The History of Lithium-Ion Batteries

01Why Lithium, of All Elements?

Batteries don't actually generate electricity. Their job is to hold onto electricity that's already been made—storing it in chemical form—and release it when you need it. If a power plant is a chef, a battery is a refrigerator.

The principle behind releasing this energy is a redox (reduction-oxidation) reaction. One material wants to give up electrons, and the other wants to take them. If you separate the two materials and connect a wire between them, electrons travel the long way around through the wire, lighting up bulbs and turning motors along the way. Charging is simply forcing that flow in reverse. If you can reverse the process, it's a rechargeable (secondary) battery; if you use it once and throw it away, it's a primary battery.

So, which materials should you pair together? There are two key criteria: the stronger a material's tendency to give up electrons, the higher the voltage; and the lighter the material, the more electricity you can pack into the same weight. Lithium is a rare element that satisfies both conditions at once. It is the lightest of all metals and has one of the strongest tendencies to release electrons.

Why does weight matter so much? If it's something plugged into a wall and left in place, a heavy battery doesn't matter. But things you carry around or things on wheels are a different story. If you make the battery bigger, it gets heavier, and a heavier object uses more electricity just to move itself. Past a certain point, adding more battery won't get you any farther. That's why, for a very long time, this industry's report card came down to a single line: how many watt-hours per kilogram. We call this energy density. What this report card eventually turns into forms the later part of our story.

Paired with energy density is power density. If energy density is about "how long it lasts," power density is about "how much power it can deliver at once." Driving range is determined by the former, while acceleration and fast charging depend on the latter. And these two usually trade off against each other. Most early decisions were about where to stand between them, and both terms will keep coming up, so keep them in mind.

That doesn't mean batteries have beaten fossil fuels. Compared to the energy stored in the same weight of gasoline, today's batteries still fall far short. This is why an electric vehicle has to carry hundreds of kilograms of batteries to travel as far as a gas-powered car. Closing this gap, even by a fraction, is practically everything this industry has worked toward for fifty years.

The trouble is that lithium isn't a gentle element. Being eager to release electrons also means being highly reactive. It reacts violently with water, and even left out in the open air, its surface quickly tarnishes. The trait that yields the best performance and the trait that poses the greatest danger come from the exact same root. The fifty years that follow are the story of how people struggled to manage that single sentence.

Worth remembering Every choice in this story unfolds between lithium's two faces: the blessing of being lightweight and the danger of being highly reactive.

02Why Did an Oil Company Make Something to Replace Oil?

In 1973, oil prices soared. Lines stretched in front of gas stations, and every industry that ran on oil scrambled to recalculate their costs. That was when the oil company Exxon moved in the exact opposite direction. They hired scientists in droves, announcing they would research the energy that would come after oil. The idea was to use the money earned from selling oil to find what would replace it.

Stanley Whittingham was on that list. The concept he seized upon was intercalation, or insertion. Some materials have a structure of layered thin sheets, and lithium ions can slip into and out of the gaps between these layers. It is much like sliding a book into and pulling it out of a bookshelf. The key was that because the bookshelf itself is not damaged, you can repeat the process over and over again.

Why was this concept so crucial? Because it determined whether a battery could be reused, and how many times. Until then, rechargeable batteries often relied on mechanisms where materials dissolved and reformed. Repeating that process distorted their shape and reduced capacity. In contrast, if ions simply traveled between layers, the material remained virtually intact. This is where today's convention of counting battery life in cycles originated.

In 1976, Whittingham demonstrated a battery using titanium disulfide as the cathode and lithium metal as the anode. It delivered about 2.4–2.5 V, and above all, it was rechargeable. It was the world's very first rechargeable lithium battery.

Exxon soon turned it into a product. In 1977, they supplied small button-shaped cells to the Swiss watchmaker Ebauches. The very first customer for a technology that would change the world was neither a car nor a power plant, but a wristwatch. The initial market for a new technology is always small. It opens up with small, expensive products—places where paying a bit more is worthwhile as long as it is light and long-lasting.

Yet in the late 1970s, Exxon shut down its battery business. Two reasons overlapped: as oil prices stabilized, the original rationale for the research blurred, and the fire hazard from the lithium metal anode could not be brought under control. The company licensed the technology out. The ones who made it first were the very first to walk away.

