At a press conference later that day, the fire department announced that Khan was the first person in New York City to die from a fire caused by a lithium-ion battery in 2024. The year before, 268 fires had been started in the city by batteries bursting into flame. And that wasn’t even counting fires that had been started at places like recycling facilities. “It is an enormous problem in our industry, and it is probably the biggest risk that we face,” Tom Outerbridge, the CEO of Balcones Recycling, told me in 2024. He pointed out that even modern greeting cards use lithium-ion batteries to play music and light up. The cards, placed into recycling bins with paper, have frequently caused fires. “It’s growing exponentially,” Outerbridge said. “Fires were really uncommon ten years ago, and now they are happening every week, every day sometimes.” As Eric Frederickson, vice president of Call2Recycle, a battery-recycling nonprofit, put it: “Keeping batteries out of mixed recycling is the single biggest challenge that the general waste and recycling industry is dealing with.”

  Fires have bedeviled lithium-ion batteries since the very beginning. Exxon researchers in Stanley Whittingham’s Linden, New Jersey, lab had to call the fire department a handful of times after inadvertently starting lithium fires, which would burn ferociously and only intensified if doused with water. One early version of Whittingham’s lithium-ion battery had to be carefully unscrewed at the end of each day to release a gas that ignited in contact with air.

  The Exxon scientists had made a risky trade-off: So much power packed into such a small space meant the batteries were liable to combust.

  * * *

  For early electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries were a moot point: Almost all of the batteries being used in ’60s and ’70s electric vehicles were old technology, improvements on Gaston Planté’s original lead-acid batteries. These were heavy and had short ranges, but they had the advantage of being incredibly stable. Some experimental vehicles used other forms of batteries, including sodium-based technologies, but these were largely shelved, since sodium cathodes had to be kept at molten temperatures.

  The lithium-ion battery needed to be stable enough for commercial viability. A deadly battery fire early on could doom the technology; some of the first versions of the battery were used in bedside clocks and watches—imagine if they exploded. And from the earliest stage of development, the Exxon scientists were thinking of putting their batteries into cars. Executives at the company wanted to create something that would future-proof their firm against any potential exhaustion of the world’s oil supply.

  Despite the fires, Whittingham and others at Exxon held out hope for their new battery; the titanium disulfide cells delivered 2.4 volts, more than the most powerful lead-acid cells. The scientists decided to remove lithium from the battery and use an aluminum compound, which was more stable. In 1977, the company developed a watch that used its battery. A year later, Whittingham made a series of small lithium cells that he kept in his personal collection. When he tested them thirty-five years later, he found they had retained around 50 percent of their original capacity. A small solar-powered clock that the team had designed still kept time.

  Executives at Exxon were starting to wonder about long-term profits. “They said to us with some rationality, ‘We’re a multibillion-dollar company. Why do we need this?’ ” Robert Hamlen, a scientist working with Whittingham, told Inside Climate News in 2016. “If I were to characterize Exxon’s new ventures in two words, it would be ‘unrealistic expectations.’ They thought that because they were good at oil, they could handle these new ventures in other areas, too.” Whittingham and his team needed more time, but as the decade came to a close, the bottom was dropping out of the excitement around electric cars and the lithium battery.

  * * *

  The catalyst for the downturn was the same thing that had provoked the hand-wringing about America losing out at the beginning of the decade: oil. The Iranian Revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis spiked oil prices to a historic high in April 1980. Then they started to drop as new fields around the world began to come online. In response, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers ramped up production to increase their market share, adding to an “oil glut.” Prices would continue falling until 1986. Carbon energy seemed abundant, even infinite.

  Exxon went into cost-cutting mode and began to question how its battery division fit into its overall business model. Under Reagan, federal grants for alternative energy dried up. “Two things happened,” Whittingham said. “One, oil prices dropped. And the second thing is the market—they decided the market wasn’t big enough. They wanted a market, if I recollect correctly, of about one hundred million dollars a year.”

  Over the first few years of the 1980s, Exxon sold off its Enterprises businesses as it “refocused on its core” and doubled down on oil and gas. After all, Enterprises had always been a blip on the balance sheet: In 1976, The New York Times noted that Enterprises had made investments totaling between $40 million and $50 million. The firm’s oil sales totaled around $49 billion. Whittingham left the company in 1984. Exxon later decided to license the technology its scientists had created to three firms in Japan, Europe, and the U.S.

  A cycle had begun that would lead directly to China’s dominance of the battery supply chain in the 2020s, a cycle in which a U.S.-developed technology was to be perfected and commercialized abroad. The battery had left the country, and its fate would now be decided elsewhere.

  Chapter 11

  A Cobalt Cathode and a Carbon Anode

  Cobalt may have become a critical metal in the 1970s, but it was not until the next decade that it found its most critical use—in batteries. April 1980, the month that oil prices peaked, was also the month that a paper landed on the desk of the editor of a scientific journal called the Materials Research Bulletin. The paper was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and by the European Energy Commission. It would go on to become the most cited article the journal published that year, and it would eventually win its lead author a Nobel Prize. But at first, nobody, not even battery companies, took much interest.

