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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 dioxides 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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