PWAC Victoria: Tom Koppel, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

Powering the Future: The Ballard Fuel Cell and the Race to Change the World

by Tom Koppel ©

The personal, technological and corporate story of an environmentally benign technology that will be powering electric cars by 2004. Published by John Wiley & Sons, October 1999 hardcover, May 2001 softcover, 276 pp., with index. Named one of the ten best business books of 1999 by Amazon.com. Finalist for Canada's National Business Book Award for 2000. Published in Japanese translation, January 2001 and in German, October 2001.

Chapter One: Miracle Valley

The long road to a new and better energy technology began in southern Arizona cactus country, a half kilometre from the Mexican border. In 1975 Geoffrey Ballard, trim and athletically built, with jet-black hair, poked his way through a small cement-block motel and held his nose. The dozen or so ground floor units were strewn with broken glass, piles of garbage and soiled mattresses. The stench of urine and excrement made him gag. For years illegal immigrants had hidden there briefly after crossing the border into the U.S.

Ballard, a forty-three-year-old Canadian scientist and engineer, was looking for an affordable building to turn into a laboratory, and the motel was just about perfect. It was a twenty-minute drive from his home. There was plenty of room for storage upstairs. The internal walls could be knocked out to create large open areas. Best of all, the price was right: only $2,000. It was owned by a religious cult that had used it to house temporary visitors to its commune. In recent years, though, the cult had become embroiled in scandal and had fallen on hard times. The motel had long stood empty. Now the group's leader, who still lived across the road, needed cash. He called the place "Miracle Valley."

Geoffrey Ballard wasn't expecting miracles, though, just many years, decades even, of hard work. He bought the motel and got his kids to help him haul out the junk and burn it in big piles. But the building still stank. So he phoned up the local fire department and persuaded them to bring in a pumper truck and use the place for a training exercise. Their high-pressure hoses blasted the paint right off the walls, cleaning out every last cobweb and mouse turd. As he stood back, watching them work, Ballard planned out the work tables, the ventilation systems, the machine shop, and the rest area. And he thought about his goal: to develop a viable technology that could power an electric car and reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

He realized that it was bound to be a long haul. In the early stages, in fact, the entire focus was to be on developing an improved battery. It would be eight years before this work led to the fuel cell itself, but Ballard had never been one to quit when faced with setbacks. He had a deeply ingrained stubborn streak that gave him the personal fortitude needed to meet difficulties in life with a sense of stoicism. Nor did he readily accept it when told that something could not be done. This just spurred him on to prove himself by overcoming the obstacles. This resolute drive and need to do things his own way appeared quite early in life, largely as a reaction to an unhappy childhood that left him with a bruised ego and a need to compensate for it.

Ballard was born in 1932 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. His mother, Jessie Marguerite Mildred, traced her origins to a wealthy and socially prominent British Quaker family, the Rowntrees, who ran Rowntree Chocolates in York, in northern England. Like the Wedgwoods and the Cadburys, the Rowntrees were Victorian-era Liberals, a paternalistic dynasty that believed in instilling strong company loyalty by providing model factories and housing for their employees. Jessie Mildred was largely raised by her uncle, Seebohm Rowntree, who was dedicated to political and social reform and had written books with such titles as Poverty, a Study of Town Life and Betting and Gambling, a National Evil. Ballard's mother passed on to him a sense of moral and social rectitude that would show itself in his commitment to alternative energy and in the corporate culture of the company he founded.

His father, Archibald Hall Ballard, was born in Staten Island, New York, when the ship his parents were taking from Britain to Canada was diverted to New York harbour because of winter weather and ice on the St. Lawrence River. This unplanned circumstance was to give Geoffrey a claim to dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship, which simplified his status when he went to work for the U.S. Army. Archibald Ballard studied electrochemical engineering at the University of Toronto and then specialized in the area of radiation.

Soon after the Second World War broke out, the laboratory director at the company where Archibald Ballard worked in Ontario fell overboard from a boat during a cocktail party and was swept over Niagara Falls to his death. Through this quirk, Ballard was promoted to the post of lab director at an unusually early age. When the German Blitz hit Britain, the Ballards took in a dozen British schoolchildren, who were evacuated to safety in Canada for the duration of the war. Because of his engineering specialty, Archibald Ballard was away most of the time in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, working on the atomic bomb. With his father away, and the house full of other kids, young Geoffrey never had the love and attention that he craved during these formative years.

