Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  It didn’t take long for Whittingham and Exxon to realize the promise of what they had created. Of all the competing chemistries available in those years, theirs was the only lithium-based compound that worked at room temperature. And so when Whittingham crossed the Hudson into Manhattan and presented his work on lithium batteries to a committee of Exxon board members in the company’s fortresslike Sixth Avenue headquarters, it was an easy sell. At the time Exxon was eagerly expanding into alternative businesses. The technology seemed like a breakthrough. The project fit perfectly with Exxon’s desire to move into electronics and alternative energy. The answer came quickly: let’s put some money into it.

  Manufacturing Whittingham’s battery fell to a man named Bob Hamlen, a self-professed battery geek. Before the call came from Exxon, he was head of electrochemistry at General Electric, and he experimented with batteries in his spare time. In 1973 he moved from upstate New York back to his home state of New Jersey and began reporting each day to Linden, where he set about scaling Whittingham’s creation into a meaningful business.

  The biggest question when Hamlen arrived was what to use for an electrolyte. In batteries that operate at room temperature, most electrolytes are a solution of two materials: a liquid (the solvent) and a salt (the solute). For the battery to work in cold climates, the liquid must have an extremely low freezing point—in the neighborhood of 30°C below zero or, if possible, even lower. It must be an electrical insulator (something that doesn’t conduct electricity) to keep the ionic reaction and the electronic reactions separate, to force electrons up and out of the battery. Finally, it has to dissolve a salt that breaks down into the right kind of ions needed for the electrochemical reaction, so the salt, which Hamlen’s group also had to find, had to match the solvent perfectly.

  Hamlen’s group started by dissolving lithium perchlorate in dioxolane, a clear, combustible organic liquid. When lithium perchlorate dissolves positively charged lithium ions break away from the negative ions—in this case, beautifully symmetrical clusters of chlorine surrounded by four oxygen atoms. If the temperature spikes because of a short circuit, all that oxygen can react with the hydrogen and carbon in the solvent. This fact, along with the inherent volativity of the metallic lithium anodes used in Whittingham’s battery, kept the lab work interesting. After several visits to the Linden lab, the fire department threatened to make Exxon pay for the special chemicals required to put out lithium fires.

  Soon, a researcher on Hamlen’s team developed a solute that worked well enough that the company decided to show off its progress. Hamlen’s group built several test batteries and sent them to a Society of Automotive Engineers conference in Chicago. “You can’t ship lithium on a plane, so we sent a guy on the train to take ’em out there,” he said. While their colleague was in Chicago putting on a show, Hamlen and a colleague discovered something unfortunate: their new electrolyte was slowly decomposing, emitting gas that was almost certainly building pressure inside the same batteries that the members of the Society of Automotive Engineers were supposed to be marveling over. Worse, the gas that was bubbling up inside was diborane, which bursts into flames upon contact with moist air.

  “I think back at some of the dumb things you do,” Hamlen said. “We called and said, ‘Take the cells back to your room each evening.’” Fortunately, they had installed a small vent on the top of each cell. “‘Carefully unscrew the vent a little bit until the gas pressure gets relieved. But get your hands out of the way, because it’s going to catch fire as soon as it comes out.’”And so each day, Exxon’s man in Chicago would show off the company’s breakthrough rechargeable lithium batteries. Then each night, back in his hotel room, he would carefully twist the top off each battery and watch as a fireball leaped out.

  The next electrolyte they tried was safer, but there was a tradeoff: the calmer electrolyte made for a less powerful battery. They had also replaced the volatile metallic-lithium anode with aluminum, making the battery safer yet. The group had made enough progress that by 1976 it was time to go public. That year Whittingham published a landmark paper on the LiTiS2 battery in Science. Exxon opened a developmental facility in Branchburg, a small town thirty-some miles west of the industrial squalor of East Jersey. Their headquarters was the first occupant of the freshly bulldozed Branchburg Industrial Park. Exxon, king of oil, was in the battery business.