It is hard to say Exxon made the wrong judgment call. At the time, that battery was something that barely fit into watches, it was hazardous, and it had nothing to do with the company's core business. Yet because of that decision, the next chapter of the lithium battery would unfold outside the United States.

Worth remembering The first to create it is the first to walk away—the very first scene in a pattern that will repeat throughout this story.

03Batteries That Catch Fire, and Progress in the Name of Giving Up

In early lithium batteries, the anode was pure lithium metal. In terms of pure performance, there was no better choice. Storing lithium inside another host material means carrying the extra weight of that material, but pure metal has no such burden. It holds the maximum amount of lithium and produces the highest possible voltage.

The trouble started during recharging. The lithium that stripped away during discharge returned to the anode surface when charged, but it did not settle evenly. An electric field concentrated wherever a tiny bump formed, pulling more lithium directly to that exact spot. Sharp, branch-like crystals sprouted as a result. These are called dendrites. What makes them especially nasty is that they grow with every single charge. A device that worked fine when brand new would suddenly cause trouble after months of reliable use.

When these branches pierce the thin separator standing between the cathode and anode and touch the other side, a short circuit occurs. Electrons take a shortcut straight inside the cell instead of looping around the circuit. A massive surge of current flows in an instant, generating intense heat. Inside the cell sits a flammable liquid: the electrolyte. Heat fuels chemical reactions, those reactions release more heat, and that heat fuels even more reactions. Once it begins, it cannot stop itself. This vicious cycle is called thermal runaway.

Understanding what the separator is makes this danger feel even more real. It is an extremely thin membrane that keeps the cathode and anode from touching directly while letting only lithium ions pass through. It is densely packed with microscopic pores, and the electrolyte fills those pores to shuttle the ions across. In the end, the safety of the entire battery hinges on whether this single sheet can hold out. In effect, the most crucial component inside the cell happens to be the most fragile.

In the 1980s, the industry split down the middle. One camp tried to tame lithium metal by any means necessary. They reinforced the separator, swapped electrolytes, and coated the surface. The other camp took an entirely different route. They wanted to throw out lithium metal completely and use a different anode material that could host and release lithium. It meant holding less lithium and losing some voltage. Judged purely by performance, it was an obvious step backward.

Yet to become a commercial product, something else must come before peak performance: it simply cannot cause accidents. That is especially true for items handled by millions of people, carried in their pockets, and placed on their nightstands. Trading away a bit of performance to buy safety—this was the defining breakthrough for this industry. The door was opened not by finding a superior material, but by walking away from the best one.

Whether this sacrifice was the right call would soon be answered by the companies that refused to give up. But before turning to them, there is more of the materials story to tell. An anode alone does not make a battery, so we must first look at where its counterpart, the cathode, came from.

Worth remembering The turning point for this industry was not discovering a new material, but giving up the best one—a dilemma that resurfaces later in the story of solid-state batteries.

04Why Did the Nobel Prize Come 40 Years After the Invention?

In 1980, a research team led by John Goodenough at the University of Oxford announced a cathode material called lithium cobalt oxide. In short, it is called LCO. The virtue of this material was that its layered structure did not collapse even when a significant portion of lithium was removed. Because it didn't collapse, it could be refilled, allowing it to be recharged over and over again.

The leap is even clearer in the numbers. Whittingham's cell produced about 2.4 to 2.5 V, but using LCO yielded over 4.0 V. That was about 1.7 times higher. When voltage rises, you can get much more work done with the same amount of electric current. It is no exaggeration to say that it was this voltage that pushed the materials over the threshold of commercialization.

Yet the University of Oxford failed to recognize the value of this patent. They declined to secure the intellectual property rights, and Goodenough never received a single cent in royalties from LCO. This was despite it becoming the best-selling cathode material in the world for decades to come. The reward for the material at the very root of the phone batteries we use today was 0 won.

LCO had a dark side as well. Cobalt is an expensive metal. The amount needed for a single palm-sized cell is tiny, but once you accumulate enough to fill an entire car, the story completely changes. This cost later became the catalyst that upended the playing field once more.

With the cathode solved, what remained was the anode. That challenge was tackled by Akira Yoshino at the Japanese chemical company Asahi Kasei. At first, he used polyacetylene, an electrically conductive plastic, but it was bulky and difficult to handle. He pivoted toward carbon and tested more than 100 materials. Eventually, he arrived at petroleum coke, a byproduct left over from refining crude oil. This material absorbed lithium at a very low potential of about 0.5 V (vs. Li/Li+). The lower the anode's potential, the wider the gap with the cathode, resulting in a higher cell voltage. He minimized the voltage penalty without having to use metallic lithium. In 1985, he filed a patent for this combination.

