Importing Clean Air
In the environmental dark ages of the 1950s, when people really believed that one or another of the international engineering firms could correct any mistake that nature might make, there was a plan of sorts to ship water from the Yukon to Southern California. If that failed, there was another plan to tow icebergs to San Pedro and somehow make them melt into Southern California’s reservoirs and water pipes.
Over the years, the earthmovers made a few mistakes of their own, the Yukon was spared and most people gradually learned to expect less from technology. So it is no small surprise to hear serious discussion these days of what amounts to importing clean air from Canada.
The discussions are serious because of technical breakthroughs in the design of fuel cells in the laboratories of Ballard Technologies Corp., a small company on a back street of North Vancouver, British Columbia. The fuel cell is still not a household word, even though it provided electric power for American manned spacecraft nearly 20 years ago. The spacecraft units generated electricity with hydrogen and oxygen pumped into them from tanks. The Ballard fuel cell gets its hydrogen from methanol and its oxygen from the air.
A fuel cell does the same thing an automobile engine does--convert fuel to energy. But the conversion is chemical, not mechanical. Power is generated without the explosions of fuel in engine cylinders that produce oxides of nitrogen, there is no gasoline vapor to put hydrocarbons into the air, and thus there are no ingredients for bright sunlight to turn into smog. The fuel cell is a battery that never needs charging and that will produce electrical power as long as the methanol lasts.
Money was no object in the early days of America’s space program and the fuel cell was a very expensive way to produce electricity, far too costly to compete with combustion engines in civilian life. But about four years ago, Ballard researchers began trying to design a fuel cell that would not only cost less but also produce more power. The laboratory now thinks it can replace diesel engines in city buses with power units that would add only 10% to the lifetime costs of the bus. A team from the Canadian company will describe what they are up to during an international conference on fuel cells that starts next week in Long Beach. What they will be talking about, of course, is a smoke-free bus, one that deposits nothing in the air that can be turned into smog and that glides quietly around city streets, with its horn the noisiest thing about it.
That may sound as far-fetched as towing icebergs to San Pedro, but Americans who have looked at the equipment agree that the Ballard breakthrough is real enough. One of them is James Lents, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, himself a physicist, who is interested. The fuel cell needs more tinkering to get the cost down even further, but Lents is encouraging the company to expand beyond the laboratory, build some prototypes of fuel cells that generate enough power to move electric buses around, and get the buses on the streets for long-term testing. He says wider use of fuel cells also would combat the Greenhouse Effect because they are such efficient energy producers.
With a prospect like that, we would agree that the Canadian company should hop to it. If building prototypes is a question of money, California business certainly should be interested, if for no other reason than that its potential growth will depend a lot on how clean the air is.
