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

by Steve LeVine

  • • •

  One day, Don Vissers walked into Mike Thackeray’s office. He was just back from a conference in Oslo. Did Thackeray know of Khalil Amine, a battery guy in Japan? They had shared lunch and Vissers seemed enthused. Thackeray said that, yes, he did know of Amine and was also impressed.

  Vissers soon found himself in Kyoto. Amine showed him around his lab.

  “God, don’t tell him too much,” Amine’s boss had instructed. But over dinner that evening, Amine went on about the science.

  “Would you be interested to come to the U.S. to work with us?” Vissers at last asked.

  “Sorry,” Amine said. He was moving to a job in Ann Arbor.

  Vissers laughed.

  “Your wife is studying only six miles from Argonne,” he said.

  “Really?” Amine replied. He had equated Argonne with the 1940s atomic bomb tests and assumed it was nearer to New Mexico.

  “Count me in,” Amine said.

  Amine and Xiaoping, now married, used their savings from Japan for a house in Downers Grove, the middle-class “Little Argonne” to which the lab’s first scientists migrated in the late 1940s. When she finished medical school, Xiaoping opened a holistic medical clinic nearby. Her instinct of shifting to the United States had been perfect, Amine said—“for the kids, and also for my career and her career.” Then Xiaoping found a foreclosure a few miles away in a newer, wealthier subdivision called Oak Brook. The schools there were terrific and progressive, too. They took the house.

  Amine might have continued to be successful in Japan, but not Xiaoping. There was too much prejudice against Chinese, not to mention bullying of foreign children. In Oak Brook, Xiaoping was happy and popular.

  Xiaoping’s parents moved in with her and Amine. When Amine arrived home from a long business trip, regardless of the time, he would notice someone in the window. It would be Xiaoping’s mother. “She is very worried. You know, about me,” Amine said. But when he opened the door, she would be gone—in her room, falling silently asleep.

  10

  Theft in the Lab

  Don Vissers walked into Thackeray’s office.

  “Khal thinks you are stealing his ideas,” he said.

  What?

  Amine, livid, had griped that Thackeray’s application to lock in the provisional NMC patent had pilfered his work. Two years after his recruitment by Vissers, the Moroccan had become a force in the Battery Department. He arrived at the office at six A.M., before almost anyone else, for a head start on funding applications to the government and private companies. These project proposals demonstrated a knack for ferreting out the potential next big thing, connecting the hidden dots in raw work under way in the field and adding the necessary missing ingredient. Many of the applications were approved and the money was on course to make up two thirds of the entire departmental budget, with the corresponding proportion of staff under his direct supervision. At root was Amine’s drive, a disruptive ambition that made much of the department seem to be standing still and upset many of his colleagues, who called him an opportunist who exploited others’ work.

  Amine and Thackeray themselves were an incongruous pair, not only because two immigrants from opposite ends of Africa were driving Argonne’s effort to push American dominance into the next industrial era. Thackeray—gently spoken yet typically disheveled in an ill-ironed shirt, his hair combed straight down—was fastidious about his science and fanatical about understanding events at the atomic level. He did not quite comprehend Amine, who, while impeccably dressed and coiffed, was by comparison a brawler, principally interested in what he could push into the marketplace. Thackeray was baffled as to why Amine did not seem bothered by the details of a given compound’s behavior. But for whatever reason Amine didn’t, and Thackeray shook his head and focused back on the science.

  The allegation that Amine leveled against Thackeray was toxic. You could accuse a scientist—a colleague on your own team—of almost nothing worse. If there truly was a theft, Thackeray’s image would be blackened. But if Amine was wrong, his credibility would suffer.

  That was not all. Amine had also accused a supervisor of bigotry. The manager, Amine said, treated him and his Chinese lab assistants as “third class” members of the lab even though they were among its most productive scientists. If the supervisor didn’t change—fast—he was going above his head. This Amine did—he went to a more senior manager and walked out with a promotion.

