As we drive, I spot a cross surrounded by flowers, photographs, and little relics on the side of the road. Then another, and another.
“Yes, this is known as Ruta del Muerte,” Claudio, our driver, tells us. “Families, they don’t know the roads. They get tired and drive off. Or truckers who drive too long.”
The way to the stuff that makes our iPhone batteries possible is down the road of death.
Lithium-ion batteries were first pioneered in the 1970s because experts feared humanity was heading down a different, more literal, road of death due to its dependence on oil. Scientists, the public, and even oil companies were desperate for alternatives. Until then, though, batteries had been something of a stagnant technology for nearly a hundred years.
The first true battery was invented by the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta in 1799 in an effort to prove that his colleague Luigi Galvani had been wrong about frog power. Galvani had run currents of electricity through dead frogs’ nervous systems—the series of experiments that would inspire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—and had come to believe the amphibians had an internal store of “animal electricity.” He’d noticed that when he dissected a leg that was hung on a brass hook with an iron scalpel, it tended to twitch. Volta thought that his friend’s experiments were actually demonstrating the presence of an electrical charge running through the two different metal instruments via a moist intermediary. (They’d both turn out to be right—living muscle and nerve cells do indeed course with bioelectricity, and the fleshy frog was serving as an intermediary between electrodes.)
A battery is basically just three parts: two electrodes (an anode with a negative charge and a cathode with a positive charge) and an electrolyte running between them. To test his theory, Volta built a stack of alternating zinc and copper pieces with brine-soaked cloth sandwiched between each of them. That clumsy pile was the first battery.
An early voltaic pile, 1793
And it worked like most of our modern batteries do today, through oxidation and reduction. The chemical reactions cause a buildup of electrons in the anode (in Volta’s pile, it’s the zinc), which then want to jump to the cathode (the copper). The electrolyte—whether it’s brine-soaked cloth or a dead frog—won’t let it. But if you connect the battery’s anode and cathode with a wire, you complete the circuit, so the anode will oxidize (lose electrons), and those electrons will travel to the cathode, generating electrical current in the process.
Expanding on Volta’s concept, John Frederic Daniell created a battery that could be used as a practical source of electricity. The Daniell cell rose to prominence in 1836 and led to, among other things, the rise of the electric telegraph.
Since then, battery innovation has been slow, moving from Volta’s copper-and-zinc electrodes to the lead-acid batteries used in cars to the lithium-based batteries used today. “The battery’s very simplicity—its remarkably small number of parts—has both helped and hindered the efforts of scientists to improve on Volta’s creation,” Steve LeVine writes in The Powerhouse. “In 1859, a French physicist named Gaston Planté invented the rechargeable lead-acid battery,” which used lead electrodes and an electrolyte of sulfuric acid. “Planté’s structure went back to the very beginning—it was Volta’s pile, merely turned on its side.… The Energizer, commercialized in 1980,” he notes, “was a remarkably close descendant of Planté’s invention. In more than a century, the science hadn’t changed.” Which is a little shocking, because the battery remains one of the largest silent forces that shape our experiences with technology.
But the oil shocks of the 1970s—where oil embargoes sent prices skyrocketing and crippled economies—along with the advent of a new hydrogen battery for what Ford billed as the car of the future, gave the pursuit of a better battery a shot in the arm.
Many consider it a travesty that the inventors of the lithium-ion battery haven’t yet won a Nobel Prize. Not only does the li-ion battery power our gadgets, but it’s the bedrock of electric vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that it was invented by a scientist employed by the world’s most notorious oil company.
When Stan Whittingham, a chemist, did his postdoc at Stanford in the early 1970s, he discovered a way to store lithium ions in sheets of titanium sulfide, work that resulted in a rechargeable battery. He soon received an offer to do private research into alternative energy technologies at Exxon. (Yes, Exxon, a company famous today for its efforts to cast doubt on climate change and for vying with Apple for the distinction of world’s largest corporation.)
Environmentalism had swept into public consciousness after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which exposed the dangers of DDT), the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga river fire. Ford moved to address complaints that its cars were polluting cities and sucking down oil by experimenting with cleaner electric cars, which instilled spark and focus to battery development. Meanwhile, it appeared that oil production had begun to peak. Oil companies were nervously eyeing the future and looking for ways to diversify.
“I joined Exxon in 1972,” Whittingham tells me. “They had decided to be an energy company, not just a petroleum and chemical company. They got into batteries, fuel cells, solar cells,” he says, and “at one point they were the largest producer of photovoltaic cells in the United States.” They even built a hybrid diesel vehicle, decades before the rise of the Prius.
Whittingham was given a near-limitless supply of resources. The goal was “to be prepared, because the oil was going to run out.”
His team knew that Panasonic had come up with a nonrechargeable lithium battery that was able to power floating LED lights for night fishermen. But those batteries could be cooled off by the ocean, an important benefit, since lithium is highly volatile and prone to generating lots of heat in a reaction.
If a battery was going to be useful to anyone who didn’t have a massive source of free coolant at the workplace, it couldn’t run too hot. Lithium or no, batteries can overheat if too many electrons come spilling out of the anode at once, and at the time, there was only one way out for those electrons—through the circuit. Whittingham’s team changed that.