  By 1976, the battery industry seemed to be on the verge of a boom. The previous year Forbes had declared the battery business, “of all things,” to be “one of today’s hottest items.” In 1976, Congress passed the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development and Demonstration Act, which aimed to stimulate the production of serious alternatives to the gasoline engine. Interest in electric cars and the batteries to power them was so urgent that Congress passed the bill over President Gerald Ford’s veto.

  In October 1976, an article in Forbes declared that “despite present—and formidable—problems, the electric car’s rebirth is as sure as the need to end our dependence on imported oil.” Industry publications were brimming with confidence too. According to Chemical Week, “After a hiatus of almost 50 years, electric vehicles are poised for a comeback … And this time, electric vehicles have a reasonable chance of forging a competitive niche in both commercial and passenger vehicle areas.”

  Exxon began talking loudly about its fears for the future of oil and its hope for new sources of energy. The oil industry was so badly disrupted that some journalists began speculating about Exxon’s ability to even survive. As Forbes put it, “Given two major trends, one geological and the other political and social, the mighty Exxon Corp. could be forced into at least partial liquidation within a decade … It probably won’t happen. But it could.” The primary reason was that oil seemed to be running out, quickly. “Unless the presently unexpected occurs, the world’s petroleum reserves are within a few years of their peak and will begin a slow decline to the point where oil and gas will be too valuable to use as energy,” the article continued. Instead, the world would have to use what oil was left in the ground for other petroleum products and find something else to power its cars.

  George Piercy, the Exxon executive who ultimately oversaw Exxon Enterprises, was the leading delegate for the major oil companies during the disastrous nonnegotiations that preceded the first oil crisis. In a Vienna hotel room in 1973, Piercy was the one to tell Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, that the oil companies refused to pay the 100 percent increase OPEC was demanding. Piercy said that he simply did not have the authority to agree to OPEC’s demands. A price increase that steep would disrupt the economies of the consuming countries so greatly that he would have to consult with those governments before making any deal. Yamani picked up the phone and called his colleagues in Baghdad. He hung up, turned to Piercy, and said, “They’re mad at you.” When Piercy asked Yamani what came next, Yamani famously replied, “Listen to the radio.” A little over a week later, the Arab oil embargo began.

  Piercy was therefore better aware of the precariousness of the oil companies’ position than perhaps any of his contemporaries. He recognized the need for alternatives, hence the company’s interest in batteries and motors for electric cars. Still, when the time came to start selling Whittingham’s battery, Exxon had to start small. Very small. Their debut product—the first rechargeable lithium battery ever to reach the market—was a duo of button-size cells intended to run a solar-powered “Perpetual Watch” that the Swiss company Ebauches (now part of the Swatch group) wanted to build. The battery division published a pamphlet aimed at commercial customers introducing their breakthrough battery. “This may look like an old familiar button cell battery,” read the text beside a coin-size silver disc. “It isn’t.” No, this was the result of “new advanced technologies in energy storage,” a novel approach that “provides one way for man to store the diffuse and intermittent light that reaches him from the sun.” Exxon was no longer just an oil company, the message went. “In a time of growing aware
ness of energy resources and needs, Battery Division is concerned exclusively with superior energy storage technology.”

  The watch might not seem like an obvious first application for Exxon’s battery, but the arrival of the digital watch in Japan in the 1970s was in fact a subtle but important pivot point for battery technology—the moment batteries began to change from something that you kept in a drawer to something you carried around on your person. The digital watch was also the first widespread application for tiny lithium primary batteries. “The digital watch really brought the wearable battery, if you like, to the mass market,” said Peter Bruce, a longtime lithium battery researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “And I don’t think it’s a huge leap of imagination to envision other devices that require power that you might be carrying around.”

