The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (4 page)

T
he Comrades Marathon extends to the South African port of Durban from Pietermaritzburg, twenty-eight miles inland and three thousand feet lower in altitude. The first time that Mike Thackeray ran the race, in 1968, he finished in ten hours and three minutes, just under the eleven-hour cutoff for the slowest participants. Determined to do better, he ran it again. And again. In 1976, entering the race for the fourteenth time, Thackeray took fourth place with a time of 6:32. His discipline had paid off.

Thackeray was the lead inventor of Argonne’s NMC technology, a descendant of the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode pioneered by Goodenough and the formulation that had beguiled Wan Gang. Thackeray’s office was situated within the main Battery Department suite, two doors down from his boss Chamberlain. Long halls lined with linoleum and pale green brick walls gave Building 205 a lingering feel of the 1950s. A handwritten sign taped to a coffee brewer requested that drinkers leave behind thirty cents a cup.

Two portraits decorated the walls in Thackeray’s office—an 1861 etching of the nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday and a sketch of the astronomer William Herschel, who in 1781 discovered Uranus. Thackeray received them as gifts in his youth in South Africa. His mind returned often to his native land, which seemed to speak the most for his soul. Few knew it, he would say, but for a short time almost four decades before, South Africa was one of the great centers of battery thinking.

In Pretoria in the late 1970s, Thackeray, in shaggy, blondish hair and long sideburns, did his Ph.D. under a crystallographer named Johan Coetzer. One day, Coetzer walked into the lab and announced a new project. They were going to “do some stuff in the energy field.” The Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors had triggered an energy crisis and the Western world was seeking a way around Middle East oil. Coetzer thought one answer was the advancement of batteries and he told Thackeray that that was where they would focus their work. The effort was challenged from the beginning because of South Africa’s system of apartheid, to which the world had responded with economic sanctions. No one outside the country would collaborate with them. To avert international trouble, they had to cloak their work in secrecy and communicate using code words. The smokescreen did not seem to matter much since neither Coetzer nor Thackeray knew anything about energy storage. But their fresh eyes turned out to be advantageous. Approaching the field laterally, “uncontaminated by how other scientists were looking at the world,” as Thackeray put it, they found insights into high-temperature batteries, the breakthrough reported by Ford and Stanford. The early result was the Zebra, South Africa’s own molten battery. Corporate funding quickly followed, a respectable achievement when you recalled their modest start.

Considering the Zebra, Thackeray thought there still must be a way to do better and at the same time move ahead of John Goodenough’s blockbuster advance in 1980. The Zebra and other molten batteries, operating at 300 degrees Celsius, were unsafe, inside a car anyway. As for Goodenough’s room-temperature formulation of lithium-cobalt-oxide, it was an improvement but still expensive if you thought of using it in electronic devices.

In physics, there is a structure called
spinel
. These structures have considerable advantages. They are abundant and therefore cheap. They have an appealing three-dimensional structure resembling a crystal. And spinels are inherently stout—sturdier, for instance, than the layered structure of Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide electrode. Goodenough had been instructing his lab assistants to put half
the lithium in motion between the cathode and the anode; but Thackeray wondered whether
all
the lithium could be pulled in and out of a spinel cathode. If he could do so without the cathode’s collapsing, spinel would be less expensive and potentially much more powerful than the lithium-cobalt-oxide.

The particular spinel that interested Thackeray was iron oxide. Ordinarily, we know iron oxide as rust—it is what happens when you leave your bicycle out in the rain. But for battery scientists, iron oxide is also a spinel, lending it special characteristics. In South Africa, Thackeray had already successfully shuttled lithium in and out of iron oxide working at the same high temperatures as the Ford researchers. He had a hunch that iron oxide might also cooperate at room temperature, which would make it much more practical.

