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

by Steve LeVine

  Each year, some 100,000 Indian students completed the entrance exam for 2,000 slots in India’s exclusive Institutes of Technology (IIT), a 2 percent admission rate. By comparison, Harvard University admitted 16 percent of its applicants in 1986, the year Kumar had to decide his college future. But there was substantial motivation for the multitudes who tried—those admitted to one of the Institute’s seven campuses went on to make up the cream of Indian science and technology, on par with the best in America, or anywhere. Graduates in fact often moved to Silicon Valley and assumed dominant roles there. Those who took the test often carried with them the lifelong ambitions of their entire extended family. If you were successful, Kumar said, “your life was set.”

  Kumar aspired to attend IIT. And when he took the exam, he scored in the top 1,800, winning him a place in the Institutes’ statistics program, a cause for jubilation. But in his case it wasn’t. He aspired not only to study at the Institutes, but admission to their engineering program. Those were the IIT grads who were admired—they were whom you pictured when hearing of an alumnus; barely anyone knew that IIT even offered statistics. But Kumar needed a much better score to qualify for engineering. He felt more dejected than thrilled.

  One of his brothers said he was misinformed—admission to the Institutes was the point, whether in statistics or any other program, and he ought to “get into IIT any way I could.” But Kumar’s father echoed his own thinking. “Why do you want to study statistics?” he said. “You should go into engineering.”

  There was another option. Kumar could use his still very good test score to study at the technological institute in Varanasi, a four-hour drive from Patna, almost straight west along the Ganges. Varanasi was a distinguished school—not long after, it in fact would be absorbed by the Institutes. But its graduates typically went on to uncreative jobs in steel or other basic industries, which to Kumar was a numbing thought. He didn’t know what would be worse—to study statistics or work in the steel industry. His parents stepped in: Varanasi was relatively close by, which comforted his mother; engineering was the more secure career, which decided his father. The teen packed for Varanasi.

  Three years into his studies, stories began to trickle in from the United States. Recent Varanasi alumni spoke of scholarships for doctoral programs and good, high-paying jobs for top graduates. Institutes of Technology alumni had the pick of the tech and engineering jobs at home, but in the United States your school was not necessarily the main thing. As long as you were talented, you could be on the same track as IIT grads.

  Kumar opted to try. In his senior year, he studied for the Graduate Record Examinations (GREs) and scoured descriptions of American universities. A letter from the United States arrived. The University of Rochester offered a full scholarship including a thousand-dollar-a-month stipend. He would have to work as a teaching assistant and in other campus jobs. But he would have a full ride toward a Ph.D.

  No one in the Kumar family had ever studied abroad. His mother had discouraged him from even trying. But now that he was in, there was no question that he should go. His father found the money for his son’s airfare. Kumar landed in New York all but penniless. He was twenty-one.

  • • •

  Kumar arrived on the cusp of a powerful surge of Asian immigrants into Silicon Valley and throughout the American technology industry. Asians already held a third of the technology jobs in the Valley and were half of the software developers.1 More than a quarter of American doctoral degree recipients as a whole were foreign born and half of those from Asia.2 In engineering and computer science, about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s were born abroad.3

  These demographics created racial tension. A black leader in Silicon Valley said the Asian employment bulge was not incidental—technology companies, she said, “do not want to employ Americans. They import labor from overseas, pushing for H-1B visas,” residency permits allotted annually to specially skilled foreigners. It was true that there were relatively few blacks in Silicon Valley technology. But there was no evidence that any particular racial group was favored or excluded. In the case of battery guys in particular, other dynamics seemed at play in the appearance of partiality.

  When you looked around a quarter century later, one of the first things you noticed in the battery race was the trend’s deep roots—America’s battery team was largely foreign born. There was the occasional American-born battery guy—the families of most of the researchers on Thackeray’s small team had been in the United States for generations, as had Chamberlain’s. But Thackeray himself was born in Pretoria. Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, was from Palmerston North, on New Zealand’s North Island. Chamberlain’s immediate boss, Emilio Bunel, was Chilean.

  The same was true across the American battery brain trust: though John Goodenough grew up in Connecticut, Stanford’s Yi Cui was born in China, Berkeley’s Venkat Srinivasan in India, and MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang in Taiwan. In the industry, not just Sujeet Kumar and Atul Kapadia but almost their entire team of scientists was born in India.

  Moroccan-born Khalil Amine unapologetically hired only foreigners. His group included not a single American-born researcher. Over the years, Amine had employed the occasional American and even a Frenchman. But now, apart from two other Moroccans (and himself), his group was entirely Chinese. Over sushi after work, Amine said he had concluded that the job was too demanding for United States–born Americans. And not just for them—some Asians, too, were not up to the task. “I have had Caucasians in my group before. Also Indians, Koreans,” Amine said. “But I will tell you this—I’m very demanding. I come to work at six A.M., five A.M. I work weekends. I have to make sure that we produce. The Chinese work this way, too—they are extremely hardworking. But some of the Caucasians, they don’t like that. It seems like big stress on them.”

  Amine was not alone in invoking a supposedly unique Asian cultural DNA when it came to science, technology, and the work ethic, in particular one native to Chinese, but he said the results spoke for themselves. If you considered inventions and published papers, his group was the most prolific in the Battery Department. By Amine’s own count, his group had produced 120 or so inventions over the last decade. “The next group is not even close,” he said, which was true. “And if you look at papers—last year we published about forty-seven, forty-eight. Some professors, they publish that many in their entire careers.” Amine himself had been awarded thirty-eight patents since arriving at Argonne. The next-highest recipient in the department—Thackeray—had twenty-four. Numbers alone were not a definitive metric—China turned out a torrent of forgettable patents and papers. But American patents were not as easily obtained. For Amine, they told the story of his group’s stature.

  The subtext wasn’t merely the view that foreign-born battery guys worked harder but that Americans were simply not a large part of the job pool. The battery guys said that when they advertised a new position, dozens of applicants would respond of whom just two or three typically would be American. The proportions explained why these few Americans, whatever their qualifications, were often outshined by the mountain of overseas competition.

  There simply did not seem to be many Americans eager to invent the next big battery. Americans trained in the disciplines attacking the battery challenge—in physics, chemical engineering, material science. But their jobs of choice tended to be in other fields. Among the places they landed were Silicon Valley’s high-tech firms. Or, even if they did go into batteries, they rejected basic research, which almost certainly required up to three years of uncertain toil as a postdoctoral assistant, and went into private industry.

  The story was similar with most foreign students. They piled into information technology jobs in the 1990s. High-tech industry demand for them as engineers and other specialists was substantial, and although the necessary H-1B visas were limited, computer hardware and software companies often managed to obtain them for those it sought. One could live very we
ll and even become rich in such jobs.

  But there was also a large well of foreign students attracted to batteries. Perhaps again it was a simple matter of proportions—when there were so many foreign Ph.D.s, it stood to reason that would-be battery guys would make up a certain minority. But one trait of Argonne’s foreign-born staff was traditional personal and family aspirations: they were seeking a new life with greater prospects for their children. “I’m not saying it in a way to degrade the other guys,” Amine said, “but Caucasian Americans—they don’t want to do Ph.D.s. They go for an MBA or something like that. For example, I was invited to give a talk at MIT. I would say seventy percent of the students were Asian. Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. I went to Berkeley—same thing.” Foreign battery guys in fact often completed not just one postdoctoral assistantship before securing permanent employment, but two or even three three-year stints. A postdoctoral researcher at Argonne earned about $61,000 a year, which was high for such a position. When offered a staff job, the pay was bumped up a bit and rose regularly from there, which became even more attractive in combination with the stability of federal lab work. But it was not high-tech scale. Their determination was distinct not just from Americans’ but also from that of the Silicon Valley immigrants.

  Once you settled on a life in batteries, a simple calculus made Argonne and the other national labs special magnets for such foreign Ph.D.s—the number of private battery companies was small and with it the possibility of obtaining an H-1B visa. The national labs, on the other hand, could sponsor an unlimited number of H-1Bs—in 2000, Congress had created a working visa exemption for nonprofit, university, and national labs.

  The national labs served as a miniature Lower East Side—not quite a teeming melting pot, but a greenhouse where battery-minded immigrants were invited to succeed and, if they did and so desired, could take citizenship. “They go an extra length. They’re smart. And they are extremely reliable,” Amine said. Why was his team predominantly Chinese? “That’s why,” he said.

  Amine said his strategy did not always work in his favor. He had lost numerous military contracts because the Pentagon permitted only American citizens to work on such sensitive projects, and his group lacked them. But he was straightening that out, too. Six years earlier, Amine himself had taken American citizenship. His two Moroccan researchers had as well, and a Chinese scientist was on his way. “I think within five years, all these Chinese will be U.S. citizens,” Amine said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  Ultimately, Amine said, his personnel preferences were unimportant. “At Argonne, the policy is you hire people based on capability. Not nationality,” he said. Of course, Amine had determined that there was a difference—he was hiring according to nationality. It was among the reasons why an American victory in the battery race oddly depended on scientists from rival countries.

  • • •

  Kumar finished his Ph.D. in 1996. The most obvious places to apply for work were Kodak and Xerox, both of which had large local research labs. But neither company was hiring. Then Kumar noticed a job posted at a university—a California professor was looking for a postdoctoral assistant to help him set up a battery company. Until then, Kumar had not considered electrochemistry as a profession. Nor did he have any expertise in batteries. But the professor was persuasive—Kumar would be his first employee, he said. The professor was confident the start-up, called Nanogram, would succeed, making the early employees wealthy. They would use nanotechnology to create batteries for medical devices. Kumar would be responsible for setting up the entire lab. He took the job.

  Eight years later, Nanogram was sold, resulting in a $300,000 payout to Kumar for the shares he held, a sum that gave him financial stability for the first time in his life. He put it away in the bank. Two years after that, Kumar was hired as director of technology for NanoeXa, the battery company that first licensed Argonne’s NMC.

  NanoeXa’s CEO, Michael Pak, was not a battery guy. He was a South Korean–born businessman with a Harvard undergraduate degree and a knack for attracting investment cash in Silicon Valley. He had raised money for start-ups creating video games and fuel cells. Now, Pak was interested in lithium-ion batteries and he relied on Kumar to guide the company to the right technology.

  When they licensed the Argonne material, Kumar’s objective was to use it for power tools. He tinkered with the NMC for some months and then applied for a patent for a NanoeXa version of the cathode. But Pak saw the license additionally as a valuable bargaining chip. He went with a proposal to a South Korean flat panel display company called Decktron: he would exchange his ultravaluable Argonne license—exclusive global rights to six of the lab’s patents in all, he said, worth $21 million in commercial terms—for majority control of Decktron. In late 2006, the deal was consummated. Pak and Kumar took seats on the Decktron board, with Pak as CEO and president.

  The problem was that the Argonne license wasn’t exclusive. It allowed Pak to manufacture the NMC for power tools, but Argonne was free to license its patents to anyone else it pleased. Moreover, Pak was not permitted to bargain away the licenses as currency to buy into other companies. Two years later, Decktron collapsed and was delisted from the Korean exchange.

  But by then, Kumar—comforted by his nest egg in the bank—and Sinkula had moved on. Along the way, Kumar had found he possessed an unusual instinct for the atomic-level physics of batteries.

  17

  Why We Stay in Chicago

  Just as a former professor prevailed upon Wan Gang to leave Germany and help to create the future at home, one might think that Chinese battery guys in the United States would also return. It made sense that they would feel the pull of the homeland. And if these impulses did draw a certain number of key players home to China, and other immigrants to their countries, the American team would be hollowed out.

  But that was not what was happening. Government incentives were attracting increasing numbers of Chinese students to repatriate but this trend largely excluded the staff at Argonne. Of the lab’s foreign researchers, the Chinese were among the least likely to repatriate. Two South Koreans returned home after some years at Argonne, persuaded in part by the excellent public education system that Korea offered their children, but Chinese and Indian scientists did not seem to even seriously contemplate going back. The professional conditions in China were a disincentive. Unless you were an established name player, the way that Wan had been in Germany, you could end up lost in a sprawling lab in your native country, serving an autocratic boss interested not in new ideas but largely in retaining his own position. Whereas at Argonne your ideas, as long as they were competitive, stood a reasonable chance of being funded.

  Zonghai Chen, a thirty-eight-year-old researcher from a tea-growing town called Penglai in Fujian province, said Internet ads from Chinese laboratories promised one-million-yuan salaries, equivalent to $160,000 a year, 50 percent more than he currently earned. The new positions for mid-career scientists aimed to fill a hole in the job pool created by the Cultural Revolution, when a generation of scientists went missing. “The old researchers retired, and the young ones are not ready to take up their posts,” Zonghai said. “So they are offering big packages to go back.”

  Zonghai said he had not responded to the ads. The money was alluring, but after more than a decade in the West, a period in which both of his children were born—a six-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy—higher pay alone was not sufficient to leave Argonne. “My children would have to learn Chinese as a foreign language,” Zonghai said. “If my daughter started now, she would be on a reading level lower than the first grade. She would have to catch up fast.”

  Several of the Chinese staff cited this language gap, a nightmare for Americanized children who would face competition with classmates already well along in their education. Their children might simply be unable to compete, a gamble they were not prepared to take. Yang Ren, a scientist on Argonne’s Advanced Pho
ton Source, a gigantic X-ray loop that researchers used to examine their creations, said that was not all—it would frankly be a step down to work in a Chinese setting. “If you want to do good science, it is here,” said the forty-eight-year-old Yang, who was from Anhui province.

  Amine’s largely Chinese staff concerned some of the other managers. Theirs was a common story of American immigrants: Argonne managers said the Chinese kept to themselves and that no one knew what they were doing or thinking. During a walk back from the cafeteria, an American postdoctoral assistant said Khalil Amine’s staff members were very, very good at their work, “but,” he added, “I am wondering about the national implications.” Amine’s calculation was, “How do I get ten papers out this year?” The American went on, “It is the easiest to hire Chinese postdocs and achieve that. But what about the long-term, national strategic mission? Basically, are we training the athletes on the other side?”

  The reactions to Amine’s hiring and working methods were not nonsensical. One needed only to recall his assertion that Thackeray stole his idea for the NMC patent, when he shut off his staff from everyone else in the lab. But there were reasons for Amine’s behavior. If you wanted to understand him, you had to consider his experience in Japan. In the United States, Amine’s observation was that innovations often went nowhere. A university professor would make a discovery, apply for a patent, and move on to the next idea. In most cases, the patent would remain unnoticed. If a company happened to unearth it, the university would gladly sign it over with exclusive rights for a few hundred thousand dollars. Two years later, Amine said, you would notice the product for sale, with the company making the money. From the standpoint of just rewards, that could discourage an inventor the next time a bright idea came to mind. It could seem almost worse, he said, to see someone else profiting from your hard work than not to have it commercialized at all.