  Exxon’s battery had never powered anything larger than some alarm clocks that the company used as promotional devices, but Whittingham, Hamlen, and the other true believers understood that this was the natural course of things. The technology would eventually scale up. And in the small-device market, Exxon’s battery had a few major advantages over its competitors. Nickel-cadmium batteries bled away their energy quickly; silver-zinc batteries died after being charged and discharged only twenty to twenty-five times. Exxon’s tiny, hermetically sealed cell had a higher voltage than its competitors and an intrinsic flexibility that meant that, in the “solar watch” that was the goal of many watch designers of the day, it could provide “the opportunity for indefinite watch operation without battery replacement.” As long as a solar cell kept charging the battery, it would essentially never die.

  While Hamlen was working to scale up the watch-battery business, he evangelized for the long-term promise of the Exxon Compound, declaring it the basis for the most promising electric-vehicle battery yet. In a presentation at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he said, as paraphrased by the trade publication Chemical Week, that the battery “may be the most desirable power source for future electric autos from the standpoint of cost and efficiency,” and that “projected performance levels of the battery should make it possible to build a two-passenger electric vehicle, with an urban driving range of 100 miles, at a cost of approximately $5,000.”

  Exxon was moving into the electric-car business on other fronts as well. In 1979, the company spent $1.2 billion to buy Reliance Electric, a manufacturer of electric motors in Cleveland. An electrical engineer at Exxon Enterprises had created what the company called the alternating-current synthesizer (ACS), a controller for AC electric motors that enabled one to vary the speed of the motor for maximum efficiency. Exxon made bold claims for the ACS and used it as justification for acquiring Reliance, which the Department of Justice, in trust-busting mode, wanted to prevent. ACS, Exxon argued, could eventually become standard equipment on the millions of electric motors that run industrial fuel pumps, compressors, fans, and blowers. As The Economist put it, “What Exxon is saying is that, if half the industrial motors in the 1–200 horsepower class in America used its new type of controller, by 1990, that would save the country the energy equivalent of 1m barrel of oil a day.” In other words: “The largest of the seven oil majors is gearing up for the day when oil begins to run out.”

  They were indeed. The problem was simple: “We’re not finding as much oil as the world is using,” Exxon’s chairman, Clifton Garvin, told BusinessWeek in July 1979. “In the long term, I’d say that you don’t ignore any source of energy. We can’t go back to the complacency of two years ago.”

  Exxon in those days had a soft spot for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels—shale oil, gasified coal, and the like—but Garvin made it a point to emphasize the inevitable importance of the electric car. Exxon had no desire to build electric cars itself, he said, but through Reliance, he hoped to supply the motors, and through the Battery Division, the power. “I happen to believe that somewhere down the road, in 30 or 40 years, we’re going to be fundamentally an electrically based society,” he said, “and we’re all going to be tooling around in electrical cars.”

  By October 1979, the electric car seemed to be on the cusp. Fortune ran an upbeat piece pegged to developments at Exxon and GM headlined “Here Come the Electrics.” GM had announced a new battery, a zinc-nickel-oxide power pack that it was putting in a car called the Electrovette—a Chevette with a backseat full of batteries and a hundred-mile range (provided you didn’t drive faster than 50 mph). Exxon had by then built a prototype hybrid gas-electric car, a converted Chrysler Cordoba. The company reiterated its desire to sell motors, not build electric cars, and as Fortune snidely noted, “That may be just as well. It is not in G.M.’s league in marketing savvy.” Whereas GM made a point of sexing up its science project by calling it the Electrovette, “Exxon refers to its car as the ‘prototype, hybrid electric vehicle.’”

  Faster than it came together, the electric-car surge fell apart.

  First came the recession of 1979–1980, which sent Exxon and everyone else into cost-cutting mode. Unprofitable expansions into solar panels and batteries quickly came to be regarded as unaffordable diversions from the core objective of the day, which was survival. “It was a period of turmoil within Exxon Enterprises,” Bob Hamlen said. “Eventually they came to the conclusion that they only wanted to get into products that had the potential to be a billion-dollar business, and if you come right down to it nothing will meet that criteria.” Nothing, that is, except oil.