“We came up with the concept of intercalation and built the first room-temperature lithium rechargeable cells at Exxon,” Whittingham says. Intercalation is the process of inserting ions between layers in compounds; lithium ions in the anode travel to the cathode, creating electricity, and since the reaction is reversible, the lithium ions can travel back to the anode, recharging the battery.
That’s right—the company that spent much of 2015 and 2016 making headlines for its past efforts to silence its own scientists’ warnings about the real and pressing threat of climate change is responsible for the birth of the battery that’s used in the modern electric car.
“They wanted to be the Bell Labs of the energy business,” Whittingham says. Bell Labs was still widely celebrated for developing the transistor, along with a spate of other wildly influential inventions. “They said, ‘We need electric vehicles—let’s put ourselves out of business and not let someone else put us out of business.’”
“For six decades, non-rechargeable zinc-carbon had been the standard battery chemistry for consumer electronics,” LeVine writes. “Nickel-cadmium was also in use. Whittingham’s brainchild was a leap ahead of both. Powerful and lightweight, it could power much smaller portable consumer electronics (think the iPod versus the Walkman)—if it worked.”
The battery breakthrough sent a jolt of excitement through the division. “I was called into New York to explain to a committee on the Exxon board what we were doing and how impactful it might be,” Whittingham tells me. “They were very interested.”
There was a problem, however: his battery kept catching fire. “There were some flammability issues,” Whittingham says. “We had several fires, mostly when we pulled them apart.” Plus, it was difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it literally stank.
Thanks to the flames, the smell, and the receding o
f the oil crisis, Exxon never became a pioneer in electric vehicles, battery technology, or alternative energy. It doubled down on oil instead. But Whittingham’s work was continued by the man who would make the consumer-electronics boom possible.
Unlike the region that envelops it, the Salar de Atacama isn’t exactly beautiful. But it’s certainly striking, I thought to myself, squinting at the salmon-colored mountains on a flat sea of thorny, twisting, dust-swept salt crystals. It looks like a dirt-swept, dry coral reef.
Those crystals would be pure white if the wind didn’t blow dirt down from the mountains, says Enrique Peña, the chief engineer of the lithium mining operation at Atacama. And the fields stretch on as far as you can see.
“I imagine a Spanish conquistador was riding his horse through Chile, got here, and said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Peña says. It’s fifty square kilometers of nothing but arid brine. Peña is an affable young man in his mid-thirties with a shock of beard and a means-business look that easily breaks into a friendly smile. He rose quickly through the ranks at SQM, where he watches over what he affectionately refers to as “my ponds.” Every week, he commutes from Santiago, where his family lives, to a lonely outpost in the high desert.
The mining operation itself, smack-dab in the middle of the salt desert, is unusual. There’s no entrance carved out of rock, no deepening pit into the earth. Instead, there’s a series of increasingly electric-colored, massive brine-filled evaporating pools that perfectly reflect the mountains that line the horizon. They’re separated by endless mounds of salt—the by-product of the mining effort.
Underneath all that encrusted salt, sometimes just one to three meters below, there’s a giant reservoir of brine, a salty solution that boasts a high concentration of lithium.
The SQM reps escort us to a lavish base camp where mining executives stay while they’re visiting the site. Imagine a tiny five-star hotel with ten or so rooms and a private chef plunked down in the weird alien desert. Ground zero for the modern battery.
The perfect place, I think, to phone its inventor.
When I tell John Goodenough that I’m calling him from a lithium mine in the Atacama Desert, he lets loose a howling hoot. Goodenough is a giant in his field—he spearheaded the most important battery innovations since Whittingham’s lithium breakthrough—and that laugh has become notorious. At age ninety-four, he still heads into his office nearly every day, and he tells me he’s on the brink of one last leap forward in the rechargeable world.
Goodenough, an army vet who studied physics under Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, began his career at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, investigating magnetic storage. By the mid-1970s, like Whittingham, he was moved by the energy crisis to research energy conservation and storage. Around then, Congress cut the funding for his program, so he moved across the pond to Oxford to continue his pursuits. He knew Exxon had hired Whittingham to create a lithium–titanium sulfide battery. “But that effort was to fail,” Goodenough says, “because dendrites form and grow across the flammable liquid electrolyte of this battery with incendiary, even explosive consequences.”
Goodenough thought he had a corrective. From his earlier work, he understood that lithium–magnesium oxides were layered, so he set about exploring how much lithium he could extract from various other oxides before they became unstable. Lithium–cobalt and lithium–nickel oxides fit the bill. By 1980, his team had developed a lithium-ion battery using a lithium–cobalt oxide for the cathode, and it turned out to be a magic bullet—or at least, it allowed for a hefty charge at a lighter weight and was significantly more stable than other oxides. It’s also the basic formulation you’ll find inside your iPhone today. Well, almost.
