The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (6 page)

So it went with another competing patent application that surfaced at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, one that to Thackeray also seemed confused. “They just didn’t know what they had,” he said.

To Thackeray’s eye, the other applications resembled “what the Japanese will do,” which was “claim the world.” If you did so, without describing precisely what you meant, you could be ripped apart by patent challenges. The trick was to be clear and simple so that there was no mistake about what you were asserting. “They sort of meandered along a road, blind around every corner as to where they were going,” he said, an approach that left you “running into problems with priority.” Thackeray’s own exacting method had been passed down by British mining executives in South Africa, the fellows who expressed commercial interest in the Zebra battery and who would take him and other battery scientists for lunch in a bar “to brainstorm” how to protect it. Patents would be drafted with beer and wine flowing freely. Thackeray noticed that the South Africa patents tended to hold.

A few years later, when carmakers began to produce electrics, they were highly secretive about their batteries, including which formulation they used and the cost, regarding such knowledge as competitively vital. But General Motors openly announced that it had bought licenses for both of Thackeray’s major inventions—the NMC and manganese spinel—in a combined-formulation battery for the Volt, its first new electrified car, a plug-in hybrid that it launched in 2010. GM said the battery’s forty-mile distance was ideal for a first-iteration Volt. But GM’s interest was not confined there; Argonne had promised an advanced version of the NMC, one that could be combined with an improved anode and take the car much farther. GM was waiting for that advance, with which it hoped to launch new electrics.

 • • • 

The addition of Thackeray had injected much-needed competitive verve into Argonne’s Battery Lab. At once, it was on the leading edge of lithium-ion research. The lab’s next recruit would complete its special tandem—a pair of battery men who sat astride both the scientific and commercial worlds.

T
he Moroccan village of Benahmed is a quick half-hour drive down a smooth highway from Casablanca. But when Khalil Amine was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, the trip took twice as long, winding down narrow roads on a bus. Benahmed was a clean, bright town with a small French population that stayed on after the end of colonial rule a few years before. Amine’s father, an Arab intellectual who taught school, and his mother, a Berber, produced seven boys. Khalil was the second. Of his mother’s family, Amine said, “The Berbers are extremely good in business.”

Family lore went back to the first decade or so of the twentieth century, when Amine’s maternal grandfather, Benadir, was a twelve-year-old shepherd in the mountains around the port of Agadir. Pretty often, an elderly man would beat him. But one day, a provoked Benadir took a rock and smacked the old man across the head. The man fell and did not move. The terrified boy fled.

Benadir was hiding when a fruit cart attached to a tractor trundled by. He clambered aboard and quickly concealed himself. For the next two or three days, the cart progressed up the coast. Benadir feasted on the fruit and vegetables. But in Casablanca the fruit sellers discovered their stowaway and threw him into the street. Benadir began to walk and beg. Tired and dirty, he turned up at a home. A Frenchwoman inside, filled with pity, took Benadir in. She cleaned him up and allowed him to stay on as a housekeeper.

Amine does not recall the woman’s name, but one day, went the story, her businessman husband asked Benadir to mind one of his shops. This was a tremendous responsibility, as Benadir saw it, and he dutifully opened at five
A.M
. and closed at midnight. He slept and ate at the shop. After a while, the Frenchman observed that the shop’s earnings had soared. He assigned the boy more shops and began to treat him like a son.

In 1956, Morocco won independence from France and Spain. Benadir’s French family was among a mass of panicky foreigners who repatriated. On his way out, the Frenchman offered his enterprise to Benadir. So it was that Amine’s grandfather became a considerable local titan.

The stories may have rubbed off in Amine’s own commercial instincts—“a gene from my mother’s side, I think,” he said. “But unfortunately, the twist is that Benadir has a son who never went to school. He never worked. He destroyed that fortune. My uncle, yeah. If I were him, I would be owning half of Morocco.” Amine was laughing but he wasn’t joking.

Amine said, that, as a boy, he was serious and emotional—he would cry if a classmate outscored him on a school test. At a French boarding school outside Casablanca, where he was sent since his own village had no high school, Amine and some friends read late into the night and early in the morning in the bathroom, the one place that the masters left lit. Mostly, his high school friends played soccer, smoked, and played cards. Amine sat with them, reading. In the case of a disputed game, Amine would arbitrate. “I could see who was the winner and say, ‘Okay, here is the money.’” He was their trusted person.

