The Perfect Battery Material Is Dangerous

This is what the inside of a lithium ion battery looks like. It's not exactly high-tech, just 2 m of foil coated in black paste, all packed into this tiny 45 g cylinder. But these are some of the best batteries we have. They power everything from laptops and electric vehicles to orbiting satellites.

Yet, when a battery fails, all that energy can get released in the wrong way. >> Oh my god. the latest incident involving lithium ion batteries. >> So, how did something so rudimentary looking end up in almost every electronic device on the planet?

And why don't we have anything better? In the early 1980s, most rechargeable batteries were stuck at just 40 to 60 W hours per kilogram, meaning you would need a kilogram of battery to power a 40 W light bulb for just an hour. As a result, when the first commercial mobile phone launched in 1983, it was pretty unimpressive. It took 10 hours to charge for just 30 minutes of talk time.

Laptops, cameras, even medical devices all suffered from the same bulky batteries. Everyone from electronics giants to oil companies were trying to make a better battery because they knew that even just doubling the energy density could unlock a new era of portable electronics and power the digital revolution. But what no one realized is that someone had already found the solution. In 1972, a 32-year-old British chemist named Stanley Whittingham was studying how different materials store energy at Exxon's research lab in New Jersey.

Yes, that Exxon, the multinational oil giant, then the largest oil company in the world. They were researching batteries. The next year, war broke out between Egypt, Syria, and Israel. When the US backed Israel, Arab oil producers cut off oil exports in retaliation.

And on December 22nd, the price of crude oil more than doubled from $512 a barrel to 1165. In response, President Nixon created policies to try to keep oil prices down, but they backfired and the shortage only got worse. Americans were left queuing for hours at gas stations as the government introduced a rationing program. It got so bad that they even dropped the national speed limit to 55 mph just to cut consumption.

At Exxon, executives were worried that supplies would run out entirely. So, they started looking seriously at alternatives like electricity. This wasn't a new idea. ...