The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (15 page)

Chu advised that those interested stay tuned as to when the competitions would take place.

 • • • 

John Newman, an electrochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, phoned Thackeray. Newman was an icon who had written the standard university textbook on electrochemical systems.

“Why don’t you lead the Battery Hub and we’ll do it with you?” Newman said.

The competition had not yet been announced, but Newman was suggesting an interesting head start. He wanted Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, traditionally bitter rivals in the battery space, to submit a joint bid. The approach was surprising given the jealousy between their two institutions. Argonne and Berkeley
never
worked together. They harbored a deep well of mutual suspicion. The stakes, however, were enormous—whoever landed the hub would be the undisputed center of American battery research. Therefore, if they joined hands, agreed to divide the research funds, and did not quarrel, Berkeley and Argonne might stand an improved chance of winning the competition.

In June 2009, Newman traveled as part of a Berkeley group to Argonne. Crowded into a small conference room, they began to brainstorm what a Battery Hub would look like. So much was already going on in the field—depending on the year, the Department of Energy alone was spending $50 million to $90 million on battery research. What could a hub add? Someone suggested starting over—that they wipe the whiteboard clean and simply construct a chart of a first-rate, industry-leading battery research program. They could then shade in areas where there was already sufficient work. What remained would be the proposed Argonne-Berkeley Battery Hub.

The result was a blockbuster, over-the-top plan for a $100-million-a-year, multiyear partnership of companies and scientific institutions. On paper, it was four times the size of Chu’s hubs. Both teams loved it. When Chamberlain described it quietly to a few industry friends, they seemed equally enthusiastic, making clear they were prepared in principle to share the cost fifty-fifty with the Department of Energy. Chamberlain thought he understood the companies’ eagerness. It wasn’t that it looked like Sematech, although the resemblance to Chamberlain’s obsession was more than passing. It was because “it was like Bell,” he said. Genuinely like Bell, and not the lablets that Chu was proposing. The Argonne-Berkeley team called it the National Center for Energy Storage Research, which they pronounced “En-Caesar.”

 • • • 

Congress had to directly approve such spending, and it treated Chu’s proposal with skepticism. Its 2010 budget funded just three of the eight innovation hubs. Worse, it guaranteed the money for only a year rather than five and allocated $22 million for each hub instead of the proposed $25 million.

The Battery Hub did not make the cut.

It was a letdown. From Washington, Chamberlain’s supervisors assured him that the Battery Hub would be approved the next time. But there was no foundation for confidence. The politics might continue to flummox Chu.

The Argonne-Berkeley group kept talking. Mostly it continued to lay the groundwork for En-Caesar. But it also strategized for the smaller Hub. In connection with the latter, Chamberlain and Newman traveled to Washington to pitch their intended collaboration.

Newman told Chamberlain to prepare for a flabbergasted reception. There simply would be disbelief in the Department of Energy. Chamberlain thought Newman was exaggerating, but sure enough, sitting there before David Howell, the head of the Department of Energy’s battery research effort, he saw that the Berkeley man was right.

“You guys are here together,” Howell said.

“Yeah,” both Chamberlain and Newman responded.

“You even got John here,” he said to Chamberlain.

“Um-humh.”

“So you guys must be serious about collaborating.”

Howell seemed unable immediately to move beyond their history. The two men went back to their respective labs. But a month later, Howell rang Chamberlain. One of the slides he and Newman presented had described an industrially popular method for saving costs while driving up inventiveness: you crosshatched your talent pools on a matrix so that, say, a single materials sciences unit could service three separate battery teams. All the big companies used this system, Chamberlain had said, interlacing basic and applied science groups. Howell told Chamberlain that senior Department of Energy management liked the idea so much that, picking one quadrant on the matrix, they wanted them to try it out.

“For a million bucks,” Howell said.

The quadrant attacked the problem of ultraenergetic lithium metal: that, when you equipped a battery with pure lithium metal, it could burst into flames on contact with air. It was what killed Exxon’s original battery in the 1970s. But extracting lithium metal’s innate energy efficiently, safely, and durably was an enduring goal, so Howell wanted Chamberlain and Newman to take it on. If they could overcome its volatility, they could enable the next generation of powerful batteries.

Howell’s offer amounted to an explicit dare. If they wanted their $25 million, they had to first solve one of the hardest problems in battery science.

“You say you want to work together?” Howell asked. “So show us.”

