The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (22 page)

Everything seemed possible. The decisive factor again was Envia’s potential customer list—the four big carmakers from whom Kumar had received spec sheets. The Goldman and Morgan Stanley men had studied the prospect of licensing to these companies and said, “You must be kidding me. Don’t even think about selling the company.” Kapadia could and should take the riskier but potentially far more lucrative step of going public.

The 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram announcement was the first step. Now, Kapadia said, the senior managers of all the major car, parts, and chemical companies would be querying their staffs, “Are you working with Envia or not?” Kapadia said. Envia aimed to be to the 2010s what IBM was to the 1970s: the hottest stock on the market. By the end of the year, he expected to announce licensing deals with GM and Honda. They would move Envia into position to launch the IPO, which would take place “early ’14, late ’13,” he said. Though Kapadia aimed for IBM’s trendiness, he didn’t aspire to its size. “We will stay small. Even as a public company I don’t see us as more than one hundred people,” he said.

Kumar and Kapadia beamed. “Success is a good feeling,” Kapadia said.

O
ne afternoon in the summer of 2012, Kevin Gallagher and his wife, Sabine, put out hummus, turkey sausages, and carrots in their backyard in Downers Grove, the suburb of choice for young Argonne researchers since the move from the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Lynn Trahey, a chemist with whom Gallagher shared an office, sipped a glass of home-brewed beer. Mike Slater, a postdoctoral chemist with a goatee and ponytail, juggled bowling pins. It was a few weeks after ARPA-E’s summit and Gallagher was still irritated about Envia. He did not desire a public argument over the matter but said again that Kumar’s 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram disclosure was just show. Gallagher was disposed to irritable pessimism—Thackeray said that was to be expected since he was an engineer. But he defended his suspicions on the basis of the girth of Kumar’s electrodes: in order to deliver the performance that Envia claimed—meaning that an electric car could travel three hundred miles on a single charge—he would have had to densely pack the lithium into an unusually
thick
cathode. That was the only way. The problem was that thick electrodes were a blunt-force method—they could deliver the distance, but only in the lab. They probably could not be placed with confidence
into
a three-hundred-mile electric car. Being so fat, they would suffer early and fatal maladies and die long before the ten-year life span required for such batteries. They might even shatter. The future, Gallagher said, was slender electrodes—cathodes less than one hundred microns thick, or slimmer than the diameter of a human hair. In its rush to the market, Gallagher said, Envia had unveiled an attention-grabbing but flawed product that still required fundamental improvement.

Gallagher had grown up in a Detroit suburb called Trenton and by curious coincidence graduated not only from the same Georgia Tech doctoral program as Chamberlain, but also from the same elementary school. Both played the trombone and had a natural confidence. Chamberlain took a liking to Gallagher, who was fifteen years younger. He called him “the next generation.” A lot of the other battery guys went along with that appraisal of Gallagher, who had curly brown hair, dimples, a compact, athletic build, and a smooth manner of speech. His first job out of college, before he decided to seek a Ph.D., was applying the adhesive to Scotch tape in a factory in Hutchinson, Minnesota, a town outside Minneapolis. He was the first to say that he could lose his temper. He had punched a man only once, and that wasn’t really a man but his older brother Sean, whom he smacked in the face when they were boys. But when he did anger, it was when he felt one or more of his principles under attack. Chamberlain said that they were alike in this respect as well.

Perhaps Gallagher’s outsized ire about Envia was another sign of the general malaise in batteries at the moment. Or possibly it was his idealism—he more than any of the battery guys was uncomfortable with the carnival aspect of batteries.

Lynn Trahey called Gallagher “K-Funk.” She had joined Argonne three years earlier as a postdoc from Berkeley. Scientists in the United States were not only largely foreign born, but also mostly men. So Trahey was an anomaly on both accounts—she was the only female staff scientist in the Battery Department. She had been a cheerleader and played varsity doubles tennis in high school. As a graduate student, she wore a purple- and green-dyed ponytail. Trahey’s current toned-down style appeared aimed at reducing her conspicuousness among these mostly plain men. She tied her hair back, unadorned. She dressed like one of the guys in loose-fitting jeans and sneakers. She seemed to overcompensate as well, in slangy and coarse phrases. “I avoid the small bathrooms near the Y-wing auditorium,” she said once. “I think that’s where old guys must go and take a long shit. I’ve seen rolled-up newspapers behind the pipe.”