For grade eight, he was sent off to a private school. Feeling himself "shunted aside" by his family, the young boy was lonely, miserable and hurt. This initiated a lifelong tug-of-war with his father--"a real personal competition" he calls it--in a desperate attempt to win the elder Ballard's approval. "The only way I would ever get my father's attention," he thought as he got older, "was to be successful in the field of science and science management. I wanted to do better than he had." When Geoffrey's own science career began to take shape, he resolved to reach the position of laboratory director at an even earlier age than his father. And in the end he did, at thirty-six. (His father was in his late forties before he reached a comparable position.)

At thirteen, Geoffrey wanted to set up an ice-cream stand, but he needed a licence. The aldermen in Niagara Falls were absolutely amazed when, at their meeting, the young Ballard stood up and introduced himself as the person who had submitted the application. They mumbled that he had to be at least eighteen and turned him down. It galled him to be rejected for failing to meet such an arbitrary standard.

In high school Ballard showed more aptitude for sports than he did for math or science, getting no better than Cs in most subjects. Yet, in conflicts with some of his teachers, he admits, he displayed more than a touch of arrogance. Through his mother, he had acquired a strong grounding in the literary classics, "and I didn't think my teachers had even a smattering of understanding of the great poets or writers."

This personal hubris and impatience with the shortcomings of others carried through to later life. "My wife has known him for over twenty years," says one long-time colleague, "but she still finds him intimidating. Just because of his approach to people. He does not suffer fools at all. I think this may come from his own version of self-doubt." Another colleague thinks that Ballard's problem has always been that "he's just too damned bright to deal with normal people."

When Ballard went out for football in high school, the coach treated him initially as something of a mama's boy and left him mainly on the bench. Then, one game, with injuries mounting, the coach put him into the line at centre. The opposing team immediately mowed him down, breaking his nose. Blood poured down his jersey, but he ignored it and insisted on playing out the game. Afterwards, the coach said, "I had no idea that you were so single-minded. You've earned yourself a spot on this team." Throughout my life, Ballard says, "I've always viewed the setbacks as just something that had to be endured" on the road to achievement.

From high school, Ballard went off to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he met his wife, Shelagh. He married her and graduated in the same year, 1956, with a degree in geological engineering. This equipped him for a career in oil exploration, working first in Alberta for Shell. It was the tail-end of the era in which horses were still used. Ballard enjoyed riding and camping out in the Rocky Mountains with a crew and string of twenty horses. The year he left Shell, they switched to helicopters. Next he was off to the Mediterranean and Turkey as a drill-site geologist for Mobil.

At one location in Turkish Kurdestan, he studied the stratigraphy--the layers of geological deposits. Mobil wanted to drill into a sand shale sequence, which was typical of the Persian Gulf. But Ballard thought this was wrong. "We're on the edge of a basin," he told them. "We should be looking at a reef." Because he was young and without a Ph.D., they brushed him aside, drilled, found nothing, and soon allowed their lease there to lapse. A few years later, Shell acquired a lease in the same area, drilled into an ancient reef and struck oil on the first try. The find eventually became a producing oil field. The experience reinforced Ballard's growing scepticism about conventional wisdom and the validity of expert credentials.

This was typical, he says, still capable of fuming over it decades later, of the way he was treated in the Oil Patch. "When I had an idea, I was always told that I wasn't hired to do those sorts of things, that Doctor so-and-so," invariably a geologist with full academic credentials, "would decide what the exploration program would be. That's one reason why I went back and got a Ph.D.," earning a doctorate in geophysics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

His father (who did not have a Ph.D. himself) was extremely critical of this move, telling his son in no uncertain terms that it was irresponsible for a man with a wife and family and secure job to go back to graduate school. "To walk away from that, just to satisfy my ego was, in his eyes, the height of stupidity."

With the doctorate to give him standing, Ballard signed on as a civilian scientist with the U.S. Army and spent ten years involved in an extremely broad range of scientific research. Not all of it was geophysics. In fact, he was also given advanced training in management methods and became a generalist overseeing research specialists in a diversity of scientific disciplines. The Pentagon selected him as one of a small group of young "comers" to participate in a series of defence-related science seminars. He was flown all over the country, visiting military installations and high-level research centres, and got to know people of influence throughout America's military-industrial establishment.