Before it helped power the wireless revolution, though, the lithium-ion battery was the solution to a more mundane electronics problem. Sony was facing an obstacle to a promising new market: camcorders. By the early 1990s, video cameras had shrunk from shoulder-mounted behemoths to handheld recorders. But the nickel-cadmium batteries used by the industry were big and bulky. “Sony needed a battery that held enough energy to run the camera but was small enough to match the camera,” Sam Jaffe of Navigant Research explains. The new, ultralight rechargeable lithium-ion battery fit the bill. It wouldn’t take long for the technology to spread from Sony’s early Handycams to cell phones to the rest of the consumer-electronics industry.
“By the mid-1990s, almost all cameras with rechargeable batteries were using lithium-ion,” Jaffe explains. “They then took over the laptop-battery market and—shortly after that—the nascent cell phone market. The same trick would be repeated in tablet computers, power tools, and handheld computing devices.”
Fueled by Goodenough’s research and Sony’s product development, lithium batteries became a global industry unto themselves. As of 2015, they made up a thirty-billion-dollar annual market. And the trend is expected to continue, abetted by electric and hybrid vehicles. That massive, rapid-fire doubling of the market that occurred between 2015 and 2016 was primarily due to one major announcement: the opening of Tesla’s Gigafactory, which is slated to become the world’s largest lithium-ion-battery factory. According to Transparency Market Research, the global lithium-ion-battery market is expected to more than double to $77 billion by 2024.
It’s time to hit the pool. Pools, I mean. Of lithium.
My chat with Goodenough went longer than expected, and the crew is waiting to take us to the lithium ponds that form the core of the mining operation.
“Sorry,” I say to Enrique. “I was just talking with the inventor of the lithium battery.”
“What did he say?” he asks, trying not to sound too interested.
“He says he’s invented a better battery,” I say.
“Does it use lithium?”
“No,” I say. “He says it will use sodium.”
“Shit.”
As we drive out to the ponds through desolate desert roads, salt is in the air, underfoot, and heaped in giant piles everywhere we look. The crusted expanse and industrial machinery makes it feel a bit like an abandoned outpost. Apparently the vibe unsettles the workers too; Peña says they’re a superstitious lot.
“They say they’ve seen Chupacabra out here,” he says, “and people disappear.” The harsh climate, the sprawling desert, the spare complex, the unforgiving dryness, the long salt-lined ponds—there’s plenty to inspire paranormal thinking out here. I don’t blame them. “And aliens. Usually, it’s aliens. They say they see UFOs.” Peña laughs. “Maybe they’re just stopping for batteries.”
We pull up to the first stop, a series of pipes stretching over white-blasted pools. SQM drills down into the brine as an oil company might drill for oil. At the Salar de Atacama, there are 319 wells pumping out 2,743 liters of that lithium-rich brine per second.
Also like an oil company, SQM is always drilling exploratory holes to locate new bounty. There are 4,075 total exploration and production boreholes, according to Peña, some of which go seven hundred to eight hundred meters deep.
The brine gets pumped into hundreds of massive evaporating ponds, where it—you guessed it—evaporates. In the high, arid desert, the process doesn’t take long. Technicians blast the pipes with water twice a day to clean off encroaching salt, which can clog them up. They use the salt by-product to build everything they can—berms, tables, guardrails. I see crystals growing on a joint that was washed off just hours ago.
At the evaporation ponds, Enrique says, “You’re always pumping in and pumping out.” First, the workers start an evaporation route, which precipitates rock salt. Pump. Then they get potassium salt. Pump. Eventually, they concentrate the brine solution until it’s about 6 percent lithium.
The lithium pools of Atacama, as photographed with my iPhone
This vast network of clear to blue to neon-green pools is only the first step in creating the lithium that ends up in your batteries. After it’s reduced to a concentrate, the lithium is shipped by tanker t
ruck to a refinery in Salar del Carmen, by the coast.
That drive presents perhaps the most dangerous part of the process. A web of transit lines spans the area around Atacama, and the next day, Enrique, Jason, and I spend hours driving down private mining roads, passing semitrucks and tankers hauling lithium and potassium or returning to the salar for another load. More memorials marking fatal accidents dot the sides of the road. On the rare occasions it rains, flooding can shut down the entire operation and send a ripple through the entire global-supply chain. But mostly, the plight belongs to wearied drivers, taking extra trips to earn extra money and pushing the limits.
There’s no spectacular white desert at Salar del Carmen, just a series of towering cylinders, a couple more pools, and rows of thrumming machinery.
The refinery operation is an industrial winter wonderland. Salt crystals grow on the reactors, and lithium flakes fall like snow on my shoulders. That’s because 130 tons of lithium carbonate are whipped up here every day and shipped from Chile’s ports. That’s 48,000 tons of lithium a year. Because there’s less than a gram of lithium in each iPhone, that’s enough to make about forty-three billion iPhones.
It begins as the concentrated solution that’s trucked in from Atacama and dumped into a storage pool. That’s purified and then sent through a winding process of filtration, carbonization, drying, and compacting.
Soda ash is combined with the solution to form lithium carbonate, the most in-demand form of the commodity. It takes two tons of soda ash to create one ton of lithium carbonate, which is why lithium isn’t refined on-site at Atacama. SQM would have to ship all that into the high desert; instead, they just bring the brine down the mountain.
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