  The paper’s main author was John B. Goodenough, a tall, genial man who had taken the inverse of M. Stanley Whittingham’s transatlantic journey. Goodenough’s father was a scholar of religion at Yale whose major field of study was how Hellenistic culture had influenced Judaism. John decided to focus on science: He studied physics at Yale and the University of Chicago, and then went on to Oxford to work on energy storage. Like Whittingham, Goodenough had spent time contributing to U.S. government projects while at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, an institution dedicated to the research side of national defense.

  At the dawn of the 1970s, Goodenough began to focus on the problem of energy storage. His reasons chimed with those of Exxon Enterprises and the various global initiatives on electric vehicles that sprang up around the oil crisis, though his were shot through with an altogether more spiritual strain, a legacy of his father’s interests. In his memoir, Witness to Grace, Goodenough writes:

  It was obvious already in 1970 that our dependence on foreign oil was making the country as vulnerable as the threat of ballistic missiles from Russia. Solar energy was an obvious renewable source to be harnessed; our profligate use of energy made conservation an obvious target also. Since solar energy is variable in time and location, it was also obvious that we needed to find a way to store the solar energy that is converted into electricity.

  In 1976, after turning down work at a solar-power institute that the shah of Iran was trying to establish, Goodenough accepted a position leading an inorganic chemistry class at Oxford. There he began to read the papers Whittingham had produced doing his research for Exxon. Goodenough wondered whether he could make a more stable cathode. In 1978, an undergraduate thesis spurred him to ponder whether a metal oxide cathode would be more stable. Metal oxides, especially those formed from transition metals like cobalt, tended to collapse if ions were taken out of them. But Goodenough knew that if he could find a way to order those ions and not take too many of them out, he might stand a shot at creating a hardy enough structure to serve as a cathode.

  Koichi Mizushima, a young postdoctoral student of experimental physics from the University of Tokyo, was visiting the inorganic chemistry lab at Oxford at the time, and Goodenough put him to work on the problem, alongside Philip Wiseman, a postdoctoral research associate in chemistry. Goodenough directed them to work on inserting lithium ions into, and removing them from, different metal oxides. “We found that over half of the lithium could be removed reversibly with cobalt or nickel,” Goodenough later wrote. The cathodes of both these oxides, moreover, produced a far greater electrical potential than Exxon’s disulfide; with cobalt or nickel, the battery cell had an output of four volts, more than one and a half times greater than the cells Whittingham had made.

  The paper Goodenough submitted to the Materials Research Bulletin represented a breakthrough in batteries, but it confounded conventional (and commercial) logic. Cathodes were normally built charged, but the Oxford team was proposing creating one that was discharged. Initially, European and U.S. companies had little interest in the work, because selling charged batteries seemed unwieldy, a logistical and safety headache. In Mizushima’s home country of Japan, however, the idea would gain traction.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve in 1982, Dr. Akira Yoshino decided to clean his office. The workspace that he occupied at Tokyo’s Asahi Kasei Corporation was littered with reams of paper stapled into bundles and spread out haphazardly across a small desk. Across Japan, people were piling into narrow overheated bars to indulge in bonenkai, that traditional Japanese ritual of drinking with colleagues and friends “to forget the previous year.” But Yoshino certainly didn’t want to forget the year he had spent researching high-tech battery materials at Asahi Kasei.

  Indeed, he could not, for he had a problem. The batteries he and his team dreamed of building were just too unstable when it came to the real world. They would catch fire; they would blow up. And so, this New Year’s Eve, Yoshino was trawling headlong through mountains of scientific research.

  In the 1980s, Japan had embarked upon a quest for technological excellence. The government’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry had fostered domestic competition by distributing research widely, and Japanese companies had bought boatloads of licensing agreements to import foreign technology.

  The resulting progress had catapulted Japan to the foremost ranks of high-tech producers, and worried policymakers in the United States predicted that Tokyo might vanquish Washington in a battle over technology. The concerns voiced in the 1980s over a putative Japanese technological primacy (a “hi-tech Pearl Harbor,” as Robert Reich famously described it in The New Republic) would be echoed decades later in the 2010s and ’20s by commenters worried about China besting the U.S. through Beijing’s current dominance of tech. The cast of characters even has some overlap: President Donald Trump, whose administration initiated a U.S.-China trade war through levying tariffs on Chinese imports, formed many of his views in the 1980s, arguing that America was being “ripped off” by Japan.

  In those years of discovery and growth, however, it wasn’t just U.S. critics who depicted the competition between Washington and Tokyo in bellicose terms. In the summer of 1982, a few months before Yoshino decided to clean his desk, The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s most widely circulated newspaper, called the competition for tech primacy the “Nichi-Bei gijutsu sensō,” or “Japan–United States technology war.” (These days, headlines read How the u.s.-china Technology War Is Changing the World.) Yoshino had positioned himself in one of the advance trenches of that war. His laboratory at Asahi Kasei was at the front line of the rush to discover a type of rechargeable battery that would better power the gadgets and futuristic devices that, thanks to Japanese companies, had begun to flood global markets. “I just sort of sniffed out the direction that trends were moving,” he once said. “You could say I had a good sense of smell.”