  Amine’s accusation was unfair—the manager was no bigot. He was simply put off by Amine’s aggressive style. But Amine’s charge against the extraordinarily civil Thackeray crossed a different line. It staggered and mystified the South African. Amine went so far as to forbid his staff to speak with Thackeray.

  Chris Johnson thought he knew what was going on. One day, he had been conversing with a South Korean named Jae-kook Kim, one of Amine’s postdoctoral assistants. “I have this theory about titanium—that you can add a little bit of extra lithium to it” and produce a higher-capacity battery, Kim said. It was the same thesis as Thackeray and Johnson’s but advanced the use of titanium rather than manganese. Johnson reckoned that Amine had learned of the breakthrough and, without overtly saying so, was proposing a twist. Typically, he had found a way to grab a piece of a big, new idea. Johnson wasn’t ruffled—he thought titanium and manganese could be a good marriage. You could claim both approaches in your patent application and make it even stronger.

  But that was Johnson, with his decorum-driven Midwest sensibilities. Thackeray, with a cultural spine anchored elsewhere, felt differently. He was seriously aggravated.

  Amine seemed bent on warfare. That left it to Thackeray to conjure up a resolution—if he chose to. The thing was, legally speaking, you must justify your name on a patent. It was not like a research paper, in which anybody is eligible for a byline. When it came to a patent, you had to genuinely contribute something, specify what it was, and assign to it a percentage of the whole work.

  Thackeray considered these questions. There was no collaboration between his and Amine’s research groups—no one was working together. So there could have been no direct blurring of ideas. Amine’s group was adding lithium to the formulation. He had swapped titanium oxide for Thackeray’s manganese oxide in order to achieve higher capacity. But his premise was different—like the New Zealanders, Amine did not describe the double lattices. Thackeray thought Amine had missed the big picture and that his ideas were at best peripheral to the actual invention—“a tiny, little thing,” he said. Amine did not belong on the patent—period.

  Yet Amine was not backing down and Thackeray felt the heat. “It was his word against mine,” he said. Thackeray could simply put his foot down but then the fight was sure to become uglier.

  Thackeray opted for peace in the lab. He added Kim and Amine to the list of inventors. The advance reflected by NMC was bigger than their personal differences. But a pall went over the relationship. You couldn’t make that sort of allegation and expect others to forget.

  • • •

  The NMC patent attracted attention. At a Boston battery conference, “people were just taking pictures of my presentation and taking notes,” Chris Johnson said. But Thackeray recalled one of John Goodenough’s maxims: once you have an invention, you have a two-year lead time before other scientists catch up. In the case of the Argonne group, it had an edge in a new, powerful, and cheap battery system. But with the patent filed, they had to be alert.

  In 2010, Thackeray and Johnson were startled by a report from Dalhousie University. Jeff Dahn, a blunt and outspoken battery researcher whose own version of the NMC had been patented by the 3M Company just after the Argonne pair, announced a big jump in the material’s performance. It happened when, as an experiment, he juiced the voltage. The capacity surged.

  If you pack lithium into a battery and apply voltage to move it from the cathode to the anode—the act of
charging the battery—the structure puts up fierce resistance. It restricts the lithium’s free movement, thus limiting how fast energy can be extracted, and thus how fast a car could go. Some goes astray along the way, stuck in one or the other side of the battery. In the case of NMC, it had high energy—you could pack in a lot of lithium—but relatively low power, meaning that you could not extract the lithium very fast. What Dahn did was to raise the voltage used to charge the battery above 4.5 volts—to about 4.8 volts, considerably more than the usual 4.3. That boost triggered a race of shuttling electrons. The result was staggering. Theoretically speaking, Dahn was putting almost all of the lithium into motion between the cathode and the anode. In principle, you should not have been able to extract that much lithium from the cathode, thus removing important walls from the latticework of the cathode—the house of oxygen and metal atoms should collapse. But Dahn discovered that he could do so.

