The buzz quieted more than a decade ago. But John Sheridan, president, chief executive and director of Ballard Power Systems, remembers it fondly - and ironically.

Ballard, born in 1979 as Ballard Research and now headquartered in Burnaby near Vancouver, B.C., had developed a technology destined to change the world. It was a hydrogen fuel cell with a proton-exchange membrane. In practical application, it would trigger a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity.

In cars and trucks, hydrogen fuel cells would mean an end to tailpipe pollution as we've come to know and hate it. It would mean less dependence on foreign oil. It would remove the automobile as a negative component in the environmental equation.

And there was so much more. The hydrogen fuel cell technology that powered cars and trucks could also be used to power homes and buildings, conceivably removing them from traditional electrical power grids.

It was all very wonderful. The media were agog. Politicians were enthralled. Wall Street types were aroused. Institutional environmentalists - people who take the "right" environmental stance as much for the acquisition of political power as they do for altruism - were at least interested.>
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Sheridan, interviewed in his glass-enclosed office in Burnaby, smiled and shook his head. "For the most part, we had only a working proof-of-concept back then," he said. "We hadn't really begun to do anything with it. But everybody was excited about it."

Between 1989 and 1994 Ballard, hydrogen fuel cells and car companies such as General Motors that had begun investing heavily in fuel cell technology were all over the news.

But there were inherent problems that would curtail a fickle public's interest. Fuel cell technology is science, and science often does not conform to the needs of the next news cycle. There are trials and errors. Science has little respect for deadlines.

And science is complicated and expensive. Its complexity defies the sound bite, whether political or straight news. It turns off a public that finds the voting intrigue of American Idol substantially more interesting than proton-exchange membranes. Its expense rattles investors who are more interested in the next big payoff than they are in the next big or best thing.

So, Ballard and hydrogen fuel cells faded from the news, ceded to the appeal of gas-electric hybrid technology and to the illusions of the silver bullet and the quick fix. And therein resides the irony.

Neither Ballard nor hydrogen fuel cells went away. In fact, they are bigger than ever, as evidenced by Ballard's sprawling research-and-development and manufacturing facility in Burnaby and the importance of the technology to countries such as Japan.

"Maybe we made some mistakes in the beginning by over-promising - that is, giving people the idea that the benefits of this technology would be immediate," Sheridan conceded. "The reality is that we're in a marathon race," he said, suggesting that Ballard and the technology it has pioneered has many more miles to run before it reaches any finish line.

At the moment, despite its reported loss of $14.2 million in the first quarter, Ballard's future looks promising. Research and development continues apace on the development of smaller, relatively lightweight, more powerful fuel cells for cars and trucks. Every major automobile company, including Toyota, is investing heavily in the development of fuel cells for future commercial automotive applications, some of which could enter the market as early as 2010.

Japan, through its various energy companies and in cooperation with Ballard its competitors, rapidly is increasing the number of fuel-cell power units installed in buildings. The technology, largely government-subsidized, is so popular in Japan that the country's energy companies are beginning to run fuel-cell advertisements on TV.

And fuel cells are beginning to show up in sectors largely invisible to the media and the public. A fuel-cell powered forklift, anyone? They are beginning to be used in factories and other materials-handling businesses worldwide.

Also, the next time a storm or other disaster short-circuits the grid power going to your local cellphone tower, fuel-cell backup power could keep you connected thanks to unhappy lessons learned during disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Traditional lead-acid battery backup devices ran out of juice several hours after the storm, disrupting first-responder communications as well as communications among families and friends. Now, many telecommunication companies are saying that hydrogen-powered fuel cells would have kept those cellphone towers working longer and more reliably.

But, as Sheridan said, continued development and application of the technology amounts to a long-distance race. But at least he and Ballard now appear to be gaining more political backing in that endeavor from provincial and state governments in Canada and the United States, as evidenced by Ballard's prominent role last week at the Pacific Economic Summit's Clean Energy Conference.

Both Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cited Ballard for its contributions to the development of alternative energy. But perhaps the most useful comments came from Campbell, who urged governments and environmental groups to abandon the silliness of pitting one technology against another.

"We have to embrace the changes in front of us," Campbell said. "We have to look at what is being offered and ask: 'How do we make the world a better place?' "

That means we have to be willing to develop technologies that might not have an instant impact, "but that will have an impact 20 or 30 years from now, that will have an impact on our children and grandchildren," Campbell said.

That requires three things all too often missing from political and media landscapes: vision, patience and selflessness.

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