The Search for a Fuel-Cell Car

Going to work in 2030. A commuter gets into a car and turns the key. There is a faint noise of auto parts pumps and compressors. The dashboard comes to life. The motor does not actually turn over, though, until the driver presses on the accelerator. Then the vehicle moves out into heavy traffic.

Looking much like their forerunners from the twentieth-century, cars are moving so quietly that the swish of tires is louder than the purr of their electric motors. No fumes spew from exhaust pipes, just wisps of pure water vapour. No smog spoils the view of the mountains. Environmentally friendly transportation has arrived.

This journey began back in 1975 in Arizona cactus country when Geoffrey Ballard, a 43-year-old Canadian geophysicist, poked his way through a small, unkempt cement-block motel just a short walk from the Mexican border. He was looking for a cheap laboratory in which to pursue his dream of finding an alternative to the petrol-driven internal-combustion engine.

He bought the motel for $1400 and burned the filthy mattresses, but the building still stank, so he persuaded the local fire department to come for a training exercise. Watching their hoses blast the place clean, Ballard thought about the world’s overconsumption of fossil fuels. Reducing it would be tough, but he’d always been tenacious.

In the energy crisis of 1973 he was called to Washington to direct research into energy conservation. His wife, Shelagh, and their three school-age sons stayed in Arizona. For six months he supervised studies of virtually anything that did not depend on oil, coal or petrol. But disillusionment soon set in. Only ideas that promised results within a few years would be funded. On a visit home in early 1974, he told Shelagh that he wanted to return to Arizona and resume his quest for a better energy technology.

Ballard thought battery-powered electric cars were the best energy alternative. A big problem was the weight of lead in storage batteries. Could lithium, the lightest metal, be substituted? He had a friend, Ralph Schwartz, a quirky engineer who had been working with lithium and sulphur dioxide.

Needing an electrochemist, they went to see Keith Prater at the University of Texas at El Paso. Prater said he lacked experience with batteries. “I don’t want someone who knows about batteries,” said Ballard. “They know what won’t work. I want someone willing to try things that others might not.”

Within six months Prater was able to isolate a key ingredient, lithium dithionite. They mixed it in a  beaker with solvents, added copper strips and charged it with electricity. Then they hooked up a torch bulb – and it glowed! Prater was ecstatic. However, a practical battery would take money to develop.

Just at that time an acquaintance was refitting a submarine in Vancouver for oil exploration. Needing a package of instruments designed, he tracked down Ballard, hired him as a consultant and soon agreed to finance a lithium battery.

That’s when Ballard and Schwartz bought the rundown motel in Arizona and started to run experiments. On the weekends, Keith Prater flew in from El Paso, landing his two-seat Piper in an adjacent field. Living on pizza and beer, they worked until exhausted, taking naps on patio furniture, then getting back to the chemistry.

After two years, Schwartz bowed out. Ballard was still committed to alternative energy, but he and Shelagh were feeling the pull of Canada. Prater had met and married a Vancouver woman. So they moved operations to the submarine warehouse in Vancouver.

The project’s backer eventually pulled the financial plug. But his cousin, Horace Koessler, had money. He owned a seaplane and wanted a companion on an Arctic tour. “You will have a month to persuade me to invest in the battery project,” he said. Desperate for financing, Ballard took a flying course.

Their trip was a near disaster. Engine trouble and deteriorating weather forced them down on an isolated pond, and for three days they sat out torrential rains. Radio calls brought no help. Finally, Ballard hung a tarp over the engine, located the problem, straightened a carburetor linkage and got them home. Koessler put up $200,000.

Next, a smoke-detector firm injected money. By now a big, jovial engineer named Paul Howard had joined Ballard. Late on a Friday in 1979 he took a phone call. The smoke-detector firm had filed for bankruptcy, meaning Ballard’s company was now in receivership.

That weekend, Prater, Howard and Ballard agreed to form a new company. Ballard was the eldest by 11 years, with a track record and excellent business contacts, but he offered them equal partnerships. “There’s lots of responsibility to go around,” he said. They rented a small office and called themselves Ballard Research.

For the next four years they scrambled to pay the bills, mainly selling single-use lithium batteries. The rechargeable version worked, but each recharge was weaker than the previous one, like the spring of a watch running down. Then an exciting alternative appeared.

In 1983, the Canadian military wanted a fuel cell with a proton-exchange membrane (PEM) for silent power. A fuel cell is like a battery, but better. It requires no overnight charging. It reverses the familiar secondary-school science experiment in which electricity is put through water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. In a PEM cell, a polymer plastic membrane coated with platinum separates two flat electrodes. Hydrogen flows in on one side, oxygen from the air on the other. They combine to form water and generate electricity without combustion and nasty emissions.