South Africa was disconnected geographically as well as politically. It was almost as far as you could be from the intellectual hubs of the United States and Europe. That being the case, it was almost expected that any self-respecting young South African scientist would spend a year or so abroad. Thackeray decided that he wanted to use his own sabbatical to test his ideas with spinel. And to do so with the leading figure of the day—Goodenough.

Thackeray wrote to Oxford. Goodenough responded immediately: he lacked money to support the younger man, but if that didn’t bother Thackeray, he would be pleased to play host. Thackeray, owed his lab-funded obligatory time abroad, required no outside funding. So, at thirty-one, he along with his wife and daughter packed for a fifteen-month postdoctoral assistantship in England.

 • • • 

Thackeray wandered the Oxford campus. As he looked around, he recalled his father’s stories of undergraduate study. Generations of Thackerays had attended Cambridge—his father, Andrew David Thackeray, who rose to be a leading astronomer; his grandfather, Henry St. John Thackeray, a biblical scholar who went on to teach at the university; and of course the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, a fifth cousin once removed. Both Thackeray and his brother had elected to remain in South Africa for university, and he sensed himself unequal to England’s great academic institutions. The intimidation was not just Oxford, but Goodenough himself. Thackeray found the older man’s intelligence almost overpowering. He had never heard anything quite like the professor’s resonant hoot, an unusual chortle that Goodenough often let fly. By comparison, Thackeray regarded himself as an ordinary “bush chemist from Africa.”

He felt out of place for yet another reason—because of his country’s medieval political system, he was certain that those he encountered, while saying nothing, must be harboring repulsive thoughts about him and his family. But Goodenough himself plainly did not hold Thackeray or his family personally responsible for the sins of their country. Thackeray would have his own, very different proving ground: the lab.

 • • • 

Thackeray had brought samples of magnetized iron oxide spinel with him from Pretoria. He planned to intercalate lithium in and out of them at room temperature and thus demonstrate that iron oxide spinel could be a powerful new battery material, one commercially superior to the cobalt formulation.

Goodenough dismissed Thackeray’s hypothesis. It violated physics—spinels resemble semiprecious gemstones and, structurally speaking, you could not move lithium in and out of a gemstone, the older man reminded Thackeray. Its physical structure, unlike cobalt oxide, would block any such attack.

Thackeray recalled how, despite Goodenough’s skepticism, he had already managed the deed at high temperatures back in South Africa. This was an issue of merely lowering the temperature.

“Well, you are welcome to try,” Goodenough said. “But you’ll want to look around the lab for other stuff to do.” Then he left for holiday in India.

Two weeks later, Goodenough returned. “I intercalated the lithium,” Thackeray said.

“What?”

The older man took Thackeray into his office and listened as he explained how, using a magnetic stirrer, an automated device for mixing chemicals, he had combined lithium with iron oxide at room temperature. Thackeray observed an immediate encouraging sign—the iron oxide fell away from the stirrer, showing that it had lost its magnetic qualities. That suggested that the spinel had ingested the lithium. Yet this was still not conclusive evidence of intercalation. There had to be more if Thackeray was to state definitively that this was the case. He smeared the concoction onto a glass slide. Now he shot X-rays through it. When you take such pictures you get a spectrum of peaks rather than an image. The trick is to infer the precise structure of the compound from the pattern of the peaks. This skill, the knowledge of X-ray diffraction, is known as crystallography.

Thackeray had shot two X-rays—one prior to the experiment and one after. Comparing them, he noticed “striking differences” in both the position of the peaks and their relative intensity. Something had happened. If Goodenough was right, and the lithium found no entry into the iron oxide structure, the X-ray patterns would be identical. But the peaks had noticeably changed—the lithium
had
intercalated into the iron oxide. Iron oxide spinel could be fashioned into a lithium-ion electrode.

