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

by Steve LeVine

  Chamberlain regarded his entrepreneurial inclinations as “something genetic and probably environmental.” All his brothers had at one time or another started a business—one in fiber optics, another in chemistry, and the third working with their father at JA Chamberlain and Sons, his Florida marine engine shop. A string of companies had exploited Chamberlain’s people and leadership skills and his start-ups had gone some distance. When he arrived at Argonne at age thirty-nine, he soared. There simply was no one at the lab—apart from Khal Amine, and he was regarded with great suspicion—who was equipped with the salesman’s bone. So that when Chamberlain did what came naturally—ringing up senior managers of the major companies and winning them over—he became the most successful patent representative not only in the unit, but perhaps in lab history. For Argonne, he was the guy “from industry.”

  He was largely tapping his formative experience in semiconductors. Although legend drew a straight line from Bell Labs to Silicon Valley to the iPhone, by the middle 1980s the American semiconductor industry was in fact dying. It was part of the narrative of industrial decline and the Japanese juggernaut that so consumed Americans. To fight back, American chipmakers proposed an experiment. They would band together along with the federal government and attempt to leapfrog the Japanese. In 1987, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that embraced the experiment. The law created Sematech, for Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology. Fourteen chipmakers and DARPA, a Pentagon research arm, went fifty-fifty on a five-year, $500 million effort to keep semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. American chip making surged back. Intel, led by Andrew Grove, regained dominance with first-rate, intricately designed microprocessors that captured the lucrative high end of the market.

  After that triumph, Sematech became a paradigm like Apollo and the Manhattan Project, shorthand for how industry and government could collaborate to recapture a market from a foreign upstart.

  In 2008, Chamberlain proposed the idea of a battery Sematech to a Department of Energy supervisor. The consortium he had in mind would not save American battery making per se since virtually no lithium-ion capability had ever been established in the United States. Instead it would unite companies that together would create an American lithium-ion industry—battery start-ups, chemical makers, lead-acid battery makers, and so on. It would put the United States on a footing to compete with global battery makers. The supervisor understood Chamberlain’s idea and challenged him to “get industry to do it.”

  And so he did. In spring, he invited the executives of a half dozen battery and chemical companies to a couple of meetings. At first the companies did not bite—notwithstanding the chipmakers’ positive experience, they wondered how they could possibly collaborate when they were rivals. None liked the idea of a five-year commitment, as Sematech had been. Yet they gradually coalesced around Chamberlain’s main idea and morphed it into their own, with the aim of establishing a foundry where battery teams could prove their materials, a single plant where they would all make lithium-ion batteries.

  One day, Jim Greenberger, an outside member of the group with which Chamberlain was speaking, mentioned a vague boyhood link to a close ally of Senator Obama, whose presidential campaign was gaining momentum. Obama seemed to be intensely interested in batteries. Why not pitch the battery Sematech proposal to the senator’s team? Everyone agreed that it was a good idea.

  The group found itself in a Chicago office before a single economic adviser to Obama. Greenberger described Sematech and the aim of beating the big Asian battery makers.

  “Why do you think we can compete with the Japanese auto industry?” the adviser asked.

  Chamberlain said American companies, while currently struggling, could recover and figure large in a reconstituted global industry. But he added that if electrics truly took off, Detroit, with its record of stodginess, “will go the way of the dinosaur.” They would not manage the transition to the new world.

  “What kind of money do you need?”

  The group had discussed this question. If they were modeling on Sematech, the sum should be around $500 million. But they wanted a cushion in case expenses were higher. So they decided on $1 billion. It was perhaps a hubristic price, but that was what they would request for the battery Sematech.

  “Two billion dollars,” Greenberger said.

  The rest of the group went quiet. Chamberlain could not see the expression on the Obama adviser’s face, and no one could fathom the origin of the new number.

  “Okay,” the adviser said.

  Outside, the group laughed. Why did Greenberger double the figure? “I don’t know,” he said. “It just felt right.”

  As Obama was elected, the economic landscape transformed. The world was in financial collapse and the country in a panic. On taking office two months later, Obama quickly proposed, and Congress approved, a $787 billion economic stimulus package. It was meant to rescue the economy and plant the seeds of future industries. Chamberlain smiled as he studied the breakdown of spending. It included a $2.4 billion line item—a $2 billion lithium-ion battery manufacturing program plus $400 million for the development of electric-car–manufacturing processes.

  Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff, had remarked that, politically speaking, no crisis should go to waste. The battery Sematech was a “go.”

  It was and it wasn’t. The money would fund the creation of an American lithium-ion battery industry, just as Chamberlain and the companies envisioned. Only now, with the unexpected largesse of a $2.4 billion research-and-development fund, the companies changed their minds about working collaboratively. Johnson Controls received $249 million of the fund, EnerDel won $118 million, and $200 million went to A123. They would compete against one another for the market. There would be no battery Sematech—no industry-government consortium. But the United States would be in the battery game.

