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

by Steve LeVine

  Japanese universities were mindful of the scarcity of exceptional ideas. When corporations came calling, the universities tended to be harder bargainers than their American counterparts.

  Argonne employed some three thousand scientists but Amine was appalled at its relatively small intellectual property unit. The lab seemed content to file away strong inventions without seeking publicity. There was no explaining it apart from either a diffidence toward the business of science or plain languor. Whichever, Argonne’s IP team was passive when it came to licensing the lab’s inventions. So Amine set out to create his own little Japan. Amine organized his staff along the lines of the Kyoto invention machine where he learned his craft. He whipped his researchers into a cadre that at his direction worked systematically through every possible approach to the solution of a chemical puzzle—hundreds if necessary. The enviable record of papers, patents, and industry interest followed.

  Of one of his Chinese researchers, Amine said, “When you give him an experiment, he does it fast. He’ll give you the result in two days. With some people it’s like pulling teeth.”

  Amine’s critics pilloried his record of picking up a promising idea produced elsewhere, blending it with his own flashes of intuition and the work of his efficient staff, and emerging with a patent application or a new paper. They insinuated that it was theft. But in Japan—or any of the big Asian manufacturing economies—his methods would be recognized as fair and even sensible. Japan, China, and South Korea continued to retain their economic edge with a willingness to build on others’ ideas and spend money for years and years with the confidence that a profitable industry would eventually result. Amine was merely following the Japanese way.

  As critical as they were of him, Amine was savage toward the usual practices in American industry and labs. Western scientists championed the visionary moment but that led to “the moon or nothing. So they have nothing,” he said. He was prepared to go step by step. And he winnowed down his group to those who would work the way he saw fit. That meant only two nationalities—Chinese and Moroccans.

  On its face, Amine’s hiring sounded racist. His management style was dictatorial. But Amine was neither unethical nor a bigot. Rather, he was opportunistic in noticing others’ advances, uncanny in identifying and resolving a flaw, and ruthless in cutting through to a product bearing his name. That made him no different from countless other successful Americans.

  Jun Lu, a researcher on futuristic lithium-air batteries, defended Amine’s Japanese notions. Jun and his wife, Temping Yu, who also worked at Argonne, had no relatives in the Chicago area. “So we have more time to focus on research. You work harder” on Amine’s team, he said, but that was only part of the picture. “If you want to be successful, you still have to have the ideas. You have to have common sense.”

  But there were also pockets of anger in Amine’s group. This was not Japan. Some members of his group did not appreciate serving as cogs in Amine’s machine rather than innovators and thinkers in their own right. Amine held out the coin of the realm—an American visa and the later hope of citizenship. Their names appeared on the papers to which their grunt work contributed. But some of Amine’s best staff bristled at his regimentation, seeing the arrangement as indentured servitude. Two of Amine’s most talented scientists—both of them principal researchers on the NMC—returned to South Korea after painful experiences under him. Amine regarded himself as a keen judge of talent—he thought he knew who was who and how to incentivize them. But his high-throughput approach didn’t always work out.

  • • •

  There was a divide between the Chinese and the rest of the battery department. The Americans were suspicious of the Chinese and also themselves insular. The old days of Argonne scientists hanging out at one another’s homes were long past—in 2011, five years after he joined the lab, Chamberlain had yet to throw a party. Almost none of the battery guys had ever been to his house. An administrative staff member’s ears perked up when her boss mentioned dinner plans with a colleague—it was the first time she had ever heard of lab executives socializing together. She could only speculate why so little entertaining went on. It wasn’t that the scientists were unfriendly. But there seemed to be an unspoken midwestern distance. Andy Jansen and Kevin Gallagher, both battery guys, threw backyard barbecues for department colleagues, but Asians were rarely present. Once, when Gallagher, a young engineer, brought along a South Korean scientist named Sun-Ho Kang to a gathering, Janssen asked why he had not joined them before.

  “I was never invited,” Kang said.

  As a young man living in Seoul, Kang had wanted to see the world. His father, a construction subcontractor who supported the family by renting out the couple of forklifts that he owned, had never left South Korea. Neither had his sister, Kang Eun Kyung, though she was a well-known composer of pop lyrics. A professor recommended that Kang contact a physicist he knew—John Goodenough, then a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Another of his students had been a postdoctoral assistant under the battery pioneer, but he was moving on, so there might be an open slot in Goodenough’s lab.

  Goodenough responded quickly when Kang e-mailed—the position was his as soon as he wished to show up. “Somehow he had the impression that South Korean students—that anyone from my university—should be good,” Kang said.

  When Kang arrived with his wife and daughter, they found Austin expensive—his salary was two thousand dollars a month, leaving little after eight hundred dollars in rent. But working with Goodenough was itself compensation. Kang found his new mentor to be “just a genius.”

  “What do you want to do?” Goodenough asked when they met. Kang had never researched lithium-ion, so Goodenough gave him an assignment: a visiting scientist was submitting a paper to Nature, but Goodenough was suspicious of his lab results.