  Johnson went into the lab and tried to duplicate Dahn’s claims using the Li2MnO3. He pushed the voltage over 4.5 volts. Just as Dahn had reported, the capacity surged.

  It was an important discovery. The numbers told the tale. Ordinarily, lithium-ion batteries such as Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide store around 140 milliampere-hours of electric charge per gram, a revolutionary capacity when it was invented but insufficient for the ambitions of the new electric age. By pushing the voltage, Johnson was getting much more—250 milliampere-hours per gram, which was even higher than the 220 that Dahn was reporting. Trying again, Johnson got 280, almost twice lithium-cobalt-oxide’s performance. The experiments suggested that the NMC was even more powerful than they had thought on pioneering it five years earlier—far more. At once Li2MnO3 was not simply a fortifying agent, as had been presumed. At just over 4.5 volts, it came alive in a very muscular manner. At this higher voltage, you activated a new, heretofore unrecognized dimension of NMC. This was NMC 2.0, the breakthrough that could push electric cars over the bar and challenge gasoline-fueled engines.

  The Argonne men published their own results immediately. As for the IP, they were covered—the jump in capacity at higher voltage was simply a new understanding of the original 2000 application.

  Working in the lab with his own team, Amine made an additional advance. It was in a usually overlooked part of the battery—the electrolyte in which the cathode and anode are submerged. It is this liquid that allows ions from the anode to migrate to the cathode, and vice versa. But sometimes the battery becomes overcharged, creating the risk of fire, a phenomenon that had already inflicted considerable public relations damage on lithium-ion batteries and products containing them—you could have only so many laptops burst into flames in airport lounges and elsewhere before consumers began to worry. Amine’s team invented and patented a new molecule based on boron and fluorine that, when added in powder form in minuscule amounts to the electrolyte, absorbed excess electrons and thus reduced the chance of fire. Amine was a full-fledged member of the NMC team, a handful of researchers who had now expanded their work into a constellation of patents centered on the NMC that was arguably more valuable than any rival new battery work.

  11

  The New Boss

  Not much more came of the NMC until the arrival of Jeff Chamberlain at Argonne in 2006. Chamberlain was tall, muscular, and relaxed, with small hands for his build, used in controlled, almost robotic gestures that conveyed confidence without seeming to be showy. It was his voice that captured attention in meetings. In a room of competing opinions, his basso profundo seemed to prevail. The voice made it impossible to ignore Chamberlain when he began to moralize. Among his gripes was “anti-intellectualism among elected officials.” Another was how Americans were “beholden to the interests of those who produce oil.” Chamberlain would continue to anyone listening: “We are the Saudi Arabia of coal and have nuclear energy. We should aim at energy independence with coal, solar, wind, and nuclear, then use them to charge up electric cars. Use electricity instead of oil—for everything. How do we get there?”

  He was hokey, which endeared him to the rank and file, scientists who were unmoved by talk of a battery war but gung-ho on the subject of importing less Middle East oil. Their passions rose at the idea that batteries could help stop climate change. They believed Chamberlain when he said over the following years that many oil despots would be in trouble if drivers turned to electric cars to the degree Obama and Wan Gang both sought and those vehicles were charged with electricity produced by natural gas. Oil prices would fall, undercutting the long-running flood of money to Russia and OPEC, especially members that themselves did not possess gas. Since China would require less foreign oil, a current subtext to tension with outsiders—its colossal need for imported resources—would soften, and its air would be cleaner. When you added up these factors, you also emitted much less carbon. What was to dislike? Chamberlain understood that his boosterism infused the lab with a sense of purpose and that led him to promote the big energy picture even more.

