The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (11 page)

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.

J
ust 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 Photon 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.

Japanese universities were mindful of the scarcity of exceptional ideas. When corporations came calling, the universities tended to be harder bargainers than their American counterparts.

Argonne employed some three thousand scientists but Amine was appalled at its relatively small intellectual property unit. The lab seemed content to file away strong inventions without seeking publicity. There was no explaining it apart from either a diffidence toward the business of science or plain languor. Whichever, Argonne’s IP team was passive when it came to licensing the lab’s inventions. So Amine set out to create his own little Japan. Amine organized his staff along the lines of the Kyoto invention machine where he learned his craft. He whipped his researchers into a cadre that at his direction worked systematically through every possible approach to the solution of a chemical puzzle—hundreds if necessary. The enviable record of papers, patents, and industry interest followed.

Of one of his Chinese researchers, Amine said, “When you give him an experiment, he does it fast. He’ll give you the result in two days. With some people it’s like pulling teeth.”

Amine’s critics pilloried his record of picking up a promising idea produced elsewhere, blending it with his own flashes of intuition and the work of his efficient staff, and emerging with a patent application or a new paper. They insinuated that it was theft. But in Japan—or any of the big Asian manufacturing economies—his methods would be recognized as fair and even sensible. Japan, China, and South Korea continued to retain their economic edge with a willingness to build on others’ ideas and spend money for years and years with the confidence that a profitable industry would eventually result. Amine was merely following the Japanese way.

As critical as they were of him, Amine was savage toward the usual practices in American industry and labs. Western scientists championed the visionary moment but that led to “the moon or nothing. So they have nothing,” he said. He was prepared to go step by step. And he winnowed down his group to those who would work the way he saw fit. That meant only two nationalities—Chinese and Moroccans.

On its face, Amine’s hiring sounded racist. His management style was dictatorial. But Amine was neither unethical nor a bigot. Rather, he was opportunistic in noticing others’ advances, uncanny in identifying and resolving a flaw, and ruthless in cutting through to a product bearing his name. That made him no different from countless other successful Americans.

Jun Lu, a researcher on futuristic lithium-air batteries, defended Amine’s Japanese notions. Jun and his wife, Temping Yu, who also worked at Argonne, had no relatives in the Chicago area. “So we have more time to focus on research. You work harder” on Amine’s team, he said, but that was only part of the picture. “If you want to be successful, you still have to have the ideas. You have to have common sense.”

But there were also pockets of anger in Amine’s group. This was not Japan. Some members of his group did not appreciate serving as cogs in Amine’s machine rather than innovators and thinkers in their own right. Amine held out the coin of the realm—an American visa and the later hope of citizenship. Their names appeared on the papers to which their grunt work contributed. But some of Amine’s best staff bristled at his regimentation, seeing the arrangement as indentured servitude. Two of Amine’s most talented scientists—both of them principal researchers on the NMC—returned to South Korea after painful experiences under him. Amine regarded himself as a keen judge of talent—he thought he knew who was who and how to incentivize them. But his high-throughput approach didn’t always work out.

 • • • 

There was a divide between the Chinese and the rest of the battery department. The Americans were suspicious of the Chinese and also themselves insular. The old days of Argonne scientists hanging out at one another’s homes were long past—in 2011, five years after he joined the lab, Chamberlain had yet to throw a party. Almost none of the battery guys had ever been to his house. An administrative staff member’s ears perked up when her boss mentioned dinner plans with a colleague—it was the first time she had ever heard of lab executives socializing together. She could only speculate why so little entertaining went on. It wasn’t that the scientists were unfriendly. But there seemed to be an unspoken midwestern distance. Andy Jansen and Kevin Gallagher, both battery guys, threw backyard barbecues for department colleagues, but Asians were rarely present. Once, when Gallagher, a young engineer, brought along a South Korean scientist named Sun-Ho Kang to a gathering, Janssen asked why he had not joined them before.

“I was never invited,” Kang said.

