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

by Steve LeVine

  They observed that the nickel and manganese had wanderlust. The metals liked to move around through the layers. It was their nature—once the lithium shuttled to the anode, taking a bit of oxygen out of the cathode, the nickel and manganese could not help but shift in order to find a new, comfortable balance. By the time the metals settled down, the material itself was changed—its voltage profile was vastly different. For a carmaker, such a transformation was unacceptable. But how could you stop it?

  One of Thackeray’s solutions was elegant—to accept the predilection. He proposed that researchers stop trying to evade physical laws and instead work with them: Croy artificially created NMC 2.0 with the manganese and nickel already in postactivation balance. The outcome was a cathode that was less energetic—it might deliver 190 watt-hours per kilogram, or a little over two thirds of the original estimate. But it was also free of voltage chaos. It was stable and usable, which was an improvement.

  Croy explained to the Envia group that the method was first to treat the Li2MnO3 in acid, water, and nickel nitrate. That leached out the lithium and some oxygen. The action jumbled the cathode’s lattice—the nickel was now not where chemistry said it should be. But that did not matter much at the moment. Croy allowed the water to evaporate. He held on to the lithium he had removed and heated the components. Then he slowly cooled them. The result was a reconstituted and stable amalgam of manganese and nickel in a layered-layered composite structure. The atoms of nickel were intended to serve as props to hold up the structure while lithium shuttled back and forth. He and Thackeray had already applied for a patent describing this new NMC 2.0 manufacturing method. In two weeks, they would amend the application with yet new findings and claims.

  Thackeray’s aim in allowing Croy to make the private presentation was to pick up any details they could—by way of facts disclosed or questions asked—on Envia’s own progress. The South African—like most of the Argonne guys—was anxious to know what was going on in the Newark lab with the NMC 2.0.

  For Kumar, too, there was advantage in sharing ideas with Thackeray, who knew the material better than anyone. Until now, Kumar, while not disputing the possibility of a problem of thermodynamics, had adhered to his engineering approach, disregarding the physics and simply trying to get the NMC 2.0 to work. Now, sitting before Thackeray, Kumar recognized that his team had advanced about as far as it probably could. His team was eradicating the relatively minute fade that occurred in the NMC only prior to its activization—they were not taking it past 4.5 volts. But some problems simply could not be engineered away—in order to attack what happened to the material after activization, Kumar and his guys needed to start to understand the physics.

  In the subsequent discussion, Kumar said he wanted to collaborate with the Argonne men, and Thackeray felt the same. Envia and Khal Amine had worked together before, but the project was not as commercially sensitive as NMC 2.0. The trouble now was the IP. Kumar worried that, if he teamed with Thackeray and Croy, whatever learning emerged might leak to Argonne’s other NMC licensees, which could jeopardize his business advantage in collaborating in the first place. For Thackeray, the concern was precisely the opposite—how could he possibly work with Kumar and also produce new public knowledge?

  They spoke for more than three hours. Thackeray and Croy had to catch a plane. Thackeray decided that when he returned to Chicago he would speak to Chamberlain about how to work with Envia while protecting the interests of both sides. But the Argonne men left feeling less apprehensive about Kumar. Neither thought Envia had broken through on voltage fade.

  When Thackeray and Croy spoke of artificially creating a balanced version of the NMC 2.0 in advance of the fade, they had a picture in mind of its atomic-scale appearance. Thackeray reproduced the image as a drawing in a published paper—a flower pattern of evenly distributed pockets of manganese and nickel. The extra manganese in NMC 2.0—the Li2MnO3—that was largely responsible for the battery’s exceptional performance also contributed to its instability. The manganese settled down and stopped rattling the structure when near nickel. So wherever you had manganese, you wanted to make sure nickel was also present. The flower pattern represented the best depiction of that balance.