  “Try to reproduce them,” he said.

  When Kang reported his findings, Goodenough concluded that the claims were in fact faked. The visiting scientist was attempting to snooker Nature. Such work could not come out of Goodenough’s lab.

  “And that was the start of my luck,” Kang said. Over the next year and a half, he and Goodenough worked on cathodes and super-capacitors, energy storage devices that deliver a burst of power for a short period. “Having my name next to his on a paper was an honor for me,” Kang said.

  One day, Kang noticed a circular on Goodenough’s desk—the announcement of a job opening at Argonne. For the first time, Kang confided his financial circumstances.

  “I don’t have funding to raise your salary,” the professor said.

  “I understand, so I’d like to apply for that position,” Kang said. Goodenough handed him the announcement.

  Don Vissers, the same manager who had recruited Thackeray and Amine, responded warmly. Kang moved to Chicago with a position on Khalil Amine’s team at double his Austin pay.

  It was not long before Kang felt like “a workhorse.” He was carrying out repetitive tasks in which Amine was attempting again and again to advance yet another theory that would produce yet another paper or patent “that doesn’t change anything.” The Moroccan traveled frequently but provided his subordinates no oppor- tunity to attend the same international conferences, mix with peers, or make a name for themselves. None of his staffers won promotion for their work. Kang imagined that, should he carry on, he would retire as he was—a research scientist. Kang shrank into himself—he “tried to be a nobody.” “Maybe that sounds weird. But that was my attitude,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything from the group.”

  The then-department head transferred Kang to another manager. His best work followed, including a crucial role in the development of NMC 2.0. Under Thackeray, Kang discovered inner truths about the material that no one else recognized. He at last found close friends on the staff, in particular Gallagher, the young engineer. But it was too late. Kang wanted to “contribute to everyday life,
” to work in applied science. Argonne seemed too far removed.

  About this time, he attended a Chicago dinner hosted by Park Sang-Jin, the CEO of Samsung SDI, the battery division of the South Korean conglomerate. One dinner topic was innovation. Kang said that, at Argonne, he did not try “to do everything alone. I know it is much faster and more effective when I find someone and try to collaborate.” Park said the same—“nobody can do it all.”

  The meeting was important for Park. Samsung had eclipsed Japanese companies and become the world’s largest maker of lithium-ion batteries for electronics. At that moment, the company was aiming to expand and develop advanced automobile batteries as well, challenging former juggernaut Japan along the entire commercial chain, from energy storage to consumer products. As the incumbent, Japan was still ahead in the battery race—its laboratories were superior, it had a decade-and-a-half head start on the factory floor, and its brand names were still prized. But Samsung was capturing a greater share of the total market. In the case of vehicular batteries, the trouble was that Samsung lacked expertise with the very different cathodes required for the ten-year life demanded of them. With his collaborative part in the work on NMC 2.0, Kang seemed ideal to lead this research. Park asked Kang to join the company. His title would be vice president. That suited Kang, because “I didn’t want to go somewhere and be some very minor person.”

  He and his family prepared to return to Seoul.

  Considering where he was at Argonne, the scale of the elevation was stunning. He looked back. Eleven years earlier, he had left South Korea to experience the world. At Argonne, he had anguished over a decidedly subordinate role in Amine’s research group. Now he was returning home as a leading member of South Korea’s team in the battery race. “They expect me to solve the problem,” Kang said. He would “taste industry and challenge myself—will I survive or not?”

  Even when he was working on NMC 2.0, Kang thought he had not been particularly creative. “I wished, I wished,” Kang said. “But I just followed. All I did was try to be open.” Kang said that to be innovative, “people should first be very desperate. Otherwise they don’t need innovation.” That was why the Chinese would lose the battery war—they typically moved slowly when it came to technology because they did not have to do otherwise. Historically, they borrowed technology from others.

  Americans, Kang said, had more potential than almost anyone because they had the fundamentals—from childhood, they were trained to argue and discuss. But they, too, were handicapped: they were not desperate. “They are not prepared to lose everything.” At Argonne itself, senior scientists did too little to prepare their young subordinates for big future breakthroughs. Thackeray and Amine—they ought to regularly assign risky and challenging projects to junior scientists “just to try.”

  “It’s like when the lions race the cubs,” Kang said. “They push the cubs off of the cliff and see if they survive or not.” That did not happen enough at Argonne. And it was shortsighted. Eventually the junior scientists would succeed Thackeray and Amine.

  But now it was Kang’s responsibility at Samsung.

  18

  IPO!

  Before carrying out fresh experiments, Argonne researchers wrote reports justifying their safety, often twenty pages in length. They wore specified lab coats—in some cases white, in others blue—and large plastic protective glasses. Before putting their hands into glove boxes, they first donned surgical gloves as an added protective layer. If they wished to continue working past seven P.M., they had to obtain special permission. These rules and others were passed down from Washington. Chamberlain pushed for compliance, arguing the tenet that all should go home each day precisely as they arrived. No one complained, at least not openly.