This is where the blueprint for today's lithium-ion battery was completed. Both the cathode and anode are materials that host and release lithium, and lithium simply shuttles back and forth between them in the form of ions. There is no chunk of lithium metal inside the cell. The industry compares this mechanism to a rocking chair: just as the chair rocks back and forth without going anywhere, lithium merely travels back and forth between the two materials.

The work divided among these three people finally won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9, 2019: Whittingham, Goodenough, and Yoshino. The citation was "for the development of lithium-ion batteries." Goodenough became the oldest person to ever receive a Nobel Prize at age 97, and passed away in 2023. The prize arrived 40 years after the invention. In the meantime, these batteries had already found their way into pockets all across the world.

Worth remembering The person who invented it, the person who paid the price, and the person who made the money were all completely different—this overarching rule of the entire story is established right here.

05In 1991, the First Customer Wasn't a Car

Let's turn the story back to the late 1980s. We'll start with what we put off in the previous chapter: what happened to those who didn't give up on lithium metal.

In August 1989, a mobile phone caught fire in Japan. The user suffered burns. The problematic battery was a rechargeable lithium metal battery made by Canada's Moli Energy. NTT recalled about 10,000 units, and the company went into receivership. It was the end of the line for the path that sought to tame lithium metal.

It was already known before then that lithium metal was dangerous. However, a laboratory hazard and an accident where someone gets hurt carry entirely different weight. After this incident, the industry's scales tipped completely. The 'giving up' we saw in the previous chapter was proven right, in the form of a company that refused to give up collapsing.

Then, in 1991, Sony commercialized the world's first lithium-ion battery. It turned Goodenough's cathode and the architecture organized by Yoshino into a single commercial product. This is an easy point to misunderstand: Sony did not invent the lithium-ion battery. It merely put it together. Yet putting it together was just as difficult as inventing it.

Why of all companies was it Sony? The hint lies in an unexpected place. Sony had a magnetic tape division. It was the division that produced cassette tapes and videotapes. What that work entailed was coating fine powder uniformly onto an ultra-thin film and winding it up. Making electrodes is precisely that: coating active material powder evenly onto metal foil and rolling it up. Add the electrochemistry of the battery division to this, and that was it. It means manufacturing technique, rather than raw materials, decided the outcome.

The first product it went into was a camcorder. Not a car, but a device slung over a shoulder to film a child's sports day. It was for the exact same reason as the wristwatches in the previous chapter. Because it was carried around, weight directly determined marketability, and devices that recorded longer sold even if they cost a bit more. A new battery always enters where saving weight commands a premium. Laptops followed, then mobile phones, and finally cars followed this sequence.

At that time, the cell's energy density was about 80Wh/kg, 200Wh/L. Production in the first year exceeded 100,000 units, and the following year, in 1992, it surpassed 1,000,000 units. It multiplied tenfold in just one year. From this point on, lithium-ion stopped being a lab curiosity and became a mass-manufactured product.

For reference, mature LCO-based cells have reached about 250Wh/kg, 600Wh/L. That is about three times the first generation in 1991. It took more than thirty years to triple. Considering how semiconductors evolved over the same period, this is a frustratingly slow pace. That is because batteries cannot be fixed with software; you can only overcome the limits set by chemistry by changing the materials.

Worth remembering Commercialization is not invention, but manufacturing. It is the moment the protagonist moves from the laboratory to the factory floor.

06From Laptops to Cars, Three Leaps

The first rivals lithium-ion displaced were nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries. The first leap took place in laptops. In the mid-to-late 1990s, laptops began switching over to lithium-ion. The reason was simple: they lasted longer at the same weight. There was a bonus, too. Nickel-based batteries suffered from the "memory effect," where repeatedly charging after only shallow use made capacity appear to shrink, but lithium-ion virtually eliminated it. A battery you could plug in anytime had finally arrived.

The second leap followed right behind. Mobile phones adopted the very same battery. When the battery changed, the shape of devices changed. Thinner and lighter laptops, along with mobile phones that slipped right into pockets, became possible. This mattered because it signaled that the battery was no longer just an internal component, but a factor defining the entire design of a product.