  Could you recreate this flower pattern on the nanoscale? Thackeray said such a configuration had never actually been observed, so there was no way to know if it could be constructed. Croy was slightly more confident. He thought he and Thackeray could create a nickel-manganese flower pattern “to some extent,” though some isolated clumps would remain. “It is just very hard to get things exactly like you want and even harder to get them to stay there,” Croy said. “It’s like your body going to hell as you age. There’s just no way out of it! So we work out to slow the decay. We need to find the equivalent for batteries.”

  Croy stared at his screen. Charge-discharge charts were arrayed across it. Eight more such charts were taped across the wall in his line of vision. He continued to be vexed by the mutability of NMC 2.0. One wondered why he should be. If you applied extreme voltage to any edifice, and if you proceeded to remove a major part of its infrastructure, it might cave in. If in this case you were removing and reinserting stuff again and again into an electrode, shouldn’t it shift around naturally? That was true, Croy said, but “when we put it back in, we still want it to go back to the way it was.”

  Thackeray and Croy seemed to have lost their hope of achieving the performance promised for NMC 2.0. They were not likely to attain 280 milliampere-hours per gram, the original goal, but rather a stable 230—if they were lucky. Seeking more amounted to greed. “It’s like asking me to be Tiger Woods,” Croy said. “I can like golf a lot and practice, but I just won’t be him.”

  • • •

  Two or three of the battery guys proposed continued battle with the physics. They argued for the introduction of pillars into the NMC 2.0 lattice: nano-size metal atoms, if strategically placed, might hold up the lattice while the lithium was shuttling, they said, preventing the collapsing sensation that sent the nickel and manganese scampering into a rescue position. Croy walked down the hall and into Laboratory X-165 to try out the idea.

  Just inside the door, he grabbed and put on a white lab coat, blue gloves, and protective glasses. Then he found a small plastic jar marked “Li2MnO3” and a beaker. He placed a flattened square of foil under these items and a spatula and a long slender pipette next to them. He picked up a container of nitric acid and some water and dropped them into the beaker, which he placed carefully into an automatic magnetic stirrer. That done, Croy grabbed another small sheet of aluminum foil and folded each side over to create a margin. He used a thumb to fashion a space in the foil where he could collect crystals of material. The metals might prop up the cathode, but Croy also thought that they could migrate to the cavities created by the shuttling lithium and oxygen. If they thus blocked these cavities, the manganese and nickel might be forced to stay in place and not wander. Either way, he might curtail the fade.

  Croy placed the foil on a scale and then scanned a handwritten recipe book. First step—dissolve 0.1927 grams of aluminum nitrate into the solution. He did that. “Now the cobalt,” he said, sprinkling in 0.1495 grams of the red crystals and mixing. Green flakes of nickel nitrate were next—1.3609 grams. The solution was now pink. He added two grams of Li2MnO3, a rust-colored powder—“kind of like the Martian surface,” Croy said. The solution had turned light green. There was enough for a couple of tests. He covered it with foil and put it on the metallic spinner. He would let it spin overnight so that all the chemical reactions would finish. He would dry it in the oven, then grind it. It would go into the furnace, then be ground again and passed through a sieve to ensure that all the particles were below a certain size. Then he would create a 50-micron-thick layered laminate of the resulting solution. All of this would take two to three days.

  Croy had carried out this same process previously using atoms of nickel nitrate, but i
t did not work as well as hoped—the voltage was more stable, indicating that the nickel nitrate did create pillars, but too low. They sought stability at higher voltage. Croy would try again. Unlike the last time, he would place the pillars not in the cathode’s metal layers, but amid the lithium. And, rather than nickel nitrate, he would use atoms of aluminum and magnesium. Perhaps they would make the difference.