Most of the research in the labs where he was posted, in New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Arizona, had little or no immediate connection to weapons development. But it did make him privy to sensitive information. His security clearance was so high that by the early 1970s, when terrorism became a major concern, he was forbidden to fly on civilian airliners lest he be hijacked.

By 1973 Ballard was working at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, at the Army's laboratory for advanced telecommunications. He and Shelagh had bought a house in nearby Sierra Vista. They had three school-age sons and an active social life that centred on the local tennis club. Then the first OPEC oil crisis struck. In the winter of 1973-74, Americans were forced to line up at gas stations, many for the first time in their lives. The U.S. government responded by establishing a new office of energy conservation and went looking for a scientist to head its research department. Because of Ballard's track record in science management and experience in the energy sector, the Army seconded him to Washington as director of research. The initial appointment was for six months. Shelagh and the boys remained in Arizona.

Ballard rented a small furnished apartment and threw himself into the new assignment, working long hours and drinking a bit too much in his free time. His task was to create a research plan with the long-term goal of achieving energy self-sufficiency for the United States. Under his supervision, teams of scientists studied such alternative energy sources and technologies as oil shales, solar energy, tidal, geothermal and wind power, and battery-powered vehicles. Based on their recommendations, he formulated plans suggesting how and where further research and development should be conducted and funded.

He plunged into the new job assuming that he would be doing something truly worthwhile. Before long, though, disillusionment set in. He gave briefings to politicians, and the plans were submitted to the congressional bureaucracy, but Ballard quickly saw that very little was going to be implemented. "Energy systems are notorious for their long gestation periods, often twenty years or longer," he says. But in the U.S. research and development funding system, he learned to his chagrin, "there had to be a pay-off in a product within five to seven years in order to justify the public money being put in." Mainly this reflected the short-term vision of U.S. electoral politics. "There are political cycles involving re-election, so the politicians didn't want to put money into systems that were going to come to fruition in some other generation. You sent out the plans, and they hacked and cut at them."

Another problem was Washington's traditional pork-barrel system of divvying up funding money by state or congressional district. "Pieces of the plan were farmed out to research centres or laboratories or universities in states where political favours were due. Some state, say Tennessee, might have priority for the next dose of research money," whether this made scientific sense or not. "In the U.S., this gets overridden in times of war, but this was a time of peace."

A final irritant was that many mornings, when Ballard arrived at his office, he found a thick stack of mail on his desk. These were letters written by citizens to the federal government or to members of Congress making suggestions on energy issues. Most of the ideas were ill-informed, unoriginal or worse, says Ballard, but they had to be answered. "So the first half of my day was totally wasted responding to inane questions from congressional constituents." It drove him up the wall.

Ballard began to ponder his future. He soon decided that the U.S. was just not going to tackle the energy conservation problem seriously, and he had no intention of sticking around and going through the motions. He was earning a very handsome salary, just one notch below that of a member of Congress. Already in his forties, though, Ballard wasn't interested in wasting his life. "If you studied a problem and were blocked by politics, you found another way. I wasn't willing to be bought off--in a sense--to receive a good salary and hold a prestigious job, but not do what I thought needed to be done." Nor did he want to spend his life fighting city hall. If you try to do that, he says, "you become an angry sort of person."

Beyond his on-the-job frustration, Ballard gradually came to the conclusion that the entire focus on conservation as such was ill-conceived and bound to fail. Coming from the oil industry and the military, he had entered the job without particularly strong views on either conservation or alternative energy. But when he saw that the U.S. was not going to pursue the solutions he had suggested, he began to look at the nature of the problem more deeply.

On the one hand, it was true that the world's industrialized countries could not continue to consume the lion's share of the world's energy resources, much of it in inefficient vehicles burning non-renewable fuels. In 1974, the transportation sector, which was almost entirely dependent on petroleum, used fifty-three percent of all the crude oil consumed in the U.S. This increased by 1987 to sixty-four percent, which was eight percent more than the entire U.S. production of petroleum. By the 1980s, transportation was responsible for about half of all pollutants that form smog in American cities, more than half of the toxic air pollutants, and up to ninety percent of the carbon monoxide. So, cutting down on fossil fuel consumption was clearly a worthwhile goal.

