'Batteries Are the Key'

Whoever killed the electric car is now trying to resuscitate it. As rising oil prices push drivers away from SUVs and toward hybrids, it's suddenly become apparent to consumer and manufacturers alike that the ultimate green car is one with that can run on batteries. But battery technology is stubbornly limited. Car manufacturers are scrambling for ways of eking more capacity out of batteries as well as making them smaller, more reliable and quicker to recharge. Newsweek's Andrew Bast spoke with Donald G. Hillebrand, the director of the Center for Transportation research at Argonne National Laboratory and one of the foremost experts on batteries, about how the battery in your cell phone may be the key to a new generation of alternatively powered vehicles. Excerpts:

Bast: How have batteries evolved over the ages?
Hillebrand: Lead-acid batteries have been "it" for a very long time. They're stable, they're cheap. The nickel-cadmium battery was introduced in the 1970s. They're small batteries that people used but never really seriously considered for automobiles because cadmium is so toxic. In the 1980s, there was a breakthrough, when the U.S. Department of Energy Program came up with the nickel metal hydride batteries now widely used in hybrid vehicles. It had better energy capacity than lead acid, was a lot lighter, [was long lasting] and didn't include the same type of toxic lead that everyone began to get concerned about in the 1980s. There was really no immediate application for it and the rights to it were sold overseas, mostly to Japanese companies, and right now Panasonic owns a big piece of that. They began manufacturing them for personal electronics and then very quickly when the hybrid vehicles came out in the mid 1990s, it was the perfect battery for that.

With a new generation of alternative energy vehicles, it seems that batteries are the big, missing piece of the puzzle today.
The battery is the single key. I was at a conference in Tokyo a couple years ago and the people there got it immediately that the battery was key to hybrid competitiveness, and hybrid competitiveness was key to the future of the automotive industry. That's a big statement and most people I've talked to fully agree that that is actually the case. We're in the middle of a breakthrough with lithium ion [batteries] right now, because we really don't know what the solution is going to be for the replacement of nickel metal hydride batteries.

What do lithium ion batteries offer?
If you look at your periodic table [of the elements], there are only two elements lighter than lithium: helium and hydrogen. So theoretically, you've got the best energy density because you have got such a light element that has such a good energy capacity. Lithium ion batteries have been in development seriously for about ten years. Right now you're seeing them in laptops and cell phones, but you haven't got to where you can scale them up in a big way and make them actually work in cars. There are a handful of prototype batteries that are working. We've got a bunch of them in our lab right now that we are testing for working in vehicles, but no single lithium ion battery really meets all of the needs and all of the challenges of a big automotive battery, of a big energy battery.

Why can't anyone scale it up?
The automotive environment is different than small electronics. The cost isn't really scalable when you get to automotive scales. And the other problem is manufacturing: you can make them in small, single cells, but when you start to combine the cells together, that's when you get to the point where you have safety risks with explosions. There are really five main challenges with respect to lithium ion. Almost in order they are: cost, safety, manufacturing, life and warranty.

If I were to point at the "next big thing," is the lithium ion battery going to be it?
It's going to be lithium ion alone or lithium ion in something. And we're not really sure yet. Lithium is fundamental, but will they have to put something special on it like another type of battery? Or will they have to couple it, which is something we're working on right now, to make the lithium more acceptable? That's an unknown.