  Protective glasses, lab coats, and extra gloves were not mandated at Envia, where researchers experimented when the impulse struck, whatever the time, absent the requirement of any pre-experiment safety reports. Many people thought that its scrappy style was helping to carry Envia into a leading position in next-generation batteries. But Kumar argued that that might be true but that if he was truly to contribute to beating the Asian giants, it was insufficient—he also needed more resources, specifically from the Department of Energy, which he urged to get behind Envia in a bigger way. For the automotive industry to treat you seriously, you had to produce material at scale—in batches as large as a ton. Kumar requested a $30 million loan to build an industrial-scale pilot plant that would produce such quantities and satisfy the automakers.

  Kapadia, Kumar’s financial backer, said that if, as Obama aspired, there were to be one million electric cars on American roads by 2015, it did not matter where they were assembled. Envia would sell to carmakers from around the world, and Obama should support the ambition. The point was that “the cars should simply contain the highest number of U.S. components.” That would spur the field. “It would build up the manufacturing base,” Kapadia said. The cathodes and anodes of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s were invented in the United States, Kapadia repeated, but ended up mass-produced elsewhere. Here was an opportunity for the United States to invent and collect the manufacturing rewards on its shores, in a way attuned to the present decade.

  Kapadia’s notions misunderstood the race. To produce the most advanced, slickest automobile on the planet could arouse passions, but Americans were unlikely to rally around the goal of supplying auto parts. Yet he bluntly advanced his point—if the Department of Energy would not bankroll the pilot plant, someone else would. A player from Japan, South Korea, China, or even Brussels would buy Envia and establish its own plants. “You can set up in China for one tenth of the cost,” he said.

  Kapadia was advancing a threat—that Envia would make battery components one way or another. There was the risk that, as with the history of cathodes, its intellectual property would be lost to a foreign player.

  Halfway through 2011, several sources told Chamberlain that Asian companies had already initiated an informal bidding contest for Envia for just this purpose. They were throwing out large numbers to buy the start-up outright—the reports were in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. He was not surprised to hear that Envia was receptive. Kapadia’s warning was Silicon Valley reality. Envia was a start-up company and the venture capitalists who had funded it would be keen for opportunities to cash out. VCs typically sought to “exit” an investment no more than five years after injecting cash. Whether or not the start-up had created an actual product tended to be a secondary priority to collecting the fruits of their risk. Some used the unflattering terms “pump and dump” or “hype and release” to describe this aspect of venture capitalism. There was the possibility that Kapadia was exaggerating or outright bluffing—Chamberlain said he always assumed his interlocutors across the table were overstating at least somewhat. But he had heard enough directly from the companies to treat the talk seriously.

  Around this time, Kumar flashed a slide on the conference room screen. It was from an Envia presentation that had recently persuaded Nissan to sign a $700,000 contract for the development of a customized NMC 2.0 cathode. One slide showed Envia’s first-generation version. A typical way to express the economics of a battery was the cost to produce a steady 1,000 watts of electricity for an hour (the amount needed to iron your clothes, for instance). According to Kumar, the Envia cathode lessened the battery cost to $250 per kilowatt-hour at laboratory scale, less than half the prevailing market rate at the time it was built. Envia’s next product promised to shrink the cost further—to $200 per kilowatt-hour, a very large jump. The ultimate aim, if Kumar succeeded with a superbattery on which he was currently working, would be a phenomenal $180 per kilowatt-hour. Kumar told Nissan that he could reach that goal in eighteen or so months. His promises, not to mention the time line, were exceedingly bold seeing as how GM was thought to be currently spending $650 to $750 per kilowatt-hour on the battery in the Volt, for a total of $12,000 to
$14,000. Dave Howell, head of the electric-car battery research effort at the Department of Energy, was challenging researchers to lower costs to $300 a kilowatt-hour by 2014 or 2015. His longer objective was $125 a kilowatt-hour by 2022. But Kumar was suggesting he needed a mere year and a half to cut battery costs by three quarters and bring down the Volt battery to around $3,000.

  Given those numbers, you could understand the frenzy building around Envia—in Asia. American companies were generally ambivalent about Envia. Kumar found that sad and frustrating. The Obama administration had allotted about $2 billion to build six lithium-ion battery factories largely from scratch. No one could say how many would survive, but most had no intellectual property of their own. In Kumar’s view they ought to be eager to grab Envia’s battery material. But, hearing silence, he said, “I don’t think it’s my job to convince them. I am working to make a product.”

  There was some U.S. interest: Kumar had received a firm bid from one American company—a $125 million buyout offer from A123, the Massachusetts battery start-up—alongside a variety of proposals advanced by German and Japanese companies. But then Envia’s management went decidedly cool in buyout discussions. A courtship was heating up with potentially the biggest American battery customer of all.