But when he looked beyond the developed world, the long-term picture came into clearer focus. "The real disaster that's coming at us," he realized, is that countries like China and India are inevitably going to attempt to reach Western standards of living. But because of this drive towards higher living standards, the solution had to go far beyond simple conservation.

In fact, he became convinced that energy conservation, per se, was neither the real issue nor the main solution to the world's energy problems. Looking at U.S. energy sources in the light of his Washington research, he saw that there was no imminent shortage of energy itself; it just needed to be harnessed by technology in new and better ways. Plenty of energy was available from the sun, wind, tides, and hydroelectric power. "We have huge tides in some of the bays in the United States, for example." Moreover, at that time, before the Three-Mile Island reactor scare and the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy from uranium still seemed like a viable source of future energy for the United States. (It has remained a leading source in some countries, notably France.) And there was the long-term promise of clean energy from nuclear fusion.

While still in Washington, Ballard began to see the increasing emphasis on energy conservation, "training people to use less," as just another example of erroneous conventional wisdom, and he still thinks he was right. "It won't work," he insists. "You just cannot train China and India to conserve energy, because they want the same standard of living that we enjoy. And that is based largely on energy consumption per capita. Yes, energy conservation can play a minor role in the transition stages" to a new energy economy, one based largely on hydrogen. But to see energy conservation as a means or mechanism by which we solve the world's problems, he argues, is "just putting your head in the sand."

The real challenge, Ballard thought, was to find a better energy conversion system or device, a convenient and economical way of taking energy from an abundant source and converting it to a usable, and preferably portable, form, especially for transportation and communications. This would not require the Third World to forego rising per capita energy use. And only such a technological magic bullet held out the promise of drastically reducing the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

"I was able to see this very clearly," he says, "because I was hired into that slot, which had its focus on conservation. So it was easy for me to see the fallacy of that approach. What I was concerned with was the conversion device and the techniques of conversion. And it was the fact that America was not going to reach for a technical solution," but instead was taking the conservationist approach, and not even pursuing it effectively, "that led me to believe there was no future for me in that place."

If the government is not going to search for a better energy technology, he resolved, then I will. On a visit home in spring 1974, he told Shelagh that he wanted to walk away from the Washington job and his Army career to pursue energy alternatives as a private consultant and entrepreneur. It was not an easy personal decision. Once again, his father severely criticized him for turning his back on a secure job and striking out on his own. "Why am I always the one out in left field?" he agonized to Shelagh, knowing that their financial future would be uncertain. "You just see things differently," she reassured him. "You've been right before, so why doubt yourself. Go for it. We'll always put food on the table. I'll help."

By then, Ballard already had a concrete vision. From his work at the Army communications command in Arizona, he had seen that the miniaturization of communications technology, from radios to computers to video cameras, was fast outpacing the development of the portable power sources that make them useful. "Solid-state electronics were being revolutionized, but the energy sources were not changing" to keep pace. People were carrying around lightweight, hand-held video cameras, but being dragged down by heavy battery packs that required long recharging times. "To improve portable power sources and reduce them in weight--that was the challenge." The market for a more compact, high-powered energy source, he thought, was guaranteed.

And beyond communications there loomed the much larger energy needs of transportation. One of the studies his teams had done in Washington was on electric vehicles powered by storage batteries. "Electric cars were quite common at the turn of the century," he says. In fact, in 1900 in the U.S. there were an equal number of battery-powered cars, gasoline buggies, and steam cars--about 2,000 each. By 1915, the number of battery-powered vehicles in the U.S. had grown to almost 40,000, but by then, with the arrival of the Model-T Ford (1908), a much larger number were gasoline-powered. Of the battery vehicles, most were light trucks and delivery vans. Among the vans, in fact, where the limited range and need to recharge were not such a handicap, battery-powered vehicles outnumbered gasoline types by four to one. Nearly all had lead-acid batteries, which were relatively inexpensive.

With cheap oil and mass-produced internal combustion engines, though, both steam and electric cars soon disappeared from the roads. There was nothing inherently wrong with electricity to power cars. In principle, it is a far more efficient use of energy than the internal combustion engine. The only problem was with the batteries--they didn't go very far and took many hours to recharge.

