The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

by Steve LeVine

  Yet while this formulation was striking, it did not break new ground. The problem was that physics stepped in and spoiled Thackeray’s picture. Nickel, manganese, and cobalt, it turned out, would come apart just like Goodenough’s formulation if you sent too much lithium into the shuttling motion between electrodes that created electricity.

  Thackeray thought back to South Africa. He had learned that a compound of lithium, manganese, and oxygen that went by the atomic lettering Li2MnO3 was electrochemically inactive. It was normally cast aside as an impurity. But now Thackeray’s intuition told him the story was incomplete—he thought there could be more to the material than anyone knew. His idea was to add a bit of Li2MnO3 to the lithium-laced NMC. Thackeray suspected that this twist would buttress the NMC and keep the cathode intact as the battery was charged and discharged.

  In 1994 and 1995, Johnson created test battery cells using the formulation that Thackeray described and intercalated the lithium. He found that he was able to shuttle well over half the lithium between the two electrodes, all while the NMC structure held very much together. It was as though the cathode had been waiting for the Li2MnO3 to provide it stability.

  Johnson learned why Thackeray’s intuition was correct. Even though the Li2MnO3 was itself inactive when introduced into a cathode, its manganese and lithium went on to migrate and lodge in the NMC like pillars. These atoms propped up the structure while the lithium in the NMC began to shuttle.

  Visually, both NMC and Li2MnO3 resemble a stripped-down house. The floor and ceiling are made of oxygen atoms, and the walls comprise nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Scientists call this framework a lattice. Because the lattices of the NMC and the Li2MnO3 are similar, Johnson could easily integrate the two at the nanoscale.

  If the only notable thing was that the compound now held together, Johnson would have been engaged in a mere thought exercise. But stability wasn’t their only success. If you were thinking about an electric car, the NMC led to a better cathode than Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide, his lithium-iron-phosphate, or Thackeray’s own manganese spinel. Not only was it cheaper and safer, but Thackeray also calculated that the extra lithium in the system improved its performance. The double lattice let you pull out 60 or 70 percent of the lithium before collapsing, well over the 50 percent you could withdraw from Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide. That extra lithium—the added 10 or 20 percent—meant more energy.

  Thackeray called the invention “layered-layered,” or “composite.”

  This double lattice had another advantage. It set up Thackeray for future advances. He could swap other metals in and out of the latticework to make more improvements.

  As it was, though, the NMC was already potent. It overcame an essential challenge facing batteries if they were ever to compete against gasoline propulsion, and that was that very few people would settle for a single trait in an electric car. The ability to travel a long distance was important, but it was not sufficient; drivers demanded other qualities, too. They wanted the car to take off—immediately—when they pressed the accelerator, and to keep on accelerating to high speeds. They insisted that their vehicle be safe—consumers, not to mention regulators, would reject any car with a chronically explosive battery. The last quality was possibly the hardest to deliver: pushing for such performance in distance and acceleration tended to make the battery more dangerous.

  Cars equipped with Argonne’s NMC formulation could travel forty miles on a single charge, a key technological marker because it was the distance that the average American motorist drove in a day. If you did not meet that metric, you couldn’t really think about putting a model on the road. The NMC also provided the rapid acceleration demanded by Americans. And manganese made the system safe.

  All in all, NMC was superior to any cathode thus far produced in the national laboratories, even, some said, to anything designed elsewhere.

  The breakthrough bucked up Thackeray, who seemed endlessly curious tinkering with the narrow range of elements on the periodic table relevant to batteries—but only if he intuited the potential for a meaningful advance. No one could predict commercial interest, which often seemed unfathomable. Why, after all these years, did Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide remain the standard lithium-ion formulation, used in virtually every cell phone, tablet, and laptop on the planet? No one else’s work—even Thackeray’s spinel—had been good enough to eclipse the old man. That illustrated the extremely slender chance of commercializing something new. Still, there had to be the chance of outdoing Goodenough—of progressing toward the ultimate goal, which was challenging the provenance of the internal combustion engine. Otherwise Thackeray was not interested.

  He began to assemble a patent application for his NMC.

  • • •

  In May 2000, Thackeray flew to Italy’s Lake Como for a two-week lithium-ion conference. The setting was symbolic—Alessandro Volta was born in Como in 1745. Just eight months earlier, the city had hosted the bicentennial celebration of Volta’s invention of the battery. Some two hundred experts from thirty countries had gathered to mark the occasion. But Thackeray was disappointed to find little feeling of the past at the May event. For starters, it was held at a conference center a train ride away from the city, where he found the atmosphere sterile.

  Thackeray delivered one of the opening presentations. Mid-morning the next day, he sat in on a thirty-minute talk by four scientists from New Zealand. In excited language, the men spoke mysteriously of a new approach to batteries coupling chromium with manganese oxide. Later, Thackeray strolled by a poster display manned by one of the New Zealanders, a crystallographer named Brett Ammundsen, and found him frustrated. “You of all people will know what I’m doing,” Ammundsen said. Surely Thackeray, the pioneer of manganese spinel back at Oxford, grasped the significance of the New Zealand advance even if no one else at Como seemed to.