As a young man living in Seoul, Kang had wanted to see the world. His father, a construction subcontractor who supported the family by renting out the couple of forklifts that he owned, had never left South Korea. Neither had his sister, Kang Eun Kyung, though she was a well-known composer of pop lyrics. A professor recommended that Kang contact a physicist he knew—John Goodenough, then a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Another of his students had been a postdoctoral assistant under the battery pioneer, but he was moving on, so there might be an open slot in Goodenough’s lab.

Goodenough responded quickly when Kang e-mailed—the position was his as soon as he wished to show up. “Somehow he had the impression that South Korean students—that anyone from my university—should be good,” Kang said.

When Kang arrived with his wife and daughter, they found Austin expensive—his salary was two thousand dollars a month, leaving little after eight hundred dollars in rent. But working with Goodenough was itself compensation. Kang found his new mentor to be “just a genius.”

“What do you want to do?” Goodenough asked when they met. Kang had never researched lithium-ion, so Goodenough gave him an assignment: a visiting scientist was submitting a paper to
Nature
, but Goodenough was suspicious of his lab results.

“Try to reproduce them,” he said.

When Kang reported his findings, Goodenough concluded that the claims were in fact faked. The visiting scientist was attempting to snooker
Nature
. Such work could not come out of Goodenough’s lab.

“And that was the start of my luck,” Kang said. Over the next year and a half, he and Goodenough worked on cathodes and super-capacitors, energy storage devices that deliver a burst of power for a short period. “Having my name next to his on a paper was an honor for me,” Kang said.

One day, Kang noticed a circular on Goodenough’s desk—the announcement of a job opening at Argonne. For the first time, Kang confided his financial circumstances.

“I don’t have funding to raise your salary,” the professor said.

“I understand, so I’d like to apply for that position,” Kang said. Goodenough handed him the announcement.

Don Vissers, the same manager who had recruited Thackeray and Amine, responded warmly. Kang moved to Chicago with a position on Khalil Amine’s team at double his Austin pay.

It was not long before Kang felt like “a workhorse.” He was carrying out repetitive tasks in which Amine was attempting again and again to advance yet another theory that would produce yet another paper or patent “that doesn’t change anything.” The Moroccan traveled frequently but provided his subordinates no oppor- tunity to attend the same international conferences, mix with peers, or make a name for
themselves
. None of his staffers won promotion for their work. Kang imagined that, should he carry on, he would retire as he was—a research scientist. Kang shrank into himself—he “tried to be a nobody.” “Maybe that sounds weird. But that was my attitude,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything from the group.”

The then-department head transferred Kang to another manager. His best work followed, including a crucial role in the development of NMC 2.0. Under Thackeray, Kang discovered inner truths about the material that no one else recognized. He at last found close friends on the staff, in particular Gallagher, the young engineer. But it was too late. Kang wanted to “contribute to everyday life,” to work in applied science. Argonne seemed too far removed.

About this time, he attended a Chicago dinner hosted by Park Sang-Jin, the CEO of Samsung SDI, the battery division of the South Korean conglomerate. One dinner topic was innovation. Kang said that, at Argonne, he did not try “to do everything alone. I know it is much faster and more effective when I find someone and try to collaborate.” Park said the same—“nobody can do it all.”

The meeting was important for Park. Samsung had eclipsed Japanese companies and become the world’s largest maker of lithium-ion batteries for electronics. At that moment, the company was aiming to expand and develop advanced automobile batteries as well, challenging former juggernaut Japan along the entire commercial chain, from energy storage to consumer products. As the incumbent, Japan was still ahead in the battery race—its laboratories were superior, it had a decade-and-a-half head start on the factory floor, and its brand names were still prized. But Samsung was capturing a greater share of the total market. In the case of vehicular batteries, the trouble was that Samsung lacked expertise with the very different cathodes required for the ten-year life demanded of them. With his collaborative part in the work on NMC 2.0, Kang seemed ideal to lead this research. Park asked Kang to join the company. His title would be vice president. That suited Kang, because “I didn’t want to go somewhere and be some very minor person.”