Ballard looked at electric cars and saw that there hadn't been enough work done on batteries to eliminate them as an alternative. A few companies and universities had financed small pilot projects, but most of these used conventional lead-acid storage batteries (the kind used to start our cars and trucks) where no real technological breakthroughs had been made. Little more than sleek-looking golf carts, these experimental vehicles were based on the strategy of cutting the weight of the rest of the vehicle and improving the aerodynamics. All suffered from the handicaps of short operating range and long battery recharging times. None of the projects had been well financed. In Ballard's view, they represented little more than just "puttering around."

Ballard wanted to look at battery chemistries with much higher energy densities, or, in other words, much lighter weight for a given power output. One of the main problems with conventional batteries for transportation is the weight of the lead. (Another is the long--usually overnight--recharging time.) Even twenty-five years after Ballard's first efforts, when auto manufacturers have finally put battery-powered cars into production, road tests show that the weight of the batteries drastically reduces performance on uphill climbs. (In fact, many of today's battery-powered vehicles are so-called hybrids, with a modest gasoline engine to keep the battery charged and help with hill climbing and acceleration.) Battery weight also causes poor road handling, especially on turns, where the heavy load can cause the vehicle to lean excessively or fishtail.

But what if a much lighter metal than lead could be used and higher power density achieved?

Back in Arizona, Ballard had a tennis pal, Ralph Schwartz. They trusted each other and had already toyed with going in on at least one financial venture together, a private tennis club in Sierra Vista. Schwartz, a burly, grey-haired man, about fifteen years older than Ballard, was an engineer and quirky self-employed inventor. He owned a small ranch and had made and lost several fortunes on his inventions. Probably the biggest winner was the disposable plastic syringe. But he was always willing to risk what he had on the next big opportunity and was forever scouting around for a new and interesting challenge.

Ballard mentioned that he was planning to leave the Army and wanted to work on alternative power and propulsion systems. Schwartz told him about a battery chemistry he knew of based on lithium, the lightest of all metals, and sulfur dioxide. "Primary," or single-use, non-rechargeable batteries using this combination were just being developed on the east coast, Schwartz said. Could the chemical process be reversed to make the batteries rechargeable? Schwartz wondered. He had even tinkered a bit with the chemistry himself and with promising results. "Can you put together a team of scientists and engineers?" Schwartz asked Ballard, who had excellent contacts throughout the U.S. energy and high-tech research community. "Let's see if lithium batteries can be made rechargeable." Ballard agreed and took a minor financial stake in the company Schwartz set up for this venture, American Energizer.

For starters, they needed a good electrochemist. Ballard had a friend in the chemistry department at the University of Texas at El Paso, who recommended that they speak to a thirty-one-year-old colleague, Keith Prater. Even as a child, Prater had always loved science. In high school he had gone one summer to a "science camp" at the University of Kansas, where he did so well he was selected to return and spend a second summer doing serious research in geology.

Schwartz and Ballard hopped into Schwartz's Cadillac, drove through the mountains and marched in on the skinny young professor to make their pitch. Prater chuckles when he recalls their first meeting. "They had a certain swagger to them. Ralph was wearing a silk neckerchief, fancy boots and a cowboy hat. He always dressed like a successful rancher. And here I was, a young university professor in my sneakers and jeans. For his part, Geoff is extremely intelligent. He exudes confidence when it's necessary. By then, he had quite a track record with the Army and working with the Secretary of Energy." Prater was a bit overawed.

The professor was frank, admitting that he had no significant experience with batteries. "That's fine," said Ballard, "I don't want someone who knows about batteries. They know what won't work. I want someone who is bright and creative and willing to try things that others might not try. That's where breakthroughs come from." Intrigued by the challenge and somewhat flattered by their trust in him, Prater signed on to help part-time as a consultant, while continuing with his academic research and teaching.

Until then, Schwartz and Ballard had little more than a concept. "Ralph only knew enough chemistry to get into trouble," says Prater. "But in an Edisonian way, he had mixed some things together. He threw in an eye of newt and a bit of bat's wing and heated it up and stuffed it in, and it sort of worked." In the single-use battery, Prater knew, lithium from an electrode reacted chemically with sulfur dioxide to produce electricity and a lithium salt as a discharge product. To reverse the process, a current had to be put through the battery to break down the salt and deposit metallic lithium once again on the electrode. This allows the entire reaction to be repeated.