In fact, as Goodenough had postulated, there
wasn’t
space for the lithium in the spinel. What Thackeray had shown was that the spinel had an unexpected quality of hospitality—when you moved lithium in, the iron ions shifted around to accommodate it. They made extra space. The spinel experienced a “phase change,” absorbing the iron and transforming into a slightly different material resembling rock salt. Like Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide breakthrough a year earlier, Thackeray had conceived of a way to significantly improve on the energy density of zinc carbon batteries. Goodenough was surprised and enthusiastic—Thackeray’s idea proved a new principle and, from the standpoint of cost, was potentially better than his own brainchild.

Yet he had not created a practical battery material—a workable cathode—which was the objective. There was a problem, Goodenough said. Examining the data, he detected a blockage in the spinel. The iron oxide wasn’t providing a clear path for sufficient lithium to enter and find a home in the structure before being shuttled out in the charge-recharge cycle. A less-cluttered channel was needed if the material was to be truly useful and not a mere novelty.

Perhaps the problem was the
type
of spinel they were using. A different sort—possibly manganese oxide, which he called by its scientific notation, LiMn
2
O
4
—could lift the logjam and allow the lithium into the right places. Goodenough had intimate knowledge of manganese oxide from his MIT days because his team had used it in their computer memory experiments. He suggested that they swap oxides. Manganese spinel, LiMn
2
O
4
, could prove the path to a cheaper cathode.

In the subsequent days, Thackeray, working in the lab library, prepared the manganese spinel experiment. As he did, Bill David, another new researcher under Goodenough, introduced himself.

In a way, David and Thackeray were equals. They were both postdoctoral assistants and had started work around the same day. But David felt like a “young lad” around the South African, who was six years older. Part of that was Thackeray’s deceptively unassuming attitude: he told almost no one why he was specifically at Oxford or his accomplishments thus far. Once, David queried him over lunch about a possible jog together. The conversation seemed to go nowhere. Thackeray barely acknowledged any personal interest in running; he said nothing of the Comrades, nor of his status as one of his country’s fastest amateurs. For David, once he came to know Thackeray, this reserve lent him powerful mystery.

 • • • 

From a pure physics standpoint, David was under no spell. Like Goodenough, he felt that Thackeray’s work was fundamentally counterintuitive—it broke all the rules. He could not dispute the X-ray crystallography—Thackeray was right despite the physics. But there was the blockage cited by Goodenough. Until the obstruction was removed, the experiment could not be called a masterstroke. David thought he could help. He understood atomic-scale crystallography better than Thackeray. David scrutinized the X-ray diffraction of the LiMn
2
O
4
. The intercalation worked perfectly this time, with an open pathway for the lithium. And the spinel had not been torn apart by the foreign material.

Thackeray
was
right.

He was deliriously content. One day, Goodenough was strolling the halls with Thackeray and said, “You know that this could have commercial value, Mike.” Though neither man could put a finger on how the invention might be used, Thackeray repeated the remark in a subsequent call to his South African supervisors, who rushed to London. They drew up a patent application—as the inventors, Thackeray’s name was listed first, followed by Goodenough as supervising investigator. The owner of the patent would be the South African Inventions Development Corporation, the intellectual property (IP) arm of the government lab in Pretoria where Thackeray was on staff.

Later, there would be dueling personal accounts about who was more responsible for the spinel breakthrough—Thackeray or Goodenough. The older man would claim credit, suggesting that Thackeray merely followed his instructions. Thackeray would retort that he himself had arrived in Oxford with the spinel samples; he had the big idea. But the warm memories made them respectful friends and, ever the diplomat, Goodenough finally summed it up best: “I don’t think he would have done it by himself, and I wouldn’t have done it without him.”

David said that successful science “is about people and it is about ideas.” It is about aspiration. Scientists in places like Oxford had such surpassing ambition to reach the top of their field that success seemed the natural result. That was the fun and visceral excitement of Goodenough’s lab. Oxford was on the extreme leading edge of a new field.

But there had to be collaboration. “No one man sits there and spits it out,” Goodenough said. “It’s through interaction, through our openness to others, where we get an idea.”