  Steven Chu also saw no reason to squander the crisis. In his case, there was the matter of his dream to recreate Bell Labs. He proposed eight projects, each tasked to solve a single big problem, at a total five-year cost of $1 billion. For those who did not grasp the significance, he said, “We are taking a page from America’s great industrial laboratories in their heyday.” On paper, they would be called “innovation hubs.” But more explicitly, they were “Bell Lablets.”

  One of Chu’s hubs was to be aimed at revolutionizing batteries. As impressive as NMC 2.0 was compared with its predecessors, it couldn’t power an electric car competitively with the internal combustion engine. After accounting for the loss of energy in combustion, a kilogram of gasoline contains 1,600 watt-hours of stored energy. State-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, by comparison, delivered about 140. Thackeray’s goal for NMC 2.0 was to double current performance plus cut the cost. But even that would leave batteries still about a sixth the energy density of gasoline. The Battery Hub’s goal was to make the next big jump after lithium-ion—to 600 or 800 watt-hours a kilogram. Toward that goal, the Battery Hub would receive $25 million of federal funding a year for five years, $125 million in all. A competition would decide which university, national lab, or consortium would host the Hub.

  Chu advised that those interested stay tuned as to when the competitions would take place.

  • • •

  John Newman, an electrochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, phoned Thackeray. Newman was an icon who had written the standard university textbook on electrochemical systems.

  “Why don’t you lead the Battery Hub and we’ll do it with you?” Newman said.

  The competition had not yet been announced, but Newman was suggesting an interesting head start. He wanted Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, traditionally bitter rivals in the battery space, to submit a joint bid. The approach was surprising given the jealousy between their two institutions. Argonne and Berkeley never worked together. They harbored a deep well of mutual suspicion. The stakes, however, were enormou
s—whoever landed the hub would be the undisputed center of American battery research. Therefore, if they joined hands, agreed to divide the research funds, and did not quarrel, Berkeley and Argonne might stand an improved chance of winning the competition.

  In June 2009, Newman traveled as part of a Berkeley group to Argonne. Crowded into a small conference room, they began to brainstorm what a Battery Hub would look like. So much was already going on in the field—depending on the year, the Department of Energy alone was spending $50 million to $90 million on battery research. What could a hub add? Someone suggested starting over—that they wipe the whiteboard clean and simply construct a chart of a first-rate, industry-leading battery research program. They could then shade in areas where there was already sufficient work. What remained would be the proposed Argonne-Berkeley Battery Hub.

  The result was a blockbuster, over-the-top plan for a $100-million-a-year, multiyear partnership of companies and scientific institutions. On paper, it was four times the size of Chu’s hubs. Both teams loved it. When Chamberlain described it quietly to a few industry friends, they seemed equally enthusiastic, making clear they were prepared in principle to share the cost fifty-fifty with the Department of Energy. Chamberlain thought he understood the companies’ eagerness. It wasn’t that it looked like Sematech, although the resemblance to Chamberlain’s obsession was more than passing. It was because “it was like Bell,” he said. Genuinely like Bell, and not the lablets that Chu was proposing. The Argonne-Berkeley team called it the National Center for Energy Storage Research, which they pronounced “En-Caesar.”

  • • •

  Congress had to directly approve such spending, and it treated Chu’s proposal with skepticism. Its 2010 budget funded just three of the eight innovation hubs. Worse, it guaranteed the money for only a year rather than five and allocated $22 million for each hub instead of the proposed $25 million.

  The Battery Hub did not make the cut.

  It was a letdown. From Washington, Chamberlain’s supervisors assured him that the Battery Hub would be approved the next time. But there was no foundation for confidence. The politics might continue to flummox Chu.

  The Argonne-Berkeley group kept talking. Mostly it continued to lay the groundwork for En-Caesar. But it also strategized for the smaller Hub. In connection with the latter, Chamberlain and Newman traveled to Washington to pitch their intended collaboration.

  Newman told Chamberlain to prepare for a flabbergasted reception. There simply would be disbelief in the Department of Energy. Chamberlain thought Newman was exaggerating, but sure enough, sitting there before David Howell, the head of the Department of Energy’s battery research effort, he saw that the Berkeley man was right.

  “You guys are here together,” Howell said.

  “Yeah,” both Chamberlain and Newman responded.

  “You even got John here,” he said to Chamberlain.

  “Um-humh.”

  “So you guys must be serious about collaborating.”

  Howell seemed unable immediately to move beyond their history. The two men went back to their respective labs. But a month later, Howell rang Chamberlain. One of the slides he and Newman presented had described an industrially popular method for saving costs while driving up inventiveness: you crosshatched your talent pools on a matrix so that, say, a single materials sciences unit could service three separate battery teams. All the big companies used this system, Chamberlain had said, interlacing basic and applied science groups. Howell told Chamberlain that senior Department of Energy management liked the idea so much that, picking one quadrant on the matrix, they wanted them to try it out.

  “For a million bucks,” Howell said.

  The quadrant attacked the problem of ultraenergetic lithium metal: that, when you equipped a battery with pure lithium metal, it could burst into flames on contact with air. It was what killed Exxon’s original battery in the 1970s. But extracting lithium metal’s innate energy efficiently, safely, and durably was an enduring goal, so Howell wanted Chamberlain and Newman to take it on. If they could overcome its volatility, they could enable the next generation of powerful batteries.