  PART III

  RECKONING

  29

  Orlando

  In February 2012, about a thousand men and women assembled at an upscale Orlando golf resort called ChampionsGate. There are two types of battery conferences—scientific gatherings that attract researchers and technologists attempting to create breakthroughs; and industry events, attended by merchants and salespeople. Orlando was the latter. A pall hung over the assembled businesspeople. Americans were not snapping up electric cars: GM sold just 7,671 Volts the previous year against a forecast of 10,000. There was no reasonable math that got you to the one million electric vehicles that Obama said would be navigating American roads by 2015, even when you threw in the Japanese-made Nissan Leaf, of which 9,674 were sold in 2011.

  That became even clearer when just 603 Volts sold in January 2012. No one seemed consoled that China was doing even worse, selling just a combined 8,159 across the country, fewer than half the American number. Nor especially when, in a conference session, they witnessed the following exchange between a Japanese presenter and an American salesman:

  American: “Do you have any advice for us new entrants into the business?”

  Japanese: “Get a new job.”

  The Japanese believed the race was already over. They—and their Prius—had won. Toyota was nearing four million cumulative hybrid sales worldwide, including 136,463 Priuses in the United States alone—the world’s second-largest car market behind China—in 2011. The Japanese themselves bought 252,000 Priuses. There could eventually be the type of market shift that both Obama and Wan Gang had forecast. But it would not be in the current decade. Until at least the 2020s, electric cars would remain at best a niche product. That would be late for most of the Westerners at ChampionsGate. Unlike the Japanese and the South Koreans, few if any had budgeted for a long struggle. The fever of the prior two or three years began to evaporate.

  • • •

  About this time, ExxonMobil released a fifty-one-page outlook of the world of energy in the year 2040. Such great stabs at the future could not be entirely accurate, particularly in the years furthest out; companies such as ExxonMobil made adjustments along the way. But the forecasts were necessary given the multibillion-dollar cost of oil and gas projects, in which even successes take decades to pay off. They helped the companies form a general picture of the world to come so that they could make coherent investments.

  The outlook made notable prophecies for batteries and electric cars. It started by forecasting that oil and gas would supply 60 percent of the world’s energy a quarter century ahead. That actually represented an increase from 55 percent in 2010. The prediction was almost categorical—the company foresaw no specific threat to this continued dominance. Biofuels, solar, wind, and other non–fossil fuels and technologies all seemed destined to remain permanently marginal.

  But batteries were a different matter. Perhaps recalling the company’s hasty surrender of lithium-ion to Japan three decades earlier, the ExxonMobil scenarists flagged batteries as one of the few wild cards with the potential to disrupt its world. ExxonMobil did not spell it out, but if researchers somewhere made a serious advance in battery technology, a jump in performance by a factor of four or five, they could grievously undermine oil. The car and truck fleet would require much less gasoline as consumers made economically driven choices to buy quiet electrics. The number of cars on the road around the world would still double to about 1.6 billion by 2040, but if many were electric, oil companies would have to become different animals, both smaller and sleeker.

  In fact, ExxonMobil did forecast a shift to electrics of a sort—it thought that almost half the global fleet would be electrified in 2040. But most of these would be hybrids—glorified electrics like the Prius, with baby-size batteries that could propel a vehicle five or six miles with the engine shut off. Plug-in hybrids and pure electrics would capture 2.5 percent of the market. That added up to around 40 million of them, a highly impressive number. But it paled next to the 680 million Prius-like hybrids that would be on the road. This was not a genuine electric picture.

  It was a shift: at least two thirds of all cars sold after 2025 or 2030 would be equipped with some form of electric technology. And you could reach your own conclusions as to why it would take place. One significant influence would probably be consumer taste. At some point, Americans would probably reject pure gasoline-fueled cars, just as they largely stopped throwing garbage from their car windows amid Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign in the mid-1960s. Only a narrowing niche would even contemplate a model unequipped with some form of gasoline-saving electric propulsion. Other factors would contribute, too, but the main idea was that motorists would make the shift.