  At that moment Thackeray did comprehend what the New Zealanders were up to: treading on his turf.

  For Thackeray, they were uncomfortably close to his maneuver with Li2MnO3—just as he was, they were injecting added lithium to juice the performance of a cathode, in their case a chromium-and-manganese oxide formulation.

  An alarmed Thackeray telephoned Chris Johnson in Chicago.

  “Quick, do a couple of more experiments and then write up an invention report,” Thackeray said. “We are going to file for a provisional patent.” The patent he had been preparing was not quite ready. But now it needed to be if he was to get the jump on the New Zealanders.

  A “provisional patent” was a tactical move—it was what you filed when you had confidence in your idea, were in a race with rivals, but lacked sufficient data. It provided a full year to validate your claim. If you found your data, you could be awarded a full patent, dated when you originally filed. Johnson dropped what he was doing and went to work. When Thackeray arrived back in Chicago, they both began to produce test cells and create electrochemical data that more or less validated their claim to greater performance. They sent off the data to the lab’s outside lawyer. In a diagram, Thackeray claimed broad priority for a cathode combining nickel, manganese, and any third metal. A year later, they filed and were awarded the permanent patent.

  They had beaten the New Zealanders. But Thackeray needn’t have worried. It was a long six months after Lake Como before the New Zealand group filed its own patent application. Reading it, Thackeray found it mediocre. The New Zealanders had “missed the big picture,” he thought. It was as though they did not understand that the key to the material was the interaction of the two lattices—the use of the Li2MnO3 to stabilize the NMC structure. Rather than a composite of two structures—the central fact of the formulation, Thackeray posited—the New Zealanders thought it was a homogenous mishmash of metals.

  So it went with another competing patent application that surfaced at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, one that to Thackeray also seemed confus
ed. “They just didn’t know what they had,” he said.

  To Thackeray’s eye, the other applications resembled “what the Japanese will do,” which was “claim the world.” If you did so, without describing precisely what you meant, you could be ripped apart by patent challenges. The trick was to be clear and simple so that there was no mistake about what you were asserting. “They sort of meandered along a road, blind around every corner as to where they were going,” he said, an approach that left you “running into problems with priority.” Thackeray’s own exacting method had been passed down by British mining executives in South Africa, the fellows who expressed commercial interest in the Zebra battery and who would take him and other battery scientists for lunch in a bar “to brainstorm” how to protect it. Patents would be drafted with beer and wine flowing freely. Thackeray noticed that the South Africa patents tended to hold.

  A few years later, when carmakers began to produce electrics, they were highly secretive about their batteries, including which formulation they used and the cost, regarding such knowledge as competitively vital. But General Motors openly announced that it had bought licenses for both of Thackeray’s major inventions—the NMC and manganese spinel—in a combined-formulation battery for the Volt, its first new electrified car, a plug-in hybrid that it launched in 2010. GM said the battery’s forty-mile distance was ideal for a first-iteration Volt. But GM’s interest was not confined there; Argonne had promised an advanced version of the NMC, one that could be combined with an improved anode and take the car much farther. GM was waiting for that advance, with which it hoped to launch new electrics.

  • • •

  The addition of Thackeray had injected much-needed competitive verve into Argonne’s Battery Lab. At once, it was on the leading edge of lithium-ion research. The lab’s next recruit would complete its special tandem—a pair of battery men who sat astride both the scientific and commercial worlds.

  9

  The Man from Casablanca

  The Moroccan village of Benahmed is a quick half-hour drive down a smooth highway from Casablanca. But when Khalil Amine was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, the trip took twice as long, winding down narrow roads on a bus. Benahmed was a clean, bright town with a small French population that stayed on after the end of colonial rule a few years before. Amine’s father, an Arab intellectual who taught school, and his mother, a Berber, produced seven boys. Khalil was the second. Of his mother’s family, Amine said, “The Berbers are extremely good in business.”

  Family lore went back to the first decade or so of the twentieth century, when Amine’s maternal grandfather, Benadir, was a twelve-year-old shepherd in the mountains around the port of Agadir. Pretty often, an elderly man would beat him. But one day, a provoked Benadir took a rock and smacked the old man across the head. The man fell and did not move. The terrified boy fled.

  Benadir was hiding when a fruit cart attached to a tractor trundled by. He clambered aboard and quickly concealed himself. For the next two or three days, the cart progressed up the coast. Benadir feasted on the fruit and vegetables. But in Casablanca the fruit sellers discovered their stowaway and threw him into the street. Benadir began to walk and beg. Tired and dirty, he turned up at a home. A Frenchwoman inside, filled with pity, took Benadir in. She cleaned him up and allowed him to stay on as a housekeeper.

  Amine does not recall the woman’s name, but one day, went the story, her businessman husband asked Benadir to mind one of his shops. This was a tremendous responsibility, as Benadir saw it, and he dutifully opened at five A.M. and closed at midnight. He slept and ate at the shop. After a while, the Frenchman observed that the shop’s earnings had soared. He assigned the boy more shops and began to treat him like a son.