They took up the challenge. Chamberlain put one of his best thinkers on the task—Jack Vaughey, a chemist whose other advantage was an unprepossessing manner that allowed him to work well in teams.

Even led by Vaughey, lithium metal bogged down in five months of talks on the legal details of a joint program. Chamberlain and Newman could see they had been outwitted. Who were they kidding: $25 million to sit in traditionally antagonistic labs 1,900 miles apart and, what,
lead the way to a new battery age
? When, even with the impossibly unthreatening Vaughey in charge, they could barely launch a single hard investigation?

But if Howell’s test was somehow fruitful—if they
could
smooth through their ego-driven testiness, if they could demonstrate progress with lithium metal, perhaps they would prove him wrong and gain an edge in the expected Hub competition.

A few months later, Chu’s science adviser, Bill Brinkman, stopped by Argonne. The Bell veteran put aside a couple of hours to speak with Chamberlain, Thackeray, and Amine.

Brinkman stared as Chamberlain threw slides up on the wall describing En-Caesar. Then he broke in and pointed.

“That’s the only way we will be able to catch up to Asia,” Brinkman said. “That is the only way we’ll do it.”

For months, there was continued silence from Washington. Politics had shifted. Congress, already impatient with Chu’s big ideas, defeated climate change legislation, which had seemed a shoo-in after Obama’s election. Chamberlain’s group grew gloomier.

Argonne director Isaacs called Chamberlain around Christmas. Screw ’em, he said. “Let’s not wait for Congress and the Hub. Let’s pull together En-Caesar.”

Isaacs was giving the green light for the massively more expensive and ambitious project. Chamberlain should proceed and formalize industry funding commitments. Argonne and Berkeley would build this Bell-like facility without Washington’s help, he said. The way Chamberlain heard the gist was, “We are going to collaborate, and we are going to race with the Asians and we are going to win this race.”

Since the 1990s, Japan, China, and South Korea had built themselves up as virtually the sole makers of powerful batteries. Brinkman said that, in order to break their hold, the United States needed the factories awarded funding by the stimulus. The United States had to manufacture the advanced products that would flow from the inventions at Argonne and other labs. One capability fed off the other—when you could invent, you could manufacture, and when you could manufacture, you could invent. They were symbiotic, and to have just one of the two would gradually erode your abilities in the other. But even as the United States built its manufacturing capability, other trends had Brinkman worried. China was developing “a super-cadre of people,” he said, training them at Tsinghua and other great universities. Foreign students still tended to make up half the enrollment in American graduate programs, and 60 or 70 percent of them stayed and made their careers in the United States. But as China evolved, wouldn’t at least some of its graduate students simply stay home—wouldn’t the trend of retention so far at Argonne suddenly go in reverse? If you could attend a first-rate university in the middle of Beijing—if you were the best student in the class and were treated as such—“where would
you
go?” he asked. Brinkman believed that the United States would begin to lose such students to China. They would stay home and present a new challenge in the battery race. That was why En-Caesar was probably the only way to win.

E
ric Isaacs had ordered Chamberlain to proceed with En-Caesar, but both men still hoped and expected that Congress would approve a Battery Hub. Presuming they were right, their idea was to first win the Hub and later make it the cornerstone of En-Caesar.

If there was going to be a Battery Hub, Isaacs badly wanted to win. A victory would confirm Argonne’s battery preeminence. But the game was high stakes because a loss would be no small matter—it could devastate the Battery Department’s methodically constructed reputation, and that of the lab itself.

The latter prospect preoccupied Isaacs and his lieutenants much more than the former. Argonne seemed cursed when it came to large projects, the defining legacies of great national labs and universities. Since 2008, Argonne had entered and lost competitions to host three major federal research facilities, including two of Chu’s early innovation hubs. Considering Argonne’s origins in the birth of the Atomic Age, the toughest blow was losing a nuclear modeling hub to Oak Ridge National Lab. “When we didn’t win, you could have knocked anyone over with a feather because we were so sure,” said an Argonne staffer. “There was questioning whether we would even continue to do nuclear research.”

The stakes with the Battery Hub were even higher. If Argonne, with its long history in batteries and the presence of Thackeray and Amine, could not win the Battery Hub, it would be an unfathomable blow. No one wanted to speak of the consequences that would follow. The researchers whispered that the senior lab leadership—Isaacs and his deputies—would probably all be fired. Chamberlain would not lose his job but his aura would be darkened and his rise at Argonne stunted. As for the Battery Department, the researchers spoke starkly of an ineradicable stigma. The lab would seem unchanged at first. But slowly it would wither away. Existing grants would go unrenewed. Big, new grants would not come.

