A North Vancouver company is planning to build an $18.6-million hydrogen-power demonstration project, which includes a hydrogen-recycling plant and two fuelling stations for alternative vehicles.

Construction is slated to commence after Sacré-Davey Innovations Inc. signs funding contracts with the federal government, says company president Christopher Sacré.

"The whole concept of this project is to show that hydrogen technologies work - today," says Sacré.

Sacré-Davey Innovations Inc. is one of a group of companies owned by Sacré Consultants Ltd. The group operates generally under the name of a sibling company, Sacré-Davey Engineering, which is also participating in this project.

Wayne Chose, Business Edge
Colin Armstrong, left, and Chris Sacré of Sacré-Davey Engineering will be administering the $18.6-million fuel project.

Several federal agencies are expected to provide the funds as part of a series of deals, says Sacré, but he declined to disclose who is paying for what until the project is formally announced. The facilities are expected to begin operations in 2006.

The funding deals are slated to run until 2008.

"We expect to have this demonstration project running from the kick-off date through to the 2010 Winter Olympics and beyond," says Sacré.

If all goes according to plan, the technologies developed in North Vancouver and other parts of the Lower Mainland will be used to operate similar facilities worldwide.

Sacré-Davey will co-ordinate the construction of a small-scale modular waste-hydrogen recycling facility next to an electrochemical plant which will be the source of the hydrogen, in North Vancouver's Maplewood Flats area.

The company will use the recycled hydrogen at two fuelling stations that it's building - one in North Van and another in Port Coquitlam where hydrogen-powered transit buses will be gassed up. The fuelling stations are among 17 fuelling stations between the Canada-U.S. border and Whistler. The fuelling-station network is known as the Hydrogen Highway.

Sacré-Davey will also build fuelling stations at Riverside Drive and Dollarton Highway in North Van and a bus garage in Port Coquitlam, along with a carwash at Main Street and Mountain Highway in North Van, which will use a 150-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell to power the facility and heat water. The carwash's excess power supply will go to the provincial electricity grid.

"We will be responsible, basically, for administering and delivering all of the $18.6-million project and we'll be managing our partners ... to make sure they do their work," says Sacré.

Vancouver-based QuestAir Technologies Inc. will provide the technology that purifies the hydrogen.

Meanwhile, Westport Innovations Inc. of Vancouver is converting the conventional transit buses into hybrid vehicles, and Dynetek Industries Ltd. of Calgary will supply compressed-hydrogen storage tanks.

Nuvera Fuel Cells Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., will supply fuel cells used to power the carwash and a hydrogen-compression apparatus at the fuelling station. Easywash Inc. of North Vancouver will operate the carwash.

If signed, the deal with Ottawa will culminate Sacré-Davey's three-year quest for funding.

The company had spent about six months unsuccessfully searching for funding before the federal government called for proposals on demonstration projects.

"Ultimately, the funding is there to help reduce greenhouse gasses through the promotion of a hydrogen economy and a more sustainable energy picture," says Sacré-Davey project director Colin Armstrong, who will supervise the work.

"Sacré-Davey's goal is to engineer hydrogen energy systems in particular ... until more sustainable hydrogen is produced from wind turbines, ocean energy, or tidal run of river."

The facilities are designed to help Canada meet its obligations under the Kyoto accord and help kick-start the so- called hydrogen economy, which is intended to make hydrogen-powered vehicles and electrical facilities commercially viable.

An average hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle requires four kilograms of the gas to travel 600 kilometres, says Sacré.

There is enough waste hydrogen from the electrochemical plant to power 15,000-20,000 vehicles per year.

"There's a whack of hydrogen available there, so it's our intention to fully leverage as much of that hydrogen as we can to foster the deployment of hydrogen technologies here," he adds.

Sacré's company wants to attract other firms to the hydrogen economy and provide a friendly operating environment for them.

"We fully recognize that there are going to be a lot of other technologies that are going to come to the plays that are going to contribute to the mix of how you get hydrogen. But when you've got an oil well of hydrogen that's sitting there (at the electrochemical plant) burning hydrogen - and doing nothing with it - the opportunity is far too great to just simply dismiss."

Alison Grigg, manager of Fuel Cells Canada's Hydrogen Highway Project, says the Sacré-Davey project will be "a fantastic catalyst" for the hydrogen economy in southwestern B.C.

The project will help hydrogen economy boosters deal with a Catch-22 situation of which kind of technology should come first. Automobile manufacturers want to provide vehicles when hydrogen is available, while gas providers want the vehicles to be available first, she says.

"How do you step up to the plate?" asks Grigg. "All over the world, governments realize we have to provide some incentive to be the catalyst."

Ottawa, she says, wants to provide incentive funding while projects also receive investment from industry.

The source for Sacré-Davey's waste-hydrogen cleaning plant has a lot of potential, says Grigg. The plant will only use a "stream" of the total gas that's available.

An oil-recycling company has provided Sacré-Davey with a small parcel of land on which to install the hydrogen-cleaning facility.

The green carwash will demonstrate how the hydrogen economy can benefit consumers, says Grigg. Hydrogen has been used for industrial purposes for many years, but there are few examples of how large groups of people can use it in their local area.

"We want to show people that it can be done - not just tell people that it can be done," says Grigg.

Similar carwashes will also benefit communities such as Whistler, which need carwashes but are concerned about their environmental effects, she adds.

The North Vancouver fuelling station, just up the road from the hydrogen-cleaning plant, will gas up eight hydrogen-powered trucks being rolled out in 2006 by BC Hydro subsidiary Powertech Labs Inc. of Surrey. The fleet will be available for businesses and other organizations in 2006.

(As Business Edge has previously reported, Powertech is converting the internal-combustion engines of eight GMC Sierra 1500 HD crew cab pick-up trucks to operate solely on hydrogen.)

The Port Coquitlam fuelling station will fill the tanks of eight hydrogen and compressed natural gas-powered buses operated by TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Regional District's transportation authority.

"We have a pretty high-performance internal-combustion engine that's going to deliver good drivability for good urban work," says Sacré. "The buses are going to give the general public the opportunity to ride on a hydrogen bus. It's going to give them the opportunity to see that hydrogen is safe."

He says his group has come up with a "milkman principle" of delivering the gas through "power cubes.”

Each cube holds 90 kilograms of hydrogen, which can fuel 20 vehicles on average.

"We're going to have three (power cubes) filled at any one time," says Sacré. "We're going to basically load them onto a truck and drop them off (and) pick up the empty ones."

The hydrogen internal-combustion engine-powered vehicles, which burn hydrogen the same way conventional autos burn gasoline, mark the first phase of hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Automobile manufacturers have also developed vehicles powered by electricity generated by hydrogen fuel cells.

In March, Ford of Canada, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Ford Motor Co., and the federal government launched the Vancouver Fuel Cell Vehicle Program, which will test five Ford Focus cars over five years. But fuel cell vehicles will not be widely available until 2014 or 2015, says Fuel Cells Canada's Grigg, whose group is managing the Vancouver vehicle program.

Ballard Power Systems Inc. of Burnaby supplied the fuel-cell technology for the vehicles.

Ballard also recently announced it has signed a $30-million US deal to supply its hydrogen fuel cell cogeneration stacks to Japan.

Ballard's technology will be used to provide electricity and hot water to Japanese homes as part of a joint venture with a Japanese company.

(Monte Stewart can be reached at monte@businessedge.ca)