Geoffrey Ballard - Ballard Power Systems

Ballard Power Systems

The main Ultra Energy team immediately re-formed as Ballard Research, taking over offices directly across the street from the Ultra ones. Ballard started calling old contacts in the oil industry, looking for companies that might be interested in diversifying their energy holdings. Shell was interested and kept the company afloat for a time, but dropped their interest when one of the minority shareholders held out. In mid-1981, Amoco decided to take over the rechargeable side of the company, and paid off most of the company's local debts. Now solvent, the company quickly started looking for applications for their technology, and won contracts with the Canadian Forces to further develop their single-use long-life battery. This led to a successful production line producing thousands of cells for the U.S. and Canadian militaries.

While the single-use design was successful, the rechargeable version never matured. In 1983, Ballard, Prater and Paul Howard started looking for new ideas for their development side to work on as the funds for the battery project dried up. Among a variety of ideas were a number of attempts to find government funding, which eventually led them to a Department of National Defense (DND) request for proposals for bids to produce a low-cost solid polymer fuel cell. Now known as PEM's, these cells had only been used commercially in Project Gemini and a few other space probes, and General Electric gave up on the technology when NASA moved onto other fuel cell designs for Project Apollo and the Space Shuttle. Although a number of attempts had been made to lower the high cost of PEM cells since then, none had been commercially successful.

At the time, no one in the company had any direct experience with fuel cells, and Ballard himself reputedly stated "What's a fuel cell?" when the topic was first brought up. Prater, with an extensive electrochemical background, flew to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where limited PEM research was still being carried out. He managed to gather a small number of parts from test cells that would provide an early start. Meanwhile Ballard sent teams to Ottawa to better understand the contract. Armed with this information from both sources, they won the $500,000 contract, which called for them to provide three prototype cells that produced between 50 and 150 watts and be ready in 28 months. After meeting the requirements, they won a follow-up contract, and it was during this project, in 1986, when they reached a milestone of producing four times as much energy per unit volume as any previous fuel cell.

In 1987 Ballard won a contract with Perry Oceanographics to provide fuel cells for their small submersibles. After some difficulties in developing a stack of the required 2 kW size using their then-current" Mark IV" cell design, the system was successfully installed and became one of the first commercial fuel cell system since the 1960s. An upgrade to the "Mark V" cell design dramatically improved performance, providing 4.1 kW from a stack the same size as the original 2 kW model. A contract with the Royal Navy soon followed, and although the resulting cells were not used as the Royal Navy decided to go all-nuclear, a research contract allowed the company to continue improving the cells.

Development from these engineering samples to real-world products was going to be long and expensive. Although the battery line continued to do well, the profits it generated were not enough to run the company as a whole. Ballard started looking for new capital, and found Mike Brown, a founder of the Vancouver-based Ventures West venture capital company. Ventures West provided several rounds of funding, and Brown suggested that if the company wanted to be successful it was going to need new leadership who was familiar with dealing with large companies. Although the founders found it difficult to accept a stranger into their midst, they were eventually won over and Firoz Rasul became the new CEO. Rasul immediately instituted a development plan with a timeline of goals that had to be met and go/no-go milestones.

The company was re-organized, spinning off the battery side to BTC Engineering, while the fuel cell side became Ballard Technologies Corp. Feeling the technology was ready for commercial use, in 1989 Ballard raised $4 million in public money from the British Columbia government to build a fuel cell powered bus, introducing it at Science World in 1993. He took the bus to energy fairs around the world, and Daimler-Chrysler and Ford invested $750 million to buy a one-third stake in the newly public Ballard Power Systems. Ballard told Time in 1999 that the fuel-cell cars should become economical by 2010 and "the internal combustion engine will go the way of the horse. It will be a curiosity to my grandchildren."

Taking the technology from laboratory to the road proved very difficult, and after years of development and many rounds of additional funding, Ballard left active management in 1998. The automotive power division was sold to Daimler-Chrysler and Ford in 2008 for $96.6 million, and Daimler currently operates a small number of fuel cell busses in Hamburg, United States, Japan and Singapore. Ballard Power Systems continues its work on PEMFC's for stationary power use and backup systems.