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Ed Adams, Robin Rankine, Edward Hardy & Joseph Lukacs

Ed Adams, Robin Rankine, Edward Hardy and Joseph Lukacs pooled their talents under the aegis of Bow Valley Industries to solve the problem of sulphur dioxide emissions monitoring. The quartet was born of two different companies; Adams had sold his instrumentation company, Dominion Instruments, to Bow Valley Industries, while Lukacs, Rankine and Hardy were part of Western Research and Development, which had also been purchased by Bow Valley in 1970.

The group worked to address the potent environmental hazard brought about by the release of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. A dangerous by-product of oil and gas natural refineries, sulphur dioxide can cause health problems in humans and animals, and it combines with atmospheric water vapour to create sulphuric acid, which falls as acid rain. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as sulphur dioxide’s deleterious effects became apparent, governments began imposing stricter SO2 emissions standards for oil and gas refineries.

Bow Valley Industries was asked to help devise a system to monitor the emissions, and Adams, Rankine, Lukacs and Hardy were assembled as the project team. Each of the four had different skills that furthered the project: Adams was skilled with instrumentation; Lukacs a skilled engineer; Hardy helped with equipment installation at a variety of plants; and Rankine was a mathematical whiz adept at measurement standards. The quartet developed a monitoring system that employed the relatively new technology of spectroscopy to measure SO2 concentrations and send the information from the refinery stack to a remote monitoring station.

The stack monitoring technology devised by Adams, Rankine, Lukacs and Hardy is used by many companies and governments across Canada and the United States.

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