  Chamberlain grew up in Longwood, a small town near Orlando where his father, Jack, sold marine engines and family conversation often turned to the auto industry as his grandfather and uncle both worked for Ford Motor. Recalling those years, Chamberlain would tell of knocking on neighbors’ doors with his Red Rider wagon, collecting newspapers to recycle. He and his father would weigh and tie the papers in twenty-five-pound bundles that reaped twenty or twenty-five cents each at the recycling center. Jack Chamberlain explained the commercial chain to his son—idea, execution, money, personal benefit. The son was given trombone lessons as well and by high school was good enough to join a brass quintet. In addition to him, there were two trumpets, a French horn, and a sax. Before long, the group qualified for state competitions and played a gig at Disney Village over in Orlando. In his senior year, school band and chorus members rallied together and helped to elect Chamberlain as class president. It was quite a coup as his opponent was the school quarterback and an unforgettable cap to his years in Longwood.

  He had meanwhile won a full scholarship to Wake Forest University and following that earned a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech. Chamberlain had expected to teach. But in 1993, when he began to search for university-level positions, he found that much had changed while he was at school.

  Back in 1982, a federal judge had ordered the breakup of AT&T, the telephony monopoly. Bell Laboratories had been AT&T’s research arm, and when it divided into parts in line with the court order, Bell eventually fell apart, too. By the early 1990s, the lab had shrunk. Other industrial research centers followed the same path—General Electric, RCA, and Xerox also diminished their basic research units, firing and retiring thousands of experienced researchers who now poured onto the job market. So many first-rate scientists were available for hire that they all but shut out the prospects for young, freshly minted Ph.D.s like Chamberlain.

  There was work, however, if you were open to less-fashionable industries. Chamberlain accepted jobs at a series of mining and chemical companies where he carried out tasks such as leaching gold and copper from rocks and developing new semiconductors. It was not long before his employers perceived a latent talent—an unusual ability to speak to anyone as an equal. To them this meant potential in sales. But if Chamberlain was possibly more valuable on the sales staff than in the lab, his raw ability would require honing. In his first job, his bosses began with instruction in deciphering a client’s desires, in addition to what he didn’t know he needed and wanted. Later, Chamberlain would recall those lessons quite a bit.

  Chamberlain’s closest friend in these years was Dave Schroeder, a smart, funny, and mouthy Illinois native with whom he worked at a microprocessor company called Cabot Industries. Neither man was liked much by the Cabot hierarchy, which regarded them as troublemakers. For their part, Chamberlain and Schroeder sensed capitalism gone awry with managers who created an unnecessary “battling culture.” They felt they might do a lot better if they started their own firm. So, while keepi
ng their day jobs, they tried out some ideas.

  Their first brainchild was Chamberlain’s. It revolved around fantasy baseball. For those unfamiliar with fantasy sports, it is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry1 whose participants choose imaginary rosters of players from real sporting teams, and keep score—often for money—based on the players’ individual statistics. Chamberlain devised software that he thought could improve the chances of winning. It borrowed from rolling averages used by stock pickers, the insight that events tend over time toward the average. Consider baseball hitting—“somebody like, say, Ryan Braun,” Chamberlain said. “He plays for the Brewers and was the MVP of the National League. He’s twenty-eight, twenty-nine now, and has swung a bat since he was five.” Say Braun’s hitting suddenly takes a dive. “The fantasy baseball player would say: ‘Oh God, the batting average is way down; I am benching him.’” But Chamberlain’s thesis was that that was precisely the moment to muster the nerve to keep him in. Because Braun would return to his average. And the only way to do so was to hit above his average. “It was counterintuitive,” Chamberlain said.

  The idea was to sell it to Yahoo!, which at the time had hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of fantasy sports subscribers paying ten dollars a month to monitor statistics in real time. Calling the invention “Trend Tracker,” Chamberlain and Schroeder filed for a patent.

  One day, they sat down for a meeting with Yahoo!’s senior fantasy sports executive.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t think of this,” the executive said. A young assistant said, “Okay, if it is that great, let’s us do it. Thanks for the meeting.” The executive glared. “Did you hear at the beginning of the meeting when they said they already filed patents on it?” he said.