  Hamlen’s team was still conducting tests with Ebauches when he attended a meeting that sealed the division’s fate. “After one presentation where we said, ‘Something like this could be a neat $50 million business, but it’s tough to make it a billion,’ they said, ‘Hell, if that’s the case we don’t want it. We’ll sell it off and license it out.’ Which is exactly what they did.”

  Hamlen’s job was now to dismantle the Battery Division. Exxon licensed Whittingham’s technology to three companies: one in Japan, one in Europe, and one in America. The American company was Eveready, at the time owned by Union Carbide. Eveready engineers suddenly found themselves in possession of boxes filled with Whittingham’s data.

  If recession and a slump in oil sales painted a target on the various ventures of Exxon Enterprises, the subsequent oil glut buried them for good. By 1986, oil was again below $15 a barrel, and supplies appeared to be steady as far ahead as anyone was willing to think. Governments and oil companies hadn’t just started building batteries and solar cells during the oil shock. They also scoured the rest of the planet looking for more petroleum, and they found it—major reserves in the North Sea, Alaska, and Mexico. Britain, which was nearly choked to death by the crisis in the Suez, had become an oil-exporting country. Moreover, the conservation efforts put in place in America in the mid-1970s worked spectacularly; the American Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) requirements, which set average gas mileage standards at 27.5 mpg, saved two million barrels of oil a day between 1975 and 1985. And because oil companies had hoarded petroleum throughout the crises of the 1970s, there was more than enough to go around. New exploration, conservation, and hoarding all conspired to ensure that by the mid-1980s, national labs and major corporations had lost all interest in developing alternatives to oil.

  The repercussions of Exxon’s decision reached far beyond that one company. “When Exxon stopped, the federal government in their ignorance decided, ‘If Exxon’s not doing it, it’s not worth doing,’”Whittingham said. “Other companies did similarly. Instead of saying, ‘Well, why did Exxon stop? Here are the technical issues, we should now take time to address them.’”

  The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 put a temporary end to government interest in alternative energy. “If Reagan had continued the programs the Jimmy Carter administration started, we’d be a lot further ahead,” Huggins said. “But that didn’t happen, and so we had this hiatus.”

  The lack of industrial and governmental funding put advanced battery research on
hold. “As money disappears, professors do something else,” Huggins said. “If you want to support your graduate students, you have to get money. And money comes in the U.S. mostly from government, so what the government’s interested in has an immense amount of influence over what goes on. You see examples of this all over the place. If you look at electrical engineering, you’d find there was tremendous activity on lasers for many years. Why? The military was interested in lasers. People go where the money is.”

  “Reagan came in and cut back energy efficiency and renewable energy programs by something like eighty percent,” Elton Cairns, who at the time was working on advanced battery research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me. “All labs, including ours, suffered layoffs as a result. The reduction in funding occurred something like overnight. That pretty well put an end to the significant involvement in DOE labs in battery and fuel-cell programs at that time.”

  By the time the false start of the 1970s came to an end, the intellectual advances of those urgent years had failed to translate into commercial breakthroughs; the best batteries on the market that year could store 30–35 watt-hours/kg, making them five hundred times less energy-dense than gasoline.

  At Exxon, Clifton Garvin drifted into the complacency he had warned against eight years earlier. “We’re not interested in being in businesses long-term that don’t meet the kinds of return criteria we see in oil and gas,” he told Fortune in 1984. That same year, General Electric canceled its research into sodium-sulfur batteries. “Without a market, what’s the sense of development?” a GE researcher told Chemical Week. At the time, Elton Cairns explained the dynamics of the battery business to Chemical Week in a simple formula that remains true to this day: The key to the feasibility of advanced batteries of all types is the price and supply of oil.