As the market grew, more manufacturers joined the race. In 1999, LG Chem built a lithium-ion mass-production line in Cheongju. It was a first for South Korea and the second mass-production facility anywhere in the world. Just eight years after Sony commercialized the battery, manufacturing caught right up to Japan. From here, the nature of the game changed once more. It was no longer about who made a better cell, but who could make them cheaper and in greater numbers. The arena had become a contest of economies of scale.

The three South Korean makers each picked a different form factor. LG Chem chose pouch cells that looked like flat envelopes filled with ternary chemistry, while Samsung SDI started from small cells and expanded into rigid box-shaped prismatic cells. SK On jumped into the fray last. Meanwhile, Japan's Panasonic stuck to cylindrical cells, became Tesla's cell-supply partner, and co-built a gigafactory in Nevada. Even with the same chemistry, the shape given to a cell divided each company's path. Different shapes required different production equipment, different pack assembly methods, and opened doors to entirely different customers.

The third leap arrived in an unexpected way. When the Tesla Roadster debuted in 2008, what went inside was not a brand-new battery developed specifically for automobiles. It was a pack made by wiring together 6,831 of the 18650 cylindrical cells commonly used in laptops. About 53 kWh with a nominal 375 V. Because large automotive cells did not exist yet, they simply rounded up small cells that were already being mass-produced at low cost. In essence, it was a sports car driven by laptop batteries. In 2010, the Nissan Leaf arrived packing flat pouch cells, officially opening the door to mass-produced electric vehicles.

As the stakes grew, the scale of accidents grew too. In September 2016, following fire incidents, about 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 units were fully recalled. The technical term "thermal runaway" appeared on TV news captions and quickly became a household phrase. It was an incident that proved to the industry how a flaw in a single cell could shake an entire company, and the role of the Battery Management System (BMS) in monitoring and controlling cells expanded dramatically.

These three leaps occurred across different devices, but the demand was always the same: cheaper, in greater volume, and with zero accidents. The moment all three are demanded at once, the competition circles back to cost and safety. And right there, a material that had long been overlooked seized its chance.

Worth remembering It was not technology but demand that expanded the playing field, and as the stakes grew, the competition shifted from raw performance to cost and safety.

07How Did LFP, Once Sidelined as Cheap, Make Its Comeback?

In 1996, Goodenough found yet another breakthrough, this time in Texas. Together with Padhi and Nanjundaswamy, he discovered and announced in 1997 lithium iron phosphate, or LFP for short. It is a cathode made from iron and phosphate, using neither cobalt nor nickel. Because its chemical bonds are robust, it does not easily break down even as temperatures climb, making it far less likely to catch fire. Its cycle life is also much longer than that of ternary batteries. It is cheap, too.

Yet it had a fatal drawback: low energy density. Even comparing state-of-the-art cells, ternary batteries reach up to 265Wh/kg, while LFP maxes out at 205Wh/kg. In an era when electric vehicle battles were fought over driving range, this difference instantly stamped LFP with the label of "cheap." Long-range cars received ternary batteries blending nickel and cobalt, while budget cars got LFP. Their places seemed firmly decided.

It was not that no one tried to turn LFP into a commercial product. Spun out of MIT in 2001, A123 Systems tackled the challenge using nanoscale iron phosphate. The outcome was bankruptcy in 2012, and the company was bought by China's Wanxiang Group. That was how a technology invented in the United States and failed at commercialization in the United States crossed over to China. A scene witnessed earlier was playing out all over again.

The way China turned the tables with this material was unexpected. Rather than improving the material itself, they changed how it was packaged. What gets mounted in a car is not an individual cell, but a pack—a large block assembled by grouping multiple cells into modules, and then bundling those modules inside a case along with cooling hardware and control circuits. Yet a significant portion of a pack's weight and volume is empty housing that stores no electricity. So what if you eliminate the module stage and place cells directly into the pack? This approach is called cell-to-pack. Because dead casing is removed and more cells fit into the same volume, even if cell performance stays the same, the driving range of the car increases.