None of it worked. Trahey still stuck out. The guys behaved bizarrely around her. They spoke inexpressively, almost robotically. Except for Gallagher and Mike Slater, a lot of them simply stayed away. While colleagues behaved awkwardly, she was ideal for public relations exercises. At Berkeley, her professors dispatched her on community-outreach visits to neighborhood schools and senior-citizen groups. She would show up and attract favorable press for the department. Chamberlain employed Trahey to the same advantage. He featured a photograph of her posed in protective glasses on the department’s home page and in a handful of press releases.

Another of the battery guys who conversed with Trahey was Dieter Gruen, the German-born physicist who had been at Argonne since the Manhattan Project days. Gruen was developing a concept for a lithium-sulfur battery and this summer asked Trahey’s help with an experiment. Gruen had no funding for his idea; Trahey did, and, in an e-mail, he asked whether she would mind carrying out his experiment on the beam line.

Trahey was sitting in the office with Gallagher. She had already done one experiment for Gruen “to be nice,” she said, but now “he is taking advantage.” Gruen’s work “is not in my budget.”

“Why don’t we get rid of the old people” at the lab? Gallagher said. “I’d like to see their output. I’ll bet it’s low.” He said that if you calculated the average age of the department’s researchers, you might be surprised as to how elderly the staff was as a whole. Gallagher and Trahey agreed that their older colleagues were costing too much money.

Trahey said, “The reason there are so few jobs is these people won’t leave. These guys suck up all this money that could go to other things.” It particularly galled her that Gruen was paid at the lab’s top salary rank. “He is a 710!” she said.

Such grousing poured out of the pair. They suggested that battery science was a young person’s game. But were the ideas developed by over-the-hill scientists under scrutiny, or was it simply their ages? Judging by space and budget, it was true that the department could be insufferably cramped and the funding slender for fresh minds leaving the universities. But experience had its place, too. John Goodenough, the eighty-nine-year-old father of lithium-ion batteries, still ran his lab at the University of Texas. No one discussed pushing Goodenough into retirement.

Nor did Trahey and Gallagher speak that way of Goodenough’s former protégé, Thackeray, who apart from also being a 710 was, at sixty-four, no longer a young man either. Sometimes Thackeray hinted at health problems but said it wasn’t anything serious. That was understating it, as he had been treated for leukemia the previous year. But he said it was “not the aggressive form” and was more or less under control. “I’m not as well as I was ten years ago but I’m hanging in there,” he said. Thackeray said he had no plans to retire soon and wondered how he would find time for a planned memoir of his South Africa days. As of now, he was occupied with voltage fade and administrative duties associated with managing two research groups. It could be some time before he got to the book.

Gallagher in fact owed his job to one of the old people. Paul Nelson had worked at Argonne since 1958. He was eighty-one years old, erect and fit. A few years before, a couple of the senior managers along with Dave Howell, the top battery boss at the Department of Energy, had decided that Nelson possessed a special skill that ought to be passed on—he had developed novel software that could rapidly assess whether a given new battery formulation would actually work in a vehicle. They searched awhile for an apt protégé before Gallagher’s CV arrived in the mail. They hired him more or less on the spot.

Nelson had witnessed much of Argonne’s battery history—the struggles with high-temperature sulfur batteries in the 1970s, the recruitment of Thackeray and Amine, and the advent of lithium-ion. By the early 1990s, he was nearing retirement age. At Argonne, that meant time to move on. A mere glance around told you that no one would appreciate his management advice. But Nelson did not want to move on. He was only in his early sixties and, as he saw it, had many productive years to go. He knew how to obtain an invitation to stay. If you proved your worth again as a pure scientist, you could be welcome back at the bench. Such arrangements were useful for Argonne because it tapped the product of a seasoned mind at a much smaller, part-time wage—really a symbolic sum. But you could stay in the game.

That’s what Nelson did. He detected an opening in the assembly line that battery science had become: propose a new chemistry, obtain funding, prove (or fail to) that it worked in coin cells, write a paper, garner any accolades, then move on to the next thing. At no point was your idea typically tested for practicality—no one checked whether it could produce a superior battery. It was as though experimentation was the final product.