But such collaboration had to be cautious, as Goodenough would discover.

A
fter oil prices slid back down from their spike in the energy crises of the 1970s, the urgency went out of battery research. Exxon abandoned electric storage and licensed out Stan Whittingham’s lithium battery. Ronald Reagan canceled government-funded energy projects of the prior decade, as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

Japan was different. Though Exxon had distributed Whittingham’s lithium batteries in watches in 1977, researchers struggled to build them bigger. Whittingham’s work kept igniting, a result of the presence of pure lithium metal as the anode. But, working on the problem for a decade, a Japanese researcher named Akira Yoshino managed to combine Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode with a carbon anode. In 1991, Sony, pivoting off Yoshino’s brainchild, released a lithium-ion battery for small electronic devices. Later versions of the Sony battery would contain a better anode made of benign graphite, whose absorptive layers were a perfect temporary burrowing place for lithium ions. But the advance as a whole—the combination of Goodenough’s cathode and a carbon or graphite anode—created an overnight blockbuster consumer product. It enabled several multibillion-dollar-a-year industries of small recording devices and other electronics. It triggered copycat batteries and a frenzy in labs around the world to find even better lithium-ion configurations that would pack more energy in a smaller and smaller space.

Despite his central role in the first lithium-ion battery, Goodenough earned no royalties. Unlike Thackeray’s South Africa lab, which itself might profit should his invention of spinel prove commercially valuable, Oxford had declined to patent Goodenough’s cathode at all—the university seemed to see no advantage in owning IP. In the end, Goodenough signed away the royalty rights to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, a U.K. government lab just south of Oxford in Harwell, reasoning that at least his invention might reach the market. He never fathomed the scale of the market to come. No one did.

It was not the only time that American battery inventors lost ground in the race to commercialize. Until the middle 1980s, Union Carbide controlled a full third of the global battery market through its Eveready and Energizer brands. But in 1984, thousands of people in India were killed and injured in a gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal. In the aftermath, the company sold leading divisions for cash. Its battery unit went to Ralston Purina, which itself ceded lithium-ion to Japan under the rationale that the profit margin per unit was too thin. The nickel-metal-hydride battery that powered Toyota’s market-leading Prius was also American born, created by a prolific Detroit inventor named Stan Ovshinsky. After the Prius’s 1997 launch as the world’s first major hybrid, licensing fees for the battery went to a Chevron subsidiary that acquired Ovshinsky’s patents. But Chevron relinquished much of the profit to Panasonic, Toyota, and other Japanese companies that made the final products.

American companies lacked their Japanese competitors’ vision, courage, patience, or perhaps all three. Students of economic history ridicule the Japanese juggernaut of the 1980s. They say Japan was a flash in the pan and contemporary panic over its rise a reflection of Western insecurity, not a new, Japanese-led future. But this version of events is not quite right. The Japanese embraced the model of an American celebrated but not emulated at home—Thomas Edison, the consummate tinkerer, who, absent a governing theory to create a new invention, systematically attempted as many ideas as necessary to reach a solution. South Korea and China then also borrowed Edison’s method and captured their own large chunks of the global electronics market. As a group, the three countries added energy storage to the arc of America’s four-decade-long industrial decline—and a subtext to its anxiety about getting the new battery-and-electric-car race right and dominating the sprawling industries to come.

 • • • 

Charlatans and hucksters abound in eras of invention, since no one can truly know what will become the next bonanza, and batteries have been unusually marked by exaggeration and outright fraud: because people intuitively understand the importance of a much better battery and think that therefore the world should have one, they are vulnerable to deception. In 1883, Edison, misled too many times in the midst of creating his electronic empire, sized up rechargeable batteries as a mere fable. He wrote:

The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. . . . Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery it brings out his latent capacity for lying.
1

Goodenough tells the story of a Japanese materials scientist by the name of Shigeto Okada. Okada arrived in 1993 at the University of Texas, where Goodenough had moved the previous year from Oxford. He came from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the Japanese phone giant, which requested permission to embed him on Goodenough’s team at company expense. After the usual stipulations regarding confidentiality, Goodenough agreed. He put Okada to work next to an Indian postdoc named Akshaya Padhi.

