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“Never Say Never Hydrogen”
2003 Hydrogen and Fuel Cells
Conference and Trade Show
Vancouver, BC, Canada
by Nigel Fitzpatrick, D.I.C.,
Ph.D.
Acquire Innovations Corp.
Vancouver, British Columbia
At the 2003 Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Conference
and Trade Show, June 8-11 in Vancouver, with joint
Honorary Chairs Geoffrey Ballard and Alexander
(Sandy) Stuart as well as Chair Paul Howard, many
of the original hydrogen fuel cell players reassembled.
They included two key people behind a 1983 Canadian
Department of National Defense (DND) request which
triggered the Ballard polymer fuel cell development
– Martin Hammerli and Chris Gardner. In 1983,
if we add in Sandy, whose father had started a
company (now Stuart Energy) to produce hydrogen
electrolyzers and also a group at the University
of Toronto led by attendee David Scott, the number
of people familiar with fuel cells in Canada would
have been less than twenty. Today it would be
hard to find a person on the planet who is not
aware of the fuel cell.
At a time when fear of terrorism and SARS resulted
in the cancellation of conferences, they were
joined by more than 1,100 registered delegates
and by a fascinated public who attended the “ride
and drive” events. With the world’s
fuel cell experts gathered, I wondered whether,
after two decades, we were simply seeing the result
of global government funding or whether there
had been sufficient progress for true commercialization
to take place.
At the opening of the conference reception, while
attendees queued to sign on to PCs powered by
Ballard generator sets, the Minister of Natural
Resources announced the deployment of the world’s
first fleet of five Ford Focus hybrid fuel cell
vehicles and other major funding awards, present
and future, that on a per capita basis put Canada
on a par with the U.S. That the gensets retail
at an entry market price and vehicles are some
way from being affordable did not daunt enthusiasm.
I reminded myself that I bought my first calculator
at $3,000 in today’s dollars!
The Plenary sessions featured distinguished speakers,
including kindly driving force Alan Lloyd, chairman
of the California Air Resources Board (CARB),
who told me he hails from Pembroke in South Wales.
Dr. Lloyd made the case for hydrogen for the conference
with air quality and health detail. I found intriguing
his evidence that California could be impacted
by emissions from Asia. He was followed by Timothy
Vail of General Motors, who admitted his legal
background, and made a case for commercializing
stationary generator sets as a stepping stone
to vehicles. Vail felt that the key issue to be
solved was that of hydrogen storage, and that
a target of $50/kW for the fuel cell was achievable
in the future. We will return to why we may not
need to go so low when we hear what Amory Lovins
said on the third day.
On Monday I wasn’t at all sure that a gem
of commercial and technical progress would be
found until in the last paper, in one of six parallel
sessions, on the stationary power side I found
a new development by a company called Questair.
This only clicked in discussion after Mark Kirby
had presented a paper, “Gas Management Technology
for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells.” Questair (partially
owned by Shell, British Oxygen and Ballard), can
show that recycling the internally produced hydrogen
in a SOFC raises its efficiency to >70 %. After
the meeting, coauthor Dr. Bowie Keefer (keefer@questairinc.com)
tells me that the approach can also be considered
as a way to improve a polymer fuel cell.
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