Nelson wanted to make it otherwise. Reality testing should assume a native role in the process. For the final three or so years of his tenure as Battery Department head, Nelson tailed off his supervisorial time and started to hone his skills at the computer. By the time he retired in 1995, he was adept at modeling and design, a new discipline in which you recreated an invention from scratch on the computer screen. Shifting to half-time, he ultimately developed the appraisal software, which, starting with a few grams of a material, could determine how it would perform in a complete automobile battery pack. He would calculate the weight and volume of all the ingredients—the lithium needed at the pack level, the electrolyte, steel, plastic, and so on—and extrapolate whether a lab-scale success would work for the decade or so a battery might be used out in the world. That was powerful, because no such system existed at the time. Nelson then expanded his work to also estimate the cost of manufacturing all these materials. He began to factor the price of the composition and the economies of scale—how much would be saved when you were producing, say, one hundred thousand batteries versus just a few hundred?

It was about this time when Gallagher was hired to learn Nelson’s system. The pair began to meet with automakers and battery companies in order to obtain more precise estimates. The software’s accuracy was soon impressive. When the pair decided to give it away on the Internet, posting it on the Argonne Web site, they attracted attention from industry players who perceived a new way to cull practical ideas from the less so. Other labs, including MIT, adopted it, too.

The Nelson-Gallagher model was far from standard procedure at Argonne itself. The senior managers understood its merit, as did their supervisors in Washington. But if you asked Amine whether he had vetted his new ideas with Nelson, he would stare as though you had suggested checking with Santa Claus. Trahey, Gallagher’s own office mate, never inquired as to the feasibility of her concepts. That depressed Gallagher.

“The group is not interested in seeing how their work fits into the big picture,” he said.

Trahey said that the other battery guys were simply “overwhelmed” with their various responsibilities. “They care. They don’t want to be working on something futile. They
want
to know if it is something totally futile,” she said.

“I don’t think they do,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher was right. Trahey was merely trying to salve his feelings. The model was sly. To the degree it was actually applied, the software could undermine the proclivity of some battery guys to inflate the potential of their inventions. It amounted to a stern manager peering over their shoulder.

As Gallagher understood it, the Hub would change all that. It was meant to be a dynamic research environment in which, if an idea was not working, resources would be more or less automatically redirected to something that might. To Gallagher, the Hub was a magical thought: Argonne
had
to win it. And he
had
to be in it. Here would be an honest appraisal of the battery work. The battery guys might never attain the desired electric-car performance; they might not win the battery race. But if they could not be straight with themselves, they
definitely
would not reach the goal, he said.

Gallagher’s idea, embraced by Chamberlain, was to embed the vetting model into the Hub’s management system. Armed with this data, a battery guy could peer deeper and isolate the specific materials having the best physical properties for the desired performance. The managers began to call the work “techno-economic modeling.” Nelson’s name dropped out of the discussion. Gallagher himself mentioned his former mentor’s role almost only in passing. It wasn’t that he was not grateful. “But at some point you have to hand it off so young folks can run with it,” he said. Nelson did not seem to begrudge the treatment. It’s what it meant to be one of the old people.

Gallagher was still uncertain about what the model could achieve. It was one matter to write such a system into the Hub proposal. It was another “to actually go and do it.” It would be a new way of business for most of the lab and would require strong leadership to become an accepted tool.

One thing he knew was that most of the researchers did not believe that vetting was “as big of a deal as it actually is.” They did not understand that if you could determine what did and did not work, that was “a clear stepping-stone” to the better battery. Perhaps the Hub would change their minds. The Hub’s industry partners were certain to press the case. They would be biased toward such testing and intolerant of any inclination to “hide behind things. ’Cause if you make a bad product, everyone knows it,” Gallagher said. “That’s the thing—in the labs, you can hide behind things. You can play games.”

Gallagher said that Envia’s new battery should be subjected to the model. He had been in touch with Sun-Ho Kang, the former Argonne researcher now at Samsung. Kang’s supervisors were inquiring about the ARPA-E announcement, and he wondered what Gallagher thought of the reported advance. Gallagher said he was skeptical. But he had managed to create philosophical distance from his early rejectionism. “It’s natural that you say two things,” he said. “First, ‘Why couldn’t I get those results?’ Second, ‘It’s great that Envia did’ because you had a role in creating this material that will be in the market.” But one way to know for sure would be to examine the detailed data.