In February 2012, an announcement appeared on the Department of Energy Web site: within ninety days, anyone interested in hosting a new innovation hub for energy storage—a Battery Hub—should submit a proposal.

Isaacs had another order for his subordinates: “Win the damn Hub.”

 • • • 

Amine—the lab’s wheeling-and-dealing, big-thinking risk taker—didn’t think Argonne would
lose. He thought it would win the Hub and then rapidly pivot to En-Caesar. En-Caesar, which did not entail competition but savvy and nerve, meant much more money and an elevated opportunity to decipher the battery. He calculated that if ten teams of scientists backed by a lot of money worked on the electrochemical and physics challenges in a consolidated manner, the big leap “will go fast.”

This combination of grand, practical thinking was the glue between Amine and Chamberlain. Both had worked in industry, Amine in Japan, Chamberlain at American chemical companies. Both knew “that any innovation has to move,” as Amine put it. It could not be filed away because it would soon be forgotten. Amine was just then aiming inventions at two companies and was confident both would provide funding to help develop them further. This was Chamberlain’s proactive approach with En-Caesar, too—he did not wait but went out and obtained informal industry funding commitments.

That was how you survived. You needed a stream of funding, without which there was barely any use in even conceiving an idea. Government or industry investment—both had to be fought for. So you collaborated with someone rather than not working at all. You sought connections with funders constantly and you delivered on your promises in order to keep the flow going.

The two big projects—the Hub and En-Caesar—were not only about surviving. In the view of both Chamberlain and Amine, the powerful combination of the two could win the long game against the Asian giants.

Both men were also contemplating the personal payoffs to come. Chamberlain was already superlatively ambitious, but the Hub offered another dimension of opportunity. A battery guy in the Bay Area had remarked that if he managed to oversee the big leap in batteries, he would be made in Silicon Valley—everyone would know his name. That notion—that he might “stand out in Silicon Valley”—fixed Chamberlain’s attention. He had failed to do so when he was raising money for his start-ups, but his Bay Area friend might be correct that the Hub could finally attest that he had done it before.

S
cientists had been working for two centuries on the battery. It was a hard problem. If you did not believe success possible—if you would not sit down with your colleagues and work it out in the open—a super-battery would never happen. Chamberlain was certain that it was possible. But he had to transform the department into a team.

The push for collaboration went from him, to his Argonne bosses, up the chain to and including Steven Chu, with his dream of recreating Bell Labs, and, when you considered the nation’s priorities, all the way to Obama. But for a lot of the battery guys, it was still hard to foresee how the mantra of teamwork would gel as a practical matter. Successful collaboration simply didn’t add up to hard proof of inventive work done well.

The idea of a system that glorified teamwork grated on Thackeray. It was not a natural state in the pursuit of science. It was “being thrust down onto us by DOE,” an enormous management mistake that did not take account of “the odd people” who populate labs everywhere, those who “probably operate a little bit better in their own little orbit.” In Thackeray’s view, the team system was going to produce new varieties of the same, preselected battery chemistries while probably failing to mine “all the other stuff that’s lying on the outside.” To get at potentially breakthrough unconventional batteries, you needed “enough time to develop a new idea and see how it goes.”

In Thackeray’s experience, scientists tended to be individuals—individual thinkers—and highly competitive. They flourished only in the right environment, which meant recognition when they were successful. “If you give your idea and then somebody else just takes it and runs with it, what are you left with?” he said. Chamberlain had to convince Thackeray and other lab scientists that their intellectual property would be husbanded and not subsumed into the maw of general ideas—or be outright stolen. Otherwise, Thackeray said, you would end up with “people not trusting one another and making outrageous sorts of remarks.”

Thackeray meant the accusations of theft that led to Amine’s inclusion on the NMC patent. But he was also referring to his own intention to stay outside the team system regardless of what Chamberlain and the Department of Energy desired. When Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, attempted to promote Chamberlain’s teamwork mantra, Thackeray dismissed him. “You know,” he said, “he’s not a battery guy. He’s still got quite a lot to learn.”

Perhaps the teamwork idea would have been accepted without question a few years back. But Thackeray thought that the NMC licensing success had irreversibly changed Argonne’s culture. “It’s unfortunate that money talks,” he said. But the fact was that now “everyone would like to become part of this licensing.” And that reinforced the notion of individualism.