  In 1956, Morocco won independence from France and Spain. Benadir’s French family was among a mass of panicky foreigners who repatriated. On his way out, the Frenchman offered his enterprise to Benadir. So it was that Amine’s grandfather became a considerable local titan.

  The stories may have rubbed off in Amine’s own commercial instincts—“a gene from my mother’s side, I think,” he said. “But unfortunately, the twist is that Benadir has a son who never went to school. He never worked. He destroyed that fortune. My uncle, yeah. If I were him, I would be owning half of Morocco.” Amine was laughing but he wasn’t joking.

  Amine said, that, as a boy, he was serious and emotional—he would cry if a classmate outscored him on a school test. At a French boarding school outside Casablanca, where he was sent since his own village had no high school, Amine and some friends read late into the night and early in the morning in the bathroom, the one place that the masters left lit. Mostly, his high school friends played soccer, smoked, and played cards. Amine sat with them, reading. In the case of a disputed game, Amine would arbitrate. “I could see who was the winner and say, ‘Okay, here is the money.’” He was their trusted person.

  As a college senior, Amine topped Morocco’s national science exam. That qualified him for a fellowship at France’s University of Bordeaux. There, he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry and accepted an offer to become a postdoctoral assistant at Kyoto University in Japan.

  • • •

  In Kyoto, Amine moved into a university dorm that to him seemed like a stylish hotel. When he wasn’t in the lab, Amine watched TV in the dorm lounge, and that was where he was when an extremely attractive young woman sauntered in and took a seat. “She was like a movie star,” Amine said. “Wow. Blow me out.” He started to chat. “Where are you from?”

  Her name was Xiaoping Xu. She was Chinese and had been in Japan for three months. Just now, she was preparing for a medical school exam that included technical Japanese. “I don’t have books,” she said, “so I’m worried.”

  Amine said he had books and dropped them off with her. Then Xiaoping vanished.

  About six months later, he received a note. Xiaoping had finished first in her class and won a prestigious pharmaceutical fellowship. She wanted to return Amine’s books.

  Amine was not thinking books but serious romance—he genuinely liked Xiaoping. He thought she must be interested, too, but a Chinese friend told him that, if she was as conservative as Amine described, he had to slow down. He could not be pushy.

  He invited Xiaoping on a series of expensive dates—to dinners, to temples. He bought her gifts. On Amine’s mind all the while was a two-decade-old memory from Morocco. He was six and along with his brother was watching an action movie starring two beautiful actresses: a Chinese and an Indian. “I’m gonna marry either that Indian girl or that Chinese,” Amine had said. Now a grown man, Amine wanted to realize that early childhood fantasy. He was intent on marrying Xiaoping.

  After six months of courtship, Xiaoping allowed him a kiss.

  • • •

  In the lab, too, Amine felt a long-won sense of success. He was a researcher who did not necessarily find original pathways to store more atoms in smaller spaces, but he read voraciously, paid rapt attention at conferences, and could rapidly grasp both the potential and the flaws in ideas advanced by others. He would e-mail friends with questions and thoughts and from there identify creative solutions before anyone else. “If there is a problem, we fix it,” Amine would say. “If there is another problem, we fix that one, too.” He had moved on to become a research and development manager for the Japan Storage Battery Company, a privileged position for a young foreigner in the East Asian country. Japan was booming and the money flowed in high salaries and astronomical extras: double overtime, which would mean triple salary; an extra six months of salary each year—three months for the winter, three for the summer—and additional bonuses for key players who made important breakthroughs. Employees were not paid royalties because the company retained rights to all inventions. But Amine was awarded an added bonus equivalent to double his annual salary for his invention of a five-volt battery system using nickel and magnesium. He received another two-ye
ar bonus for a cobalt-oxide system that the company licensed to Sony and Samsung, a link back to John Goodenough’s blockbuster original.

  Amine and Xiaoping decided to wed. Amine’s parents immediately embraced the idea. As for Xiaoping’s family, Amine had to impress her mother. In Chinese tradition, “if the mom says it’s okay, everything’s smooth,” Amine said. “If the mom says no, you are in trouble.” At first, the signs were not good. Xiaoping’s mother thought that Amine, given his professional success, must be advanced in years. “Why do you want to be with this guy? He’s old,” she told her daughter. Amine said, “She thought I was like fifty years old.” But just three years separated him from Xiaoping.

  They traveled to China. Before going, Amine checked in with his Chinese friend. It went without saying that Amine would present a gift to the mother, but it had to be valuable, the friend said. “You bring her a flower, and they’ll joke about you. They’ll say, ‘Yeah, this is a dud.’”

  Amine arrived with a gold pendant-and-bracelet set, several French scarves, and a pair of fashionable shoes.

  “Hello,” he greeted Xiaoping’s mother, smiling with gifts in hand. She smiled back in a way that told him there would be no problem.

  In 1997, Xiaoping was accepted to medical school at the University of Illinois, a necessary step if she wanted to practice in the United States. She encouraged Amine to follow her and he found a job leading a battery research group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It wasn’t far—he would drive the four hours to Chicago and see Xiaoping as often as he could.