In March 2020, BYD introduced the Blade Battery. It removed modules altogether by lining up long, blade-shaped cells across the floor of the pack. The highlight of the announcement was the nail penetration test. When a nail was driven through the cell, there was neither smoke nor fire, and the surface temperature remained at 30~60℃. Under the exact same test, a ternary cell burned violently, surging past 500℃. In June 2022, CATL unveiled its third-generation cell-to-pack, the Qilin battery. It promised a 1,000km range with a pack volume utilization rate of 72% and cell energy density of up to 255Wh/kg. In August 2023, it launched the Shenxing LFP battery capable of 4C fast charging, claiming 400km of range from a 10-minute charge. One after another, the weaknesses of a material once called slow and weak were erased.

The numbers flipped rapidly. In July 2021, China's monthly LFP installation volume reached 5.8GWh, surpassing ternary batteries' 5.5GWh for the first time. Over that entire year, LFP's 79.8GWh overtook ternary's 74.3GWh, claiming 51.7% to 48.1%. A technology that accounted for less than 10% of global EV batteries as recently as 2020 climbed to about half in 2024 and topped 55% in 2025. Two-thirds of electric vehicle sales in China are LFP.

Yet the world did not all head in one direction. As of 2025, about 80% of batteries installed outside China were still nickel-based. The market has effectively split in two: LFP leads where price comes first, and ternary dominates where driving range is the priority.

Worth remembering If you cannot win with the material, change the packaging. This change of guard came from engineering, not chemistry.

08When Do They Say Solid-State Is Coming—and What Should We Watch For?

The technology most frequently mentioned as the next big step is the solid-state battery. True to its name, it replaces the liquid electrolyte with a solid one. Just eliminating flammable liquid from inside the cell is a massive win for safety. But what comes next is even more exciting. If the solid electrolyte is sturdy enough, we can bring back the lithium-metal anode that was abandoned long ago. It means picking back up, after fifty years, the very card that was discarded in Chapter 3 of this story.

If it were easy, it would already be here. The challenges are largely twofold. First, solids have a hard time making seamless contact with other solids. Liquids fill gaps on their own, but solids have to be pressed together, and when materials expand and contract during charging and discharging, the contact surfaces pull apart. And reports keep emerging that dendrites grow even inside solids. That means the exact homework problem that forced the abandonment of lithium metal fifty years ago still hasn't been solved. Most of what exists today remains at the prototype stage.

We need to read the timelines with caution. Samsung SDI announced that it would begin mass production of solid-state batteries in Ulsan in 2027, targeting over 900Wh/L. Toyota and BYD are also pointing to the window between 2027 and 2030 as the timeline for pilot production or mass production. However, all of these numbers are targets set by corporations. Timelines in this field have been pushed back multiple times before. It is much more accurate to read them not as 'coming out in year X,' but as 'targeting year X.'

Another one to watch is the sodium-ion battery. This battery uses sodium, which is far more abundant and cheaper than lithium, but its energy density tops out at 175Wh/kg, lower than LFP. The fate of this technology hinges on the price of lithium rather than its own performance. In November 2022, lithium carbonate prices hit an all-time high of over 600,000 yuan per ton before plunging to the 60,000-yuan range. When lithium is expensive, sodium emerges as an alternative; when lithium gets cheap, the rationale fades. Right now, sodium-ion production capacity stands at about 1% of lithium-ion, with forecasts projecting it will reach about 7% in 2030.

Prices continue to fall. The average battery pack price has broken record lows year after year: $139 per kWh in 2023, $115 in 2024, and $108 in 2025. Yet the cost of the exact same product is not uniform everywhere. As of 2025, the average pack price in China was $84, while North America was 44% more expensive and Europe was 56% more expensive. By chemistry as well, LFP packs stood at $81 per kWh, while ternary chemistries reached $128. A single line on a price tag reveals a country's entire factory density and supply chain.

So what should we be watching? Let's highlight just four things. First, whether solid-state timelines are delayed once again or actual production lines start running. Second, whether the share of LFP rises outside China or nickel-based chemistries maintain their dominance. Third, whether lithium prices surge again—which is when sodium-ion and recycling come back to life together. Fourth, the speed of fast charging. If charging times firmly settle into the ten-minute range, driving range becomes less critical, and the weakness of low-energy-density materials fades right along with it.

And one final thought. The players pushed aside in this story were generally not pushed out for a lack of technology. Exxon created the first lithium battery, Goodenough invented two cathodes still used today, and Sony was the first to bring this commercial product to the world. Yet as of the first half of 2026, seven out of the top ten global EV battery companies are Chinese, accounting for a combined 72.4%. South Korea, which ