Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  For Leigh

  It is quite possible that the man who has taught us to put up electricity in bottles

  has accomplished greater things than any inventor who has yet appeared.

  —The New York Times, June 11, 1881

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  1 - THE ELECTRICIANS

  2 - FALSE START

  3 - THE WIRELESS REVOLUTION

  4 - REVIVING THE ELECTRIC CAR

  5 - THE BLANK SPOT AT THE HEART OF THE CAR

  6 - THE LITHIUM WARS

  7 - THE BRINK

  8 - THE STIMULUS

  9 - THE PROSPECTORS

  10 - THE LITHIUM TRIANGLE

  11 - THE GOAL

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  To skeptics, the Chevrolet Volt concept car was nothing but a public-relations stunt, an unserious stab at building green credibility through future-shock styling and a hollow promise of untold advances in fuel economy. After all, the annual North American International Auto Show more closely resembles a Paris fashion show than tent day on the dealer lot. Every January, Detroit’s Cobo Hall is filled with outlandish concept cars—hydrogen-fuel-cell cars whose time is always just another year away, hallucinatory “design studies” whose lines might one day help determine the grille pattern on an otherwise bland sedan. Nothing wrong with that: it’s the way the automotive industry works. The artists and research-and-design people have their fun, and then the executives and engineers water the fanciful down to something safe, something that the board suspects might actually sell. Sometimes the technological advances that run down the automotive catwalk do eventually appear in the real world. But in early 2007 GM had a credibility problem. It was natural to wonder how serious the manufacturer of the Hummer could be when it said it would soon build an entirely new type of twenty-first-century automobile.

  The skepticism surrounding the Volt was partly informed by the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, which had premiered at the Sundance film festival the previous year and had quickly become a cult hit, delivering to an unexpectedly large audience footage of General Motors’ seizing all but a few specimens of its earlier EV1 electric car from their heartbroken drivers, hauling them out to the desert, and crushing them en masse behind a security fence. The documentary didn’t directly accuse GM of conspiracy, but it didn’t matter. Particularly among the young and the environmentally conscious, a new piece of conventional wisdom threatened to crystallize: General Motors, an evil American corporation, had colluded with the oil companies (also evil) to rid the land of an existential threat, the electric car.

  Yet the truth was that by the day of the auto show, General Motors had done vastly more production-intent work on the Volt than they ever would for a normal concept car. It hadn’t been easy, but its product-planning chief, Bob Lutz, had secured a good-faith commitment from his superiors to build the Volt. It was to be a moon shot, a game changer—an entirely new type of car, one more relevant and useful than any electric vehicle that had come before. Thanks to its series hybrid drivetrain—a battery-powered electric traction motor backed up by a gas-powered generator—the Volt would hardly ever use gasoline around town. If you weren’t opposed to buying gas, however, you could also drive the car cross-country. And the Volt’s power architecture could be transferred to any number of other vehicles.

  The Volt, or at least the idea of the Volt, was promising enough that some of GM’s critics—even some of the people behind Who Killed the Electric Car?—allowed themselves to be cautiously open-minded. There were indications that this time, General Motors might be serious. Rumors had been spreading for months that the company might be ready to get back into electrification. Lutz had been stung by Who Killed the Electric Car? More important, he had come to see GM’s ceding of the lead in the newly fashionable hybrid market to Toyota and its Prius as a terrible mistake. The righteous glow of the Prius was by 2006 shining on every car and truck Toyota built. The Prius was the ultimate image booster for the company that appeared set to surpass GM as the world’s largest automaker. Then, the arrival of start-up Tesla Motors and its glamorous electric roadster finally made Lutz snap.

  The skeptics were right about one thing: the Volt was definitely about image. The car was Lutz’s baby, designed in pseudo–Skunk Works fashion, pitched as a reputation rebuilder for a stumbling, increasingly unprofitable company. He had given the designers little direction except that the car should be a technology showcase, and that it should be an electric—not a hydrogen-fuel-cell car, which by 2006 GM had spent at least a billion dollars researching. The prototype that the designers came up with was sexy, like a twenty-second-century Camaro, and on the day of its unveiling, standing beneath the blue-gelled stage lights next to his gleaming car of the future, Lutz appeared to gloat.

  Announcing the Volt, General Motors executives argued that the time for the electrification of the automobile had finally arrived, thanks to a critical enabling technology: the lithium-ion battery. This was the same technology responsible for the miraculous shrinkage of the cellular phone. These batteries were three times more energetic and less than half the weight of the lead-acid cells that drove the EV1. Make that the lead-acid cells that doomed the EV1. The company line was that heavy, inefficient lead-acid batteries, the best available in 1996 when production of the EV1 began, were so bulky that it was impossible to shove a backseat into the car, so short-lived that the vehicle was limited to a maximum range of one hundred miles or so, after which, if you ran out of juice, you were, as Lutz would later say, “truly screwed.” This is why the EV1 failed, GM contended: it was really just an inadequate car. But the lithium-ion battery changed everything. It could bottle up enough energy in such a small and light package that suddenly an affordable four-passenger electrified vehicle was feasible.

  There was a major caveat: the batteries weren’t quite ready. The type of lithium-ion battery used in laptops and cellular phones wasn’t suitable for use in a car, experts argued. It wasn’t safe enough, powerful enough, or durable enough for the many years of abuse that an electric-car battery would have to endure. That could change quickly, however: around the world major electronics companies, venture-backed start-ups, and scientists in national and university labs were developing new strains of lithium-based batteries that had the potential to make the Volt reality. Once the batteries were ready, the car would be ready too.

  Plenty of people thought GM was simply setting itself up, once again, to blame the failure of an electric-car program on the batteries. Even the optimists were afraid of being fooled again. This new battery technology was promising, and the Volt’s blended power train cleverly circumvented the most common obstacle to electric drive—limited driving range. None of that would necessarily stop GM from milking the car for PR value without ever putting it into meaningful production. But there was a chance. If the events of the next few years unfolded in just the right way, the electric car’s time could finally arrive.

  Three years after the Volt’s unveiling, I found myself standing on a rocky bluff in a remote and desolate corner of the Bolivian altiplano. In the distance, like an endless vanilla glaze on a mud-chocolate landscape, was the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, which, by some estimates, holds half of the world’s easily accessible lithium. Below lay the construction site of the Bolivian government’s pilot plant for lithium production, a small collection of shacks and half-built brick-and-timber structures that had become a source of international fascination and, in Bolivia, plen
ty of domestic consternation. Delegations from the South Korean government, Japanese and French corporations, and others had been here before me, eager to secure access to Bolivia’s lithium riches in preparation for a postoil future. None of them had much luck. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales—Aymara Indian, head of the Movement Toward Socialism Party, former leader of a coca growers’ union—had declared that in order to prevent foreigners from stealing the country’s lithium, the government would go it alone. This pilot plant was Bolivia’s first step toward building a national lithium industry.

  Fears about the price and future availability of oil, the increasingly undeniable reality of anthropogenic climate change and the concomitant likelihood of restrictions on carbon emissions, the rise of resource hungry India and China, the collapse and rebirth of Detroit’s auto industry, a dramatic realignment in American politics, the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression and the remolding of the American economy that the crisis seemed to make possible—this strange constellation of circumstances had brought me to this remote corner of the world. Some combination of these factors had by 2010 led nearly every major automaker to announce some level of commitment to the electrification of the automobile. Those commitments caused a rush to supply the batteries the cars of the future would need. That rush initiated a global race to secure access to the world’s supply of lithium—the element that is the yeast in the dough of the world’s most advanced batteries. All this happened with astonishing quickness. It was fascinating to watch, and for those involved it was by turns thrilling and brutal, an opportunity for a few winners and survivors to change the world and maybe make a billion dollars in the process. Yet it only makes so much sense to speak of these events in the past tense. The real upheaval is only beginning.

  1

  THE ELECTRICIANS

  Before the invention of the battery in the first year of the nineteenth century, electricity as we know it today—as a stream of electrons that can be made to do our bidding—didn’t exist. Electricity was part parlor trick, part mystery. It was a fuzzy force field that could be conjured by rubbing a plate of glass with fur. It was in no way useful, and it wasn’t even remotely understood. Only after the battery gave mankind a reliable source of electricity did that really begin to change.

  We’ve known about what is now called static electricity since around 600 B.C., when the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus began puzzling over a strange property of amber: when rubbed with cloth, amber (called elektron in Greek) would, through some invisible mechanism, pull feathers toward itself. The phenomenon resembled magnetism, which the Greeks had observed in iron-bearing stones found near the city of Magnesia on the Meander. After Thales, however, more than two millennia would pass before human understanding of these two forces advanced appreciably. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some momentum returned when William Gilbert, chief doctor to Queen Elizabeth I of England, discovered that a variety of materials could be electrified by friction, just like amber. Gilbert is the one who coined the word “electricity,” drawing on the Greek word for amber to give a name to the force that he called “electrical effluvia.” After that, in part because there was no good way to store electricity for use in experiments, the “electrickal arts” progressed only haltingly for the next century and a half.

  Then came the Leyden jar. Invented in the town of Leyden, Belgium, in the 1740s, it was literally a jar for electricity. Its walls coated inside and out with metal, the jar was filled with water and then, via a metal chain that dangled down through the lid, charged by an electrostatic machine. (We now know that the Leyden jar is a capacitor, a device that stores charge between a pair of conductors.) One Leyden jar, or several of them wired in series, could hold a significant charge, as Benjamin Franklin learned around Christmas in 1750, when he accidentally hit himself with a charge he’d been building up to kill a holiday turkey. He called it a “universal blow” through the body, which left “a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck which continued til the next morning but wore off.” Yet the Leyden jar’s usefulness was limited by the fact that it could dump its charge only in that kind of instantaneous jolt. This restricted the kinds of experiments scientists—or, as they often referred to themselves, electricians—could perform, and by the second half of the eighteenth century the true nature of electricity was still a mystery. In 1752, when Franklin performed his legendary kite experiment and determined that the electricity generated by friction was the same stuff as lightning, it was an important breakthrough. But what was that common force? No one knew.

  The battery was the accidental fruit of a dispute between two Italian scientists over this question. In one corner was Luigi Galvani, a physician at the University of Bologna, who noticed that under certain circumstances, touching a scalpel to the crural nerves in the thigh of a dissected frog caused the legs to kick to life. Galvani came to believe that within the muscles of all living creatures flows an electrical fluid, an “indwelling electricity” generated by the brain and pumped through the body as a motivating force.

  In the other corner was Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta, a professor of physics at the University of Pavia. Volta had long been interested in the general project of eliminating superstition through the careful study of phenomena still commonly attributed to magic. He thought deeply about the concepts of mind and the soul, and for a while he entertained Galvani’s theory as a possible explanation for the relationship between the “will” and the motion of the body. But that didn’t last long. Through his research with electrical instruments he became convinced that there was no such thing as animal electricity. Instead, electricity was set in motion by the contact of different metals. When a disembodied frog leg kicks in the presence of electricity, that’s because it’s a good conductor, just like the human tongue, one of Volta’s favorite experimental tools.

  Galvani and Volta sparred over the nature of electricity for years beginning in 1792, trading jabs in letters and books. A decisive round began in 1797, when Galvani published a long book devoted to destroying Volta’s theory of metallic electricity. Volta could easily handle all of Galvani’s arguments but one, which involved a freak of nature that seemed to validate everything Galvani believed in: the torpedo fish, a bottom-dwelling ray conveniently equipped with an organ capable of creating electrical shocks strong enough to kill a man. Galvani believed that some kind of electrical fluid was cooked up in the fish’s brain and then piped throughout its nervous system, and he intended to prove it experimentally.

  Volta knew that the torpedo fish threat had to be dispatched quickly. He learned how to do so when he read a paper by the English chemist William Nicholson, which proposed that the torpedo fish produced electricity not through its brain, nerves, or will, but through an organ that could be modeled mechanically. Volta ran with Nicholson’s idea, determined to build a device that would draw electricity only from the contact of different metals. After only a few months he emerged from his lab with a column of little sandwich cookies, each one a zinc and copper disc separated by brine-soaked cardboard. On March 20, 1800, Volta wrote to Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society in England, announcing his discovery of “electricity excited by the mere mutual contact of different kinds of metal.” The battery had arrived.

  News of the battery spread across Europe as quickly as the infrastructure of the day would allow. Letters describing the new device sailed to England, France, Denmark. Electricians throughout Europe began replicating Volta’s experiment, and soon they began building larger and more powerful batteries. Nicholson built one and used it to create what the historian Giuliano Pancaldi described as “loud detonations, clouds of bubbles, gleams of light, shocks felt by up to nine people holding each other by the hand, and a ramified metallic vegetation, nine or ten times the bulk of the wire, when the wire was kept in the circuit of the battery for four hours.” Almost immediately the battery enabled major fundamental scientific discoveries. Within weeks, Nicholson and his colleag
ue Anthony Carlisle had used the battery to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen, proving that water was not, in fact, an irreducible element.

  Volta called his invention the “organe electrique artificial.” Nicholson called the device the “pile,” referring to the fact that it is simply a pile of metal and cardboard. Soon, however, the word “battery” emerged in common usage, a reference to the practice of connecting a “battery” of Leyden jars in series to supply electricity.

  The battery assured Volta a place in the pantheon. It was “the last great discovery made with the instruments, concepts, and methods of the eighteenth-century electricians,” a device that “opened up a limitless field” that “transformed our civilization,” wrote the historian John L. Heilbron. The nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday, often considered the most brilliant experimentalist in history, called the battery a “magnificent instrument of philosophic research.” Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy, called Volta “immortal” and put him on the Positivist Calendar, a proposed reform calendar that celebrated history’s greatest thinkers. According to the historian of science George Sarton, the battery “opened to man a new and incomparable source of energy.”

  Volta earned such effusive praise because of the battery’s enduring, history-bending influence. Throughout the nineteenth century, the battery powered the experiments that finally allowed human beings to put to work the amber-borne force field that had mystified thinkers for millennia. The famed English chemist Humphry Davy used large batteries to break various minerals into previously unknown elements—potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, barium, strontium. In Copenhagen in 1820, Hans Christian Oersted noticed while giving a lecture that current flowing from a battery changed the direction of a compass that was sitting nearby. Soon, Oersted proved that electricity could induce magnetism. Oersted’s discovery led to James Clerk Maxwell’s equations describing the relationship between electricity and magnetism—electromagnetism—which led to the electric motor, the generator, the telephone, and every other electrically powered device ever invented.