  The trickier question was why, three decades in the future, the market for pure electrics would remain stunted. The answer, according to ExxonMobil, was that by numerous metrics important to buyers, electrics would barely close the gap with the internal combustion engine. In the current market, with gasoline at $3.50 to $4.00 a gallon, a Prius owner required just four years of fuel savings to cover the vehicle’s higher price tag. Not so the pure-electric Nissan Leaf. It cost roughly $12,000 more than comparable gasoline-fueled models. Gasoline would have to cost $10 a gallon to compensate for such a price difference over the space of a five-year loan. So an electric-car owner would save on fuel but might never recoup the elevated cost of the vehicle. ExxonMobil forecast the persistence of this price difference more or less all the way through to 2040.

  Wall Street aligned with the pessimists. About this time, Edward Morse, an analyst with Citigroup, forecast a fresh, decades-long period of relatively cheap oil ranging from $70 to $90 a barrel. He said this new day would be triggered by a surge of oil production and a moderation of demand.1 If Morse was correct, American public support for electric subsidies could evaporate. China faced the same conundrum—already Wan Gang was threatening to slash China’s subsidies.

  ExxonMobil’s logic was perhaps generally accurate—oil and gasoline propulsion were dug in. But could one be certain that time would stand effectively still in battery labs for almost three decades? That for the many years ahead, Thackeray, Amine, the many other scientists across the globe, and the generation of researchers to come all would fail to crack the battery code? The world was in a state of utter flux, of financial collapse, extreme weather patterns, and the fall of Middle East governments, not to mention a wholly unexpected—and big—shakeup from the shale gas and oil boom. How could one be certain of anything? The big necessary jump in performance and cost was formidable, but not impossible. Were it achieved, one of the greatest victims would be fossil fuels. Big Oil as we currently knew it would shrivel.

  With respect to electric cars, ExxonMobil’s forecast seemed built on presumptuous ground.

  Menahem Anderman, an Israeli-born battery guy with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley, organized the Orlando conference. Anderman said he was “the world’s leading independent expert on advanced automotive batteries.” ExxonMobil’s views about batteries were not altogether surprising, but Anderman’s were—he, too, was skeptical of them, along with electric cars. Industry hands were paying him thousands of dollars each to hear that their mission was more or less hopeless, at least for a long time to come.

  Anderman was distrustful of the entire thesis of the battery race. “Somehow,” he said, “there was a decision during the 2009 collapse of the financial market and the auto industry that the solution was to electrify the fleet. But there was no connection whatever between the fina
ncial crisis, the automotive industry crisis, and electrification.” He said the global pursuit was a mere gimmick to “create positive motivation with employees, suppliers, shareholders, with the public, with the press, and government.” For three decades, electric-car proponents had awaited a convergence of events that would catapult the vehicles into the commercial market. But it simply wasn’t to be—not this time anyway. Researchers might achieve a genuine breakthrough in a decade or so, Anderman said. But meanwhile the internal combustion engine would keep improving and “raising the bar.”

  30

  The Old Technology Guys

  If you walked downhill for fifteen minutes from the Battery Lab, past some woods and to the right, you’d be likely to find Don Hillebrand in Building 362, one of a cluster of three-story steel-and-glass structures. Relaxed and plain-spoken, he grew up, attended college, and reached the age of thirty-one before leaving the rural Michigan county of Oakland to take a series of car industry jobs in Washington, D.C., and Germany.

  Hillebrand frequently irritated the battery guys. His job was to oversee Argonne’s work on advanced internal combustion engines. Hillebrand said the conventional engine had a lot of fight left “and will ultimately beat electrics for another generation.” Batteries and internal combustion, he said, were on separate innovation tracks. When scientists like Thackeray and Amine made more powerful batteries, the internal combustion engine grew more efficient through tinkering. To close the gap, the battery guys had to devise better technology at a faster pace than internal combustion. So far the gasoline engine had managed to maintain its lead. That was what Anderman meant by combustion’s capacity for “raising the bar.” The rivals in the battery and electric car race were racing each other, and all as a group were battling agile internal combustion.