Ballard Power cutting 400 jobs: powering down spending in five-year plan

VANCOUVER (CP) - Ballard Power Systems is cutting 400 jobs in a five-year plan to hold down spending as it works toward a commercially viable fuel-cell engine.

In making the announcement Monday morning, Ballard said it has "preliminary agreement" from major shareholders DaimlerChrysler and Ford to provide a total of $97 million US in additional funding over the five years.

The company plans to decrease its workforce in the short term by 250 "through normal attrition, transfers and layoffs." One hundred employees in Germany will be redeployed to DaimlerChrysler.

Over the next 12 months, Ballard said, it intends to reduce employment by an additional 150 positions, to about 1,000.

It will combine three of its four divisions - transportation, power generation, and electric drives and power conversion - into a single organization. "This leaner, more efficient structure will enable Ballard to focus and accelerate the development of its core technologies and at the same time reduce administrative overhead expense," a company statement said.

Ballard will continue to have operations in Burnaby, B.C.; Dearborn, Mich.; Lowell, Mass.; and Nabern, Germany.

The changes will generate a restructuring charge of about $15 million US, of which $12 million will be booked in the current quarter, Ballard said.

"Our strategy and five-year plan have been reformulated with an emphasis on sustainability, speed and execution," stated Dennis Campbell, president and chief officer.

Here is some information about a different way to store and use hydrogen as a transportation fuel. This is the method used in the Chrysler "Natrium" demonstration vehicle, which can travel 300 miles on a 48-gallon tank of the sodium borohydride solution, which is neither flammable nor caustic, and does not require pressurized storage. My Plymouth minivan goes about the same distance on 16 gallons of gasoline.
http://www.millenniumcell.com/solutions/white_hydrogen.html

The fact is, fossil fuels are "God's battery", energy accumulated and stored at a different time and place that we now collect and use for our own purposes. Hydrogen is fantastically abundant, but here on earth is primarily hydrogen oxide (water), not much use as fuel. We can and do use what is available when we use hydrocarbon (fossil) fuels or biofuels such as alcohol and biodiesel, but we extract more energy from the carbon content of these fuels than from the hydrogen.

By the way, replacing just 20% of our current petroleum consumption with biofuels would require NEW irrigated land larger than the state of Texas, plus the people and machinery to tend and process it. And it would require about as much energy to produce as it would provide as fuel. We might want to do a practical amount of this, but it cannot replace fossil petroleum.

We can use "reformers" to extract hydrogen from many different hydrocarbon fuels, but the energy in the carbon is just wasted, and the same amount of CO2 is produced as just using the source fuel directly. A fuel cell can be thought of as a chemical battery with an external, refillable fuel source. To the best of my knowledge, fuel cells cannot tolerate fuels containing carbon.

I do expect to see small, alcohol sourced hydrogen fuel cells used to power portable appliances in the near future, but that will succeed based on portability and convenience rather than ecology, since it will emit CO2 as well as water vapor.

The Millenium Cell Corp technology linked above, or any other hydrogen based system, will require considerably higher energy input than the fuel will deliver to vehicles, unlike fossil fuels. Whether the hydrogen fuel is sodium borohydride, low-pressure metal hydride, or high-pressure
hydrogen gas, the hydrogen and the energy to package it will have to come from high-volume, fixed sources of energy in quantities several times our current capacity.

For that amount of energy, we will have to either make little atoms out of big ones (nuclear fission, which we can do very efficiently now) or bigger atoms out of little ones (nuclear fusion, which we are still trying to figure out.)

I have seen the term "energy vector" used elsewhere, which is a very sensible way to think of manufactured transportation fuels (anything other than fossil-sourced fuels.) We have been running our transportation system on God's battery for a long time now, and not worried about recharging it. There is a lot left, but someday we will probably value petroleum as a manufacturing feedstock more than as stored energy. By then, I believe we will live in a hydrogen economy.

Not that I'm aware of. Methanol, yes, but not methane.

At present the overall efficiency costs are the problem. Throwing away the carbon is throwing away a lot of the energy.