In hosting such researchers, Goodenough was part of the peculiar world of materials scientists, who at their best combine the intuition of physics with the meticulousness of chemistry and pragmatism of engineering. It is their role to dream up a new order from the existing parts in front of them.

Padhi and Okada began to tinker with spinel formulations, searching for one with more energy than Thackeray’s manganese spinel and better safety than Goodenough’s own lithium-cobalt-oxide. They started by methodically swapping in metals to see if any achieved their teacher’s objective. They tried cobalt, manganese, and vanadium, but none was quite right. Finally, they winnowed down the list to a final option—a combination of iron and phosphorus.

Goodenough was skeptical. “Padhi,” he said, “you won’t get the spinel structure.”

Then the old man left for summer vacation.

As had happened with Thackeray at Oxford years before, Goodenough arrived back to news. Padhi said the professor was right—he did not achieve the spinel structure. Instead, he had produced a synthetic version of a different, naturally occurring crystal structure called olivine. And he had managed to intercalate lithium in and out of it. On inspection, Goodenough saw that the result was sensational. Lithium combined with iron phosphate met all the metrics for which he had hoped.

Goodenough didn’t learn until much later that Okada—the Japanese researcher—had gone on to disclose Padhi’s discovery to his own employer, which had proceeded to secretly develop the formulation itself. In November 1995, NTT, using Padhi’s methodology, quietly filed for a patent and began to canvass Japanese electronics makers, gauging their interest in a new, lithium-iron-phosphate battery.

Goodenough caught wind of the subterfuge only the following year. He was incredulous. “Padhi, he was a spy, for goodness sakes,” he nearly shouted at his postdoc. “Wake up and start putting something in your notebook.” He meant that Padhi should commit his work to writing in his lab book; that record would prove crucial should there be an IP battle. And there very well could be.

“Sorry,” Padhi replied to Goodenough. “He is my friend.”

A race of priority was joined. The Japanese and the Americans rushed out competing papers and patent applications. On behalf of Goodenough’s lab, the University of Texas filed a $500 million lawsuit against Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.

The complications worsened. An MIT professor named Yet-Ming Chiang began to fiddle with Goodenough’s idea and filed for his own patents. Asserting that his improvements had created yet another new material, Chiang launched a Massachusetts company called A123. His stated aim was to sell a version of the lithium-iron-phosphate for use in power tools and eventually motor vehicles. This established another legal front for Goodenough as Chiang’s company sought to persuade a European tribunal to strike down the old man’s patents, which it eventually did in 2008.

The result was a free-for-all, one that reached an apex late in 2008 when Warren Buffett spent $230 million to buy 10 percent of BYD, a Chinese car company that announced a new lithium-iron-phosphate-powered electric car. No one spoke of the source of BYD’s batteries but, coming after Chiang’s actions, the impression in the industry was that the Goodenough lab’s invention might turn up anywhere.

In 2009, A123 sold shares in an initial public offering. Chiang’s charisma, the MIT name, and the general tenor of the times created an aura of sizzle, and the share price surged by 50 percent on the first day of trading. Chiang’s company raised $587 million, the biggest IPO of the year and a tremendous payday for him and all involved. Except, again, Goodenough.

In the end, the University of Texas settled with NTT. The payoff to the school was $30 million along with a share of any profit from its Japanese patents, recognition that Goodenough had been infringed. Goodenough received nothing from A123. He regarded the outcome as a travesty. The university-hired lawyer was a mere big talker, a naïf out of his depth against cunning shysters. As for the university, Goodenough said it lacked the courage to fight.