About
One engineer, with a network behind him. No account manager, no pyramid of juniors, no handover to someone you have never met. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
I am an engineer, and I have spent my career on the part of technology that has to physically work - rigs, processes, instruments, data that has to survive being checked.
For ten years I worked inside a company that builds its own technology: first supercritical water gasification, then CO2 capture, then metal recycling. I came in as a mechanical design engineer in a three-person team in a warehouse and left as the technology lead for a recycling programme with a team of about fifteen and a budget near two million euros. In between I went through the full cycle several times - idea, prototype, pilot, demonstration plant - and found that I enjoy it. I started Bolwerk because the gap between a brilliant idea and scaling it up is where most of them stop. Closing it takes a broad view: technology, people, legislation, finance.
In every one of those places I noticed the same gap. Genuinely good technical people, a real result on the bench - and then months disappearing into the unglamorous part. The rig nobody instrumented properly. The report that took three weeks because the data was in four formats. The standards review everyone agreed was important and nobody had time for.
That gap is the whole reason Bolwerk exists. Not to advise you about it from a distance, but to come in and close it - with a soldering iron, a P&ID, a Python script or an AI pipeline, whichever the problem actually calls for.
The name is deliberate. Bolwerk is Dutch for bastion: the reinforced corner of a fortification, the part built to hold when the rest is under pressure. It also happens to be my surname.
What I have built
A high-pressure, high-temperature reactor turning biomass into syngas at full commercial scale. A direct air capture installation that captures CO2 from the air and stores it permanently in cementitious products. An induction-based furnace to upcycle high-alloy waste. Each was taken from concept and translated to commercial scale with real-world application.
A commercial-scale induction melting process. Circular chemical process lines at pilot scale. Multiple bench-scale high-temperature and high-pressure reactor models for oil and gas applications. Commissioning is where a design finds out whether it was honest.
Around 60 projects, run or worked in, across multiple industries, from small to full commercial scale. Because of NDAs and IP, ongoing work stays off this website; ask and I will tell you what I can.
How I work
Nobody is learning on your budget. You are not paying a day rate to have your problem explained back to you.
I would rather hand you a rig that runs, a clean dataset or a tool your team opens on Monday than a slide about what could be done.
Work runs in your environment wherever it can. Nothing about your process goes into a tool you have not approved.
Every engagement ends with your team able to run it without me. That is the objective, not a risk to be managed.
Capability
Next step
An hour, no charge, no pitch. If I am not the right person you will hear that too.
