican has turned two things the Midwest has in abundance—wind and space—into the largest wind-power business of any U.S. utility. Metal recyclers harvested what they could, but until Paladin came along the rare-earth metals that some of them contained were going to waste. “You’re on a field in the middle of nowhere. If you’ve got mud, or you’re on clay, and the groundsoil isn’t sturdy, you could have a crane tip over. Another risk comes from the wind itself—strong gusts can play havoc with blades being moved by cranes. The other deterrent is the challenge of separating materials cost-effectively so the sought-after rare earths can be isolated, ground up and turned into metal for new magnets. Paladin works with Critical Materials Recycling, a Boone, Iowa company that is commercializing a leaching process developed at Ames National Laboratory to extract nearly all the rare earths from electronic waste. In the company’s Tampa, Fla., offices, a poster of Don Quixote, the fictional knight who tilted at windmills, hangs on the wall, with a smaller portrait of Wray in the corner.
It has already replaced nearly 1,500 of its 3,700 turbines. On one job, when contractors were using explosives to fell turbines, hubs weighing more than 30 tons ended up buried deep in clay and had to be arduously excavated. Wray has lined up a pipeline of about 500 turbines across the U.S.
“That’s why it was critical for us to get into the game now,” said Diesselhorst, who says he believes Paladin is the first company to start harvesting this source of rare earths. “You’re dealing with 80-to-120,000-pound pieces that you’ve got to load on flatbeds,” said Luke Wray, the Paladin executive charged with overseeing the company’s supplies of rare earths and other critical minerals.