"What Keith Prater brought forth immediately," Ballard says, "was that we didn't know what was produced when lithium and sulfur dioxide react, and that nobody seemed to know. It wasn't in the literature, and until we knew it, we couldn't turn around and reverse the reaction. So that had to be the first question."

Prater's challenge was to identify the lithium/sulfur dioxide discharge product and isolate (or synthesize) a sample of it. Schwartz had had the contents of a discharged primary lithium battery analyzed, and the analysis had come out with something Prater knew could not be right. Prater made an educated guess that the discharge product should be lithium dithionite.

It was not a regularly available chemical. In fact, his search of the literature came up blank. Since he couldn't just phone up a chemical supply house and order some, he set out to make it in his university lab. First, he bought a closely related sodium salt, and changed it to the desired lithium salt in a vertical glass tube, full of the salt and resin beads, called an ion exchange column. To do this, Prater explains, "You pour through lots and lots of a solution containing lithium ions, and what goes on the bead is the lithium. Then you pour through a solution of the sodium salt. The sodium goes on the resin and the lithium comes off, and what comes out at the bottom of the column is what you want, the magic ingredient."

"Geoff, I've got it," Prater announced proudly over the phone, when he had made his first sample of lithium dithionite. "It wasn't rocket science," he admits. "But the chemical was pretty reactive and had to be quickly dried in order to be stable. That's probably why the analysis Ralph Schwartz had commissioned had not found the chemical." To Prater's knowledge, nobody had ever isolated the stuff before.

Soon they were getting help from some colleagues of Prater's at the University of California at Berkeley, where they had access to expensive specialized equipment. Schwartz bought a construction-site trailer for $400 and gutted it to use as a laboratory. Ballard had begun doing geophysical consulting work for industrialist John Horton, who was refitting a submarine in North Vancouver, B.C. for oil exploration. Horton also owned a freeze-dried food plant in San Leandro, California, and allowed them to park the trailer against a loading bay and tap in for power. In between other projects, Ballard and Schwartz spent week-long stints at their makeshift California lab, while Prater flew in for quick consultations.

The eureka experience came when Prater arrived with the first sample of lithium dithionite. They mixed it in a beaker with solvents, but it did not dissolve as expected. It just formed a sort of slurry. Nevertheless, they put in two electrodes, one a mesh of copper, the other a stainless steel mesh, and charged it up by running an electric current through it. If they could get electricity back out of it, they knew, they had a battery of sorts. Hovering anxiously, they hooked up a tiny flashlight bulb and--lo and behold--it glowed. "Son of a gun," said Prater. They repeated the process again and again, and the little desktop cell gave a stable output of about three volts. These were three dedicated, hard-nosed guys. Instead of breaking out the champagne, they just kept discharging and recharging their crude device. "That's the stage," says Ballard, "where you do an endurance check and watch it for days." The tiny single cell was a breakthrough, but a practical battery, they knew, would take real money to develop.

Enter John Horton, the industrialist with the submarine in British Columbia, who became their financial godfather. The Horton family's keystone firm was the huge Chicago Bridge and Iron Company. Ballard had met Horton in the mid-1960s at a management workshop in New York, when Ballard was with the Army. One exercise assigned at the workshop was to simulate decisions using computers, which were still a novelty to most business types. Horton was the only other engineer in sight, so he teamed up with Ballard. They figured out how the program worked, modified it to their advantage and swept away the competition. They also talked geophysics and hit it off personally.

By 1974, when Ballard and Schwartz began their battery project, Horton had bought the Auguste Piccard, a twenty-eight-metre (ninety-foot) long submarine. One of the world's largest non-military submersibles, it was originally built to carry tourists to the bottom of Lake Geneva during a world exposition, and was sold at auction a few years later. Horton needed a package of geophysical instruments designed to do detailed seismic survey work for oil exploration. He remembered Ballard, tracked him down and hired him as a part-time consultant.

