The race to move beyond lithium-ion

DON HILLEBRAND, AN American motor-industry veteran, has an intriguing job. In a warehouse at the secure Argonne National Laboratory, which arose from the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan Project, he scrutinises foreign-made cars, trucks and lithium-ion batteries to discover their technological secrets and share them with his employer, the Department of Energy, and its friends in the Big Three car companies.

His engineers have dismantled the engine of a new Honda model to lay bare its energy-saving technologies and then “reverse-engineered” it to make sure they have fully understood them. They do something similar with lithium-ion batteries, though they rarely dismantle them completely. When they do, it is in an explosion-proof room, Mr Hillebrand chuckles.

Much of the science behind those batteries originally came from America (ironically, the labs of ExxonMobil, America’s biggest oil company), but it was Japan’s Sony that first commercialised them in 1991. America is now in a race to catch up with Japan and South Korea, the two front-runners, though China is also a strong competitor. “The Asians are ten years ahead of us...