“A fuel cell is electrochemistry,” Prater told colleagues. “It’s right up our alley.” Ballard got the contract and hired a technical team. Engineer David Watkins set up the lab. Danny Epp, a sailor who had worked on the submarine, did most of the day-to-day building. Ken Dircks did the testing. They bought a sample of a costly DuPont membrane developed for the US space programme. But their budget was so tight that Epp scrounged materials from rubbish bins. When he needed to make grooves on the electrode plates to channel the gases, he begged a company that sold trophies to lend him an engraving machine. In three years they had the most powerful PEM cell, for its weight and size, in the world. Watkins set up a display at an international conference in Phoenix. Hardly anyone had heard of Ballard Research, but scientists noticed the impressive results. Soon they were visiting the lab.

In 1987 entrepreneur Michael Brown read an article on fuel cells in his dentist’s surgery. A few weeks later he got a tip about Ballard. Excited by the fuel cell’s promise, he persuaded the Business Development Bank of Canada to join his firm, Ventures West, in a syndicate that raised $880,000.

Progress continued. The Ballard team replaced the DuPont membrane with one from Dow Chemical and left it running. To their amazement, it generated four times the previous power. As they watched, a finger-thick electric cable got so hot that copper strands began to melt and fuse. They yelled and jumped around. With this second, drastic boost in power, the electric car suddenly seemed feasible.

By 1998 Ballard Research needed additional financing. Brown and his partners decided that before they would commit more money, the Ballard founders had to bring in new leadership with more business skills.

Brown introduced them to Firoz Rasul, a 36-year-old engineer who had been marketing vice president of MDI Mobile Data. Recognizing their limitations in the world of megabusiness, Ballard founders gave Rasul an equal share of stocks as well as making him president. Rasul and Brown wrote a new business plan and raised $5 million.

To refine and market the fuel cell would mean enormous growth and at least ten years with no net earnings. Employees increased from 37 in 1989 to over 450 today. The company, now called Ballard Power Systems, changed headquarters. To raise the needed hundreds of millions of dollars, they had to establish annual targets for greater power, improved reliability, reduced cost – and meet them. And they did.

One key advanced, led by polymer specialist Alfred Steck, was a cheaper membrane, the heart of the fuel cell. Mixing novel polymer plastics, Steck’s group spread them to form films, dried them in a “clean room” and put them into cells. The first membranes turned brittle and failed after 300 to 500 hours, not good enough for a commercial vehicle. The “third generation” membrane, however, just kept running. When it passed 1000 hours, they broke out a bottle of champagne. At 5000 hours, another bottle. Then 10,000 hours. More champagne. When Steck had a  shelf of empty bottles, Ballard Power Systems had its own durable, affordable membrane.

By mid-1990 Ballard wanted to put the cell into a small bus to show that it could actually make wheels turn. He had been playing tennis with British Columbia’s Energy Minister Jack Davis, who said, “Give me a ‘green’ photo opportunity for the premier and I will get you the funding.” The province provided $2.7 million of the $4.1-million cost.

They unveiled the project in June 1993 outside Vancouver’s Science World. Premier Mike Harcourt waited with Ballard and the media. Suddenly Paul Howard, who was in charge, got a walkie-talkie call from the bus. “The compressor just stopped.” A small bolt – not part of the cell, but crucial – had broken.

After a stunned moment of horror, Howard orchestrated a comic-opera charade. Six Ballard workers, hidden from view, pushed the bus until it rolled silently down a slight incline towards the podium. Harcourt made a speech, then said, “Now let’s go for a ride.” But the crowd milled around. Reporters asked Howard one question after another. He just kept talking. There were too many people to move the bus safely, so the ruse worked. Harcourt left for another appointment. “Come back this afternoon for a ride,” Howard told reporters. By then the problem was fixed.

Government and motor-company officials began to visit for test runs. Vancouver and Chicago have even put in orders for city buses. Meanwhile, California has passed laws requiring that ten per cent of all cars sold starting in 2003 be zero emission vehicles. Other American states have followed suit, creating a potential market for fuel-cell cars.

Germany’s Daimler-Benz, the first major car company to experiment with a Ballard cell in the late 1980’s, seized the initiative. In 1996 it rolled out a minivan powered by Ballard cells. In a series of multi-million-dollar deals, Daimler-Benz bought a 20-per-cent share of Ballard in 1997, while Ford acquired a 15-per-cent stake the next year. The three firms formed two new joint companies to manufacture and market fuel cells and drive trains for electric vehicles.

“The starting pistol in the race to produce the first fuel-cell car has been fired,” says Juergen Hubbert, head of Daimler’s car division. “A new era in transport is dawning.”

“It’s an astounding leap,” says David Scott, professor of mechanical engineering at Canada’s University of Victoria. “The fuel cell will have an impact on transportation comparable to that of the microchip on communications.”

Ballard can barely keep up with the invitations to speak at universities. He advises students: “Do not be patient. All things do not come to those who wait. Dare to be in a hurry to change things for the better.”