  The most famous of these Japanese devices was perhaps the Sony Walkman, a personal tape player. Released in 1979, it almost immediately revolutionized the way people listened to music. In the first two months, Sony sold ten times more units of the Walkman than the company had expected. But such devices were powered by mercury-containing batteries that had, by the early 1980s, sparked environmental concerns. “The battery problem is especially serious in Japan because there are few sites to dispose of wastes,” The New York Times noted in 1984. Yoshino was on a mission to make a cleaner battery.

  * * *

  Stacks of yet-to-be-read papers hid Yoshino’s desk. “It was completely disorganized,” he recalled forty years later, laughing at himself. “Papers were everywhere.” For almost two years, Yoshino had been working on various materials for the anode of his battery, specifically polyacetylene, a silvery-gray substance that has been called a “plastic that conducts electricity.”

  Yoshino had hit a roadblock. He had found the anode material he wanted to experiment on, but what about the cathode? “I needed a positive electrode material that contained a lithium ion,” he told me. “I was having trouble finding the right material.” At the time, a whole host of metals and elements in combination with others had been proposed, but to Yoshino, they all presented fundamental problems. Those that contained actual lithium metal were likely to explode or catch fire; those that did not contain lithium had no lithium ions to exchange with the anode during the charging and discharging progress; and Whittingham’s titanium disulfide was expensive to produce and released foul smells when exposed to air.

  As the chemist began to sift through the mess that had accumulated in his office, he noticed a paper that he had passed over in his rapid skimming of available research. The study that caught his eye bore Goodenough and Mizushima’s bylines on the title page. “As soon as I started reading that paper, I realized that [Goodenough’s] material was the perfect material for me,” Yoshino told me. He had understood that lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) could make for batteries that were much safer and less liable to catch fire.

  In his lab at Asahi Kasei, Yoshino mixed lithium carbonate, cobalt oxide, and stannic oxide (a form of oxidized tin), then roasted them at 650 degrees centigrade (just over 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit) for five hours. After another twelve hours of firing the mixture at over 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, he pulverized it in a ball mill. Then he mixed it with a decomposed form of carbon and an acrylic resin solution in a liquid solvent. When he finally applied the mixture to one surface of a very thin sheet of aluminum, the positive cathode was ready to be made by nipping the aluminum foil between stainless steel mesh. “I just followed the way he described it in the paper, step by step, and fortunately, I was able to make it without too much trouble.”

  By the end of December 1983, Yoshino had applied for a patent for his new polyacetylene-LCO battery, but polyacetylene turned out to be less conductive than he had first hoped. He didn’t have to look far for an alternative: Scientists at another wing of Asahi Kasei had created a form of carbon that showed promise. The material was known as vapor-grown carbon fiber, or VGCF, “grown” in a laboratory by heating a hydrogen gas in a furnace to 1,200 degrees centigrade. He filed for another patent in 1985, but he thought he could still build a safer and more powerful battery, so he started to experiment with other forms of carbon, including petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil refining, for his anode. Later developments saw him settle on graphite as the best material for battery anodes—this decision would come to be questioned in the 2020s, when China controlled the production and processing of graphite. In late 2024, China placed export restrictions on graphite and other critical minerals, and scientists looked to build anodes out of materials like silicon.

  One summer morning in 1986, Yoshino traveled to Nobeoka, a town on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where Asahi Kasei had a testing facility. He had brought with him two batteries: one with a cathode containing lithium metal, the other containing lithium cobalt oxide. To test them, a heavy-metal slug was dropped onto the two batteries.

  When the lithium-containing battery was struck, flames leapt from each side, eliciting oohs from the scientists who were watching. An alarm began to sound as the cell burned for almost half a minute. Yoshino thought the sparks looked like fireworks. When the slug came down on the battery containing lithium cobalt oxide, however, nothing happened. There were no flames.

  Cobalt oxide had made the battery safe enough not to explode when whacked and crushed (or at least if they had been made properly: Faulty batteries and ill-conceived batteries that cut corners for price, including the kind of cheap Chinese e-bike batteries that would start fires in cities around the world, would still be incredibly dangerous). Lithium-ion was ready for its world debut.

  Chapter 12

  The Milking Cow Falls Ill

  As a boy, Augustin Katumba Mwanke once won a scholarship for being the “nicest student” at his school. In the mid-1970s, he moved from his native Pweto, a Congolese town on the shores of Lake Mweru, to become a boarding student at an elite high school in Lubumbashi, the country’s copper capital, following the well-worn tracks trod by successful men like Kufi Kilanga. “He was very quiet, actually,” Mwamba Wanzala, a classmate of his, remembered. “Not a very talkative chap, very quiet, but very friendly. We played soccer together.”