When the lithium cell in San Leandro got to the point where it could be discharged and recharged twelve or fourteen times, it began to look like a potentially valuable technology. Ballard convinced Horton that a large lithium battery might be a viable power source for his submarine, and Horton agreed to finance the battery's development to the tune of several thousand dollars a month.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, with his only paid employment being part-time consulting work for Horton, Ballard and his wife were forced to find ways to make ends meet. They drew on some accessible Army pension money that Ballard had accumulated and made a down payment on a slightly funky old restaurant for Shelagh to run. Called the "Outback," it was an isolated place, located coincidentally at the foot of Ballard Mountain along the desert highway between Wyatt Earp's hometown of Tombstone and the world's largest open-pit copper mine. There was a leaky roof, hippie waitresses, and rattlesnakes in the parking lot. The menu ran mainly to steaks and seafood. On weekends, a country-and-western band played. Working together, Geoffrey and Shelagh fixed the place up and added a deck with a spectacular view of the mountains.

When need be, the whole family pitched in. On busy days, the three boys would bus tables and Geoffrey Ballard mixed drinks behind the bar. One time, when he was away, Shelagh turned the tap in the kitchen and nothing happened. No water. The pump had burned out. But customers had to be served. Frantic, she phoned home. "Don't worry, Mom," said Curtis, the oldest son, who had just received his driver's licence. "We'll bring you water." The boys filled every jug, bottle, and plastic container in the house, raced twenty-five miles out to the restaurant and saved the day. The training evidently took. Today, alongside their other careers, the three Ballard sons run a popular bar and restaurant in Vancouver.

With the battery funding in place, Ballard and Schwartz bought the fleabag motel on the Mexican border. They knocked out many of the interior walls to create open working space, installed fume hoods to vent chemical vapours, and built in shelves and workbenches. One area became a machine shop, with a drill press, lathe and a heat press for making battery electrodes. Another area had racks of chemical glassware and a small still for purifying and separating chemicals. They equipped an office with old desks and chairs, and a rest area with a coffee pot and patio furniture. They furnished one unit properly and hired a Vietnamese couple as caretakers. Recent immigrants to the United States, they were hard workers who also pitched in as lab assistants.

In addition to the battery work, Ralph Schwartz used the motel to develop a gizmo he called a brake equalizer. An early form of anti-lock braking system, it was a small device that fit into the hydraulic lines of an automobile and pulsed the brakes so they did not suddenly lock up. Schwartz and Ballard, with major help from Keith Prater, were also developing a novel system of storing whole human blood for transfusions, but most of that work was being done in California and Texas. Ballard had a minor financial stake in both of these technologies through Schwartz's Southern Arizona Manufacturing Company, or SAMCO, and through SBR Labs Inc., which stood for Schwartz-Ballard-Research.

To work on the battery, Ballard and Schwartz commuted to the motel from nearby Sierra Vista. Periodically, a handful of cronies would join them for intensive weekends running experiments. There was a retired chemist from California named Bramson, who was in his 80s but still quite perky. And there was Lynn Marcoux, an electrochemist; he was a friend of Prater's from their undergraduate days together at the University of Kansas and then in Texas. Some years later, Marcoux would be chief scientist of the Ballard company's battery divisions in British Columbia. John Horton's cousin, Horace Koessler, had an interest in the technology; he sometimes pitched in at the motel and later invested in the battery.

Keith Prater was the other key member of the team. He had an old, two-seat Piper airplane, which allowed him to fly in regularly from El Paso, landing the plane in a field adjacent to the motel. It was full of cattle that kept getting in the way, forcing him to chase them off the runway prior to take-off. Because of the proximity to the Mexican border, Prater jokes, he was always nervous about carrying his little samples of white powder and kept expecting to be pounced on and questioned by federal agents.

The motel lab was an informal place, strictly jeans and sweatshirts, rather than white coats. The marathon sessions, when a push was on, were stimulating and fun. When the men got hungry, they either went out for a bite or brought in pizza and beer. Working until exhausted, they would grab quick naps on chaise longues and get back to their chemistry or stints in the machine shop. But basically, they worked right through the weekend. If they began to fade, there was a coffee-maker to give them a lift. Ballard drove himself so hard the others called him "the bulldozer."

It was an exciting time. The entire team knew that their vision and goal were extremely ambitious. Success, in the form of a lightweight but powerful rechargeable battery, might lead to nothing less than a revolution in energy use. It would probably make them all rich as well.

Not that they had any illusions. When they talked about the potential of a battery-powered electric car, they were aware of its likely limitations. The problem, says Keith Prater, is that "one of the fundamentals of electrochemistry tells you that the faster you recharge a battery, the shorter the life of that battery is going to be." This makes it impossible "to cram into a battery the amount of energy you put into a gas tank in two or three minutes." Which is one reason why the fuel cell is a preferable technology. "But at that time, the fuel cell did not exist in anybody's mind as an option." It had performed well in space, but the types suitable for use on earth were plagued with problems and astronomically expensive. "So the best thing was a better battery. And if you extended the range of a battery-powered electric vehicle from thirty miles to 150 or 200 miles, then you can imagine that there would be a very substantial change in the market potential for electric vehicles."

The fact that the battery they were developing was intended for a submarine did not distract them from this larger vision. "We looked at the sub as a test bed," says Ballard. If you could perfect the rechargeable battery, "you could then apply it to a car." In fact, for test purposes the submarine had advantages. "Being able to experiment with these batteries and having a strong pressure hull between you and this thing was a nice idea. Having it under water also made it a lot safer. We expected failures." And failure could be dangerous.

They were careful, but mishaps occurred. Ballard unlocked the lab one morning to find solvents and chemical beads splattered all over, and shards of glass embedded in the ceiling. A large ion exchange column, the glass apparatus used to manufacture batches of lithium dithionite, had exploded during the night. Fortunately, nobody was around. A similar thing happened another time. The amounts of dithionite involved on these occasions were relatively small, so the damage was minor but unsettling nonetheless.

The actual battery for Horton's submarine, however, was a different story. Each unit was a spool-shaped device about the size of a large hatbox. Designed to be ganged together and fit into a cylindrical pod attached outside the pressure hull, it held two kilograms of lithium dithionite, which, as Prater had already found out, was an extremely unstable substance. And, in chemical jargon, "unstable" is often a euphemism for explosive. "We thought we'd got it pretty well under control," says Ballard. "We had it in acetyl nitryl. We didn't think it was dangerous. But it turns out, in hindsight, that we didn't know that much about it. In fact, we had created quite a dodgy situation. A high-powered battery is basically just a controlled bomb. Whenever you put chemical compounds together that create electricity, you've essentially got an explosive situation." He shakes his head and laughs. "If it had decided to detonate, there would have been another Crater Lake down there in Arizona. And no more motel, I'll tell you! We were very, very lucky."

Ballard, Schwartz, Prater and their colleagues beavered away for about two years in their motel lab and made steady progress. By 1977, though, Ballard was spending a lot of his time away from home, especially in North Vancouver, working on the instrument package for Horton's submarine. He missed his wife and family. And he found that being based in a "backwater town" in southern Arizona was not good for his career. "I wasn't publishing papers. I wasn't going to scientific meetings. I was in danger of being forgotten," says Ballard. He had begun with a dense network of useful contacts, but these might not last. "Pretty soon I'll be 'Geoff who?'," he worried to himself. A major urban centre would be a much better base of operations.

He and Shelagh also felt the pull of home. They'd had a long-term plan to return eventually to Canada, and wanted their children to have at least some experience of Canadian schools and life during their formative years.

Keith Prater, too, had been shuttling back and forth between El Paso and Vancouver. He had taken a leave of absence from his academic job to put in time on both the battery and the blood storage work. As he took his seat on a flight to Vancouver in January 1978, he saw an attractive woman coming up the aisle. He hoped she would choose the empty seat next to him, and she did. Her name was Mei Lin Yeoell. She was English, but had been raised in Malaya, hence the Oriental name. She lived in Vancouver and was returning from a business trip to Rio de Janeiro. They were both involved with other people at the time, but they exchanged addresses and found a pretext to meet again. After two years of commuting, Prater resigned his tenured university position and relocated to British Columbia. Mei Lin and Keith were married.

Although the rechargeable lithium battery showed promise, Ralph Schwartz decided to focus on his other projects. Geoffrey Ballard was committed to alternative energy. With their bank manager as witness, they shook hands and paid each other one dollar. Ballard transferred all his interest in the blood work and brake equalizer to Schwartz. Schwartz, in turn, handed over his interest in the battery technology to Ballard, who became president and CEO of the new Vancouver-based company, Ultra Energy.

Tom Koppel
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Last updated: April 22, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/koppel07.html