The Hub was an important aim, and teams and collaboration sounded worthy. Doubts gnawed at some of the core guys underneath Thackeray and Amine as well, men who had been around the lab for two decades, years in which success meant not collaboration but shining in individually executed projects. Would there be a patent or a paper, one with your name in the lead position, the only place it counted? If not, as seemed likely, how would you explain yourself in the all-important “Annual Merit Review” in Washington, the official vetting of every scientist in the system, where, before large audiences, you justified your existence in the laboratory? How would you validate your work? “Ummm . . . I’ve been collaborating with those other thirty guys.” It did not seem a credible proposition. It went to the bedrock of modern Western tradition, which was to reward individuals. The Nobel Prizes, after all, went to individuals or up to three-person teams, not to sprawling groups. You could not change this psychology by fiat.

Chamberlain was never going to change Thackeray and Amine. They had too much leverage and could and would simply say no. Because of their reputations, they would escape any repercussion, too. Although others in the lab were on less solid ground, some of them felt the same. At one meeting, Daniel Abraham, a lab veteran, said flatly that he was not prepared to distribute his data openly to the department at large. What was his advantage in doing so?

Yet that was precisely what Chamberlain was proposing. Everyone needed to think big. The Hub needed to be about teamwork. He was going to “bring this up and hit it right on the head.”

He summoned a grand departmental meeting in the basement auditorium.

“I want to start by reminding everyone of the mission we’re on,” Chamberlain said, pursing the fingertips of his hands. “And that’s the electrification of vehicles, and then the extension of that would-be improvement in efficiency to the electric grid.” Standing before a full auditorium, he said the mission had three components, all of them anchored in security.

First was economic
security. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries produced more than $10 billion in global revenue. As the vehicle market grew, the market for lithium-ion batteries would exceed $100 billion—by most people’s estimates, that would happen within five or six years. These estimates excluded manufactured materials used to make the batteries, not to mention the market for automobiles themselves, which was enormous. Companies elsewhere in the world—in China, in Japan, in South Korea, for example—were gearing up to capture that business, to create jobs for their societies. That was one reason Argonne was on a mission to create a lithium-ion battery industry in the United States.

Another was energy
security. “So we import a lot of oil, a little over a billion dollars a day,” he told the silent room. “Some of that is from friends, some from enemies. So that’s not a secure position.” And the third component was environmental security—if the United States could move away from fossil fuel consumption, climate change would be less of a threat as well.

“So in the big picture,” Chamberlain said, “I wanted to remind you of the mission we’re on.” Altogether, he said, this mission was in the service of an investor—“the American taxpayer.”

You were not required to join this mission if you preferred not to—it was not an obligation of employment at Argonne. Not at all. But he did not then—nor in any of the other dozens of times that he offered his researchers a way out—sound convincing in this respect. He was calling for an unequivocal commitment. Either you were in or you might be out.

The mandate sounded terrifying. There were historical examples of group glory in science, but they were few, grandiose, and by now trite because of overuse—the Manhattan Project, Apollo. But it was up to Chamberlain to prod the group to trust that the team approach he planned was not a cliché. That they should be calm as they went along. Their careers and their chances for scientific achievement would
not
be derailed. Instead, they would have greater opportunity to do big things and be recognized for it.

Chamberlain seemed to sense that he had the researchers with him. The way he described it—the big science that was going to be done in teams, the big breakthroughs that might be made—why, that was why they
were
in science. He went on.

If there was a Hub competition and Argonne won it, he said, “we could really catapult ourselves” into a position to achieve the mission. Just a week earlier, Argonne had conducted a “Director’s Review,” in which the heads of other national labs stopped by to review the preliminary Hub proposal. “I don’t know how to say this exactly,” Chamberlain said, “but they were really excited. They were using words like ‘blown away,’ and ‘ecstatic.’ And I will tell you, I was nervous. I wasn’t sure. The biggest weaknesses that were identified were the way we were portraying the message—the way we built the story, which is very different from the guts of the science, which they were happy with. We’re still, in my view, way ahead of the game.”

If Argonne did win, more and more companies would seek a piece of the multibillion-dollar battery market. They would realize they lacked the research capability. They would look around, kick over stones, and then turn to Argonne.

“That’s what we are in the middle of right now,” he said. That was what collaboration could bring to Argonne, and to the country.