As a college senior, Amine topped Morocco’s national science exam. That qualified him for a fellowship at France’s University of Bordeaux. There, he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry and accepted an offer to become a postdoctoral assistant at Kyoto University in Japan.

 • • • 

In Kyoto, Amine moved into a university dorm that to him seemed like a stylish hotel. When he wasn’t in the lab, Amine watched TV in the dorm lounge, and that was where he was when an extremely attractive young woman sauntered in and took a seat. “She was like a movie star,” Amine said. “Wow. Blow me out.” He started to chat. “Where are you from?”

Her name was Xiaoping Xu. She was Chinese and had been in Japan for three months. Just now, she was preparing for a medical school exam that included technical Japanese. “I don’t have books,” she said, “so I’m worried.”

Amine said he had books and dropped them off with her. Then Xiaoping vanished.

About six months later, he received a note. Xiaoping had finished first in her class and won a prestigious pharmaceutical fellowship. She wanted to return Amine’s books.

Amine was not thinking books but serious romance—he genuinely liked Xiaoping. He thought she must be interested, too, but a Chinese friend told him that, if she was as conservative as Amine described, he had to slow down. He could not be pushy.

He invited Xiaoping on a series of expensive dates—to dinners, to temples. He bought her gifts. On Amine’s mind all the while was a two-decade-old memory from Morocco. He was six and along with his brother was watching an action movie starring two beautiful actresses: a Chinese and an Indian. “I’m gonna marry either that Indian girl or that Chinese,” Amine had said. Now a grown man, Amine wanted to realize that early childhood fantasy. He was intent on marrying Xiaoping.

After six months of courtship, Xiaoping allowed him a kiss.

 • • • 

In the lab, too, Amine felt a long-won sense of success. He was a researcher who did not necessarily find original pathways to store more atoms in smaller spaces, but he read voraciously, paid rapt attention at conferences, and could rapidly grasp both the potential and the flaws in ideas advanced by others. He would e-mail friends with questions and thoughts and from there identify creative solutions before anyone else. “If there is a problem, we fix it,” Amine would say. “If there is another problem, we fix that one, too.” He had moved on to become a research and development manager for the Japan Storage Battery Company, a privileged position for a young foreigner in the East Asian country. Japan was booming and the money flowed in high salaries and astronomical extras: double overtime, which would mean triple salary; an extra six months of salary each year—three months for the winter, three for the summer—and additional bonuses for key players who made important breakthroughs. Employees were not paid royalties because the company retained rights to all inventions. But Amine was awarded an added bonus equivalent to double his annual salary for his invention of a five-volt battery system using nickel and magnesium. He received another two-year bonus for a cobalt-oxide system that the company licensed to Sony and Samsung, a link back to John Goodenough’s blockbuster original.

Amine and Xiaoping decided to wed. Amine’s parents immediately embraced the idea. As for Xiaoping’s family, Amine had to impress her mother. In Chinese tradition, “if the mom says it’s okay, everything’s smooth,” Amine said. “If the mom says no, you are in trouble.” At first, the signs were not good. Xiaoping’s mother thought that Amine, given his professional success, must be advanced in years. “Why do you want to be with this guy? He’s old,” she told her daughter. Amine said, “She thought I was like fifty years old.” But just three years separated him from Xiaoping.

They traveled to China. Before going, Amine checked in with his Chinese friend. It went without saying that Amine would present a gift to the mother, but it had to be valuable, the friend said. “You bring her a flower, and they’ll joke about you. They’ll say, ‘Yeah, this is a dud.’”

Amine arrived with a gold pendant-and-bracelet set, several French scarves, and a pair of fashionable shoes.

“Hello,” he greeted Xiaoping’s mother, smiling with gifts in hand. She smiled back in a way that told him there would be no problem.

In 1997, Xiaoping was accepted to medical school at the University of Illinois, a necessary step if she wanted to practice in the United States. She encouraged Amine to follow her and he found a job leading a battery research group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It wasn’t far—he would drive the four hours to Chicago and see Xiaoping as often as he could.

 • • • 

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.

D
on 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 Li
2
MnO
3
. 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 Li
2
MnO
3
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.