  Howell’s offer amounted to an explicit dare. If they wanted their $25 million, they had to first solve one of the hardest problems in battery science.

  “You say you want to work together?” Howell asked. “So show us.”

  They took up the challenge. Chamberlain put one of his best thinkers on the task—Jack Vaughey, a chemist whose other advantage was an unprepossessing manner that allowed him to work well in teams.

  Even led by Vaughey, lithium metal bogged down in five months of talks on the legal details of a joint program. Chamberlain and Newman could see they had been outwitted. Who were they kidding: $25 million to sit in traditionally antagonistic labs 1,900 miles apart and, what, lead the way to a new battery age? When, even with the impossibly unthreatening Vaughey in charge, they could barely launch a single hard investigation?

  But if Howell’s test was somehow fruitful—if they could smooth through their ego-driven testiness, if they could demonstrate progress with lithium metal, perhaps they would prove him wrong and gain an edge in the expected Hub competition.

  A few months later, Chu’s science adviser, Bill Brinkman, stopped by Argonne. The Bell veteran put aside a couple of hours to speak with Chamberlain, Thackeray, and Amine.

  Brinkman stared as Chamberlain threw slides up on the wall describing En-Caesar. Then he broke in and pointed.

  “That’s the only way we will be able to catch up to Asia,” Brinkman said. “That is the only way we’ll do it.”

  For months, there was continued silence from Washington. Politics had shifted. Congress, already impatient with Chu’s big ideas, defeated climate change legislation, which had seemed a shoo-in after Obama’s election. Chamberlain’s group grew gloomier.

  Argonne director Isaacs called Chamberlain around Christmas. Screw ’em, he said. “Let’s not wait for Congress and the Hub. Let’s pull together En-Caesar.”

  Isaacs was giving the green light for the massively more expensive and ambitious project. Chamberlain should proceed and formalize industry funding commitments. Argonne and Berkeley would build this Bell-like facility without Washington’s help, he said. The way Chamberlain heard the gist was, “We are going to collaborate, and we are going to race with the Asians and we are going to win this race.”

  Since the 1990s, Japan, China, and South Korea had built themselves up as virtually the sole makers of powerful batteries. Brinkman said that, in order to break their hold, the United States needed the factories awarded funding by the stimulus. The United States had to manufacture the advanced products that would flow from the inventions at Argonne and other labs. One capability fed off the other—when you could invent, you could manufacture, and when you could manufacture, you could invent. They were symbiotic, and to have just one of the two would gradually erode your abilities in the other. But even as the United States built its manufacturing capability, other trends had Brinkman worried. China was developing “a super-cadre of people,” he said, training them at Tsinghua and other great universities. Foreign students still tended to make up half the enrollment in American graduate programs, and 60 or 70 percent of them stayed and made their careers in the United States. But as China evolved, wouldn’t at least some of its graduate students simply stay home—wouldn’t the trend of retention so far at Argonne suddenly go in reverse? If you could attend a first-rate university in the middle of Beijing—if you were the best student in the class and were treated as such—“where would you go?” he asked. Brinkman believed that the United States would begin to lose such students to China. They would stay home and present a new challenge in the battery race. That was why En-Caesar was probably the only way to win.

  22

  “The Damn Hub”

  Eric Isaacs had ordered Chamberlain to proceed with En-Caesar, but b
oth men still hoped and expected that Congress would approve a Battery Hub. Presuming they were right, their idea was to first win the Hub and later make it the cornerstone of En-Caesar.

  If there was going to be a Battery Hub, Isaacs badly wanted to win. A victory would confirm Argonne’s battery preeminence. But the game was high stakes because a loss would be no small matter—it could devastate the Battery Department’s methodically constructed reputation, and that of the lab itself.

  The latter prospect preoccupied Isaacs and his lieutenants much more than the former. Argonne seemed cursed when it came to large projects, the defining legacies of great national labs and universities. Since 2008, Argonne had entered and lost competitions to host three major federal research facilities, including two of Chu’s early innovation hubs. Considering Argonne’s origins in the birth of the Atomic Age, the toughest blow was losing a nuclear modeling hub to Oak Ridge National Lab. “When we didn’t win, you could have knocked anyone over with a feather because we were so sure,” said an Argonne staffer. “There was questioning whether we would even continue to do nuclear research.”

  The stakes with the Battery Hub were even higher. If Argonne, with its long history in batteries and the presence of Thackeray and Amine, could not win the Battery Hub, it would be an unfathomable blow. No one wanted to speak of the consequences that would follow. The researchers whispered that the senior lab leadership—Isaacs and his deputies—would probably all be fired. Chamberlain would not lose his job but his aura would be darkened and his rise at Argonne stunted. As for the Battery Department, the researchers spoke starkly of an ineradicable stigma. The lab would seem unchanged at first. But slowly it would wither away. Existing grants would go unrenewed. Big, new grants would not come.

  In February 2012, an announcement appeared on the Department of Energy Web site: within ninety days, anyone interested in hosting a new innovation hub for energy storage—a Battery Hub—should submit a proposal.