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| NEWSPAPER SINCE 1969

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PAGE 13 [:] P

: EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Tyler McMullen is dwarfed by the two enormous pumpkins he and his famil

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AGE 37

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after the family’s planned Thanksgiving pumpkin pie feast.

Feds award $950,000 high tech deal to North Van company

THE FEDERAL government has awarded North Yan-
couver’s Ballard Technologies Corp. (BTC) a $950,000 con-
tract to develop a revolutionary non-pelluting electronic
power generator for the Canadian military.

Under the contract, which was
announced Friday by Capilano MP
Mary Collins, BTC will develop a
prototype four-kilowatt generator
powered by a passive, non-
polluting Solid Polymer Fuel Cell
(SPFC).

The finished generator will
weigh half as much as a com-
parable gas-powered unit and will

create electricity from a chemical
reaction between air and a
methane-based fuet. Scheduled
delivery date is March 1990.

BTC, which was founded in
1979 by company president Gcof-
frey Ballard, has beaten some of

the world’s largest industrial
research corporations to the punch
on SPFCs,

The federal government con-
tact, Ballard said Friday, is ex-
tremely importait for BTC
“because it is recognition...and it
will allow us to take the work out
of the Jab’’ and apply it to a prac-
tical use.

BTC began work on SPFCs in
1983 after the Canadian Depart-
ment of National Defence (DND)
awarded the company a $500,000
contract to develop the technolugy.

The company matched DND
funds and developed the world’s

firs. hydrogen-air fuel cell to
operate below 212 F. BTC is now
the world leader in portable energy
technology.

The Jatest federal government
contract will help BTC increase the
SPFC’s size and power output and
complete its modification to a
more portable and less volatile
methanol-based fuel.

BTC will initially hire three
engineers to help in the generator’s
development. Company vice-
president of marketing David
McLeod said BTC will eventually
move into generator production.

In addition to BTC’s dedication

to perfecting portable, non-
polluting power, McLeod said its
SPFC success is based in its ap-
proach to the cell's technology,
which had been developed in the
1960s by NASA for the Gemini
space program, but had remained
technologically and financially
beyond private industry.

“Everyone else had been looking
exclusively at the science aspect (of
SPFCs),"" McLeod said, ‘‘but
when we looked at it, we said,
‘Can we make a commercial pro-

See BTC

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