Methane fuel cells will have to wait for whatever is beyond current PEM exchange types- Possibly the solid oxide ones:

"An SOFC is composed of a gas-tight electrolyte layer sandwiched between porous cathode and anode layers. Oxygen from the air flows through the cathode, and a fuel gas containing hydrogen, such as methane, flows past the anode. Negatively charged oxygen ions migrate through the electrolyte membrane and react with the hydrogen to form water, which reacts with the methane fuel to form carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This electrochemical reaction generates electrons, which flow from the anode to an external load and back to the cathode, a final step that both completes the circuit and supplies electric power. To increase voltage output, several fuel cells are stacked together, a configuration called a fuel cell stack that forms the heart of a clean power generator. Visco and colleagues' foray into affordable fuel cell design began several years ago when they developed a way to lower a fuel cell's operating temperature to 800 degrees Celsius without sacrificing efficiency. Until then, fuel cells worked most efficiently at 1,000 degrees Celsius, a high temperature that decreases the cell's life span and precludes the use of metal components.

But there's the rub! Just as in the sodium/sulfur batteries that were going to power cars, when you have these operating temperatures, there are engineering and practical nightmares.

At least methane is quite easy to liquify and transport. Before we get too excited about hydrogen, remember that a good portion of the people we see every day on the highway _really_ should not even be trusted with gasoline.....

On our DoE hydrogen contract, we were running a small truck on hydrogen. It was affectionately named "The Hindenwagen". Never had any negative or adverse events with it....but it was a LONG LONG way from prime time.

Note also the solid oxide Fuel Cell produces CO2 when run on methane..which negates any "green" benefits, doesn't it?

Contrare mon frere.... There are already fuel cell vehicles on the road. The City of LA accepted Honda's last week, five of them....and the UC system accepted six Toyotas... GM is taking the press to Monaco to debut theirs in the next couple weeks, and Mercedes-Benz is introducing theirs at the Detroit Auto Show. The way I understand it is that we will be needing to build some nuke plants in order to power the hydrogen conversion plants...because they use a lot of power.

Japan's automakers zip ahead on fuel-cell cars
San Francisco Chronicle, CA - 08 Dec 2002
... Honda is leasing five of its fuel-cell cars to Los Angeles for use in the city
fleet. There's a downside to the new technology, though, and it's a big one. ...

California gets fuel-cell cars
Oakland County Press, MI - 07 Dec 2002
... Honda delivered the FCX to the city of Los Angeles, while Toyota Motor Sales delivered
its first two market-ready hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles to the University ...

AOL Time Warner integrating offerings
Topeka Capital Journal, KS - 07 Dec 2002
... Honda is leasing five of its four-passenger FCX fuel-cell vehicles to Los Angeles
for daily use in the city fleet and on Monday presented Mayor James K. Hahn ...

GM Envisions Radical New Future Powered by Fuel-Cell Technology
Fuel Cell Today, UK - 06 Dec 2002
... and Honda Motor Co. Honda announced Oct. 7 that it had sold its first
FCX fuel-cell car to the City of Los Angeles, and on Nov. ...

Drive to create fuel cell vehicles
The Chesapeake Bay Journal, Chesapeake Bay - 06 Dec 2002
... Clear skies from Los Angeles ... And perhaps fuel cell ... fill-up of hydrogen, which doesn’t
fit into the hurry-up-and-go-far US lifestyle (although Honda ...

Fuel cell vehicles will be hitting the roads in the next year or two. The cost of drive units is approaching the cost of internal combustion units and a major push is under way at all auto companies.

I thought CO2 was much less important as a greenhouse gas than methane, however.

Right.

From an EPA website:

"Methane traps over 21 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide".

But in tonnage, there is more CO2 produced. There are natural processes for coping with the CO2, like photosynthesis, and dissolution in the seas and getting locked up as carbonates.

CO2 still becomes an issue when studying the different energy schemes, though. One publication described the regeneration by carbothermal reduction of hydroxides of light metals when used in M-OH-->MH---> M-OH-->... hydrogen energy cycle, and the CO2 produced amounted to a deal-killer. The workers would have been right back where they started with a hydrocarbon fueled engine. Considering the advances in ignition control, catalytic converters, and all, there is not much BUT CO2 coming out of tailpipes now. So, to have a hydrogen fuel cycle that produces CO2, and at lower overall cycle (the only efficiency that counts) efficiencies, the only plus would have been telling the Arabs to Go Fish. (Not all that bad a motive, but it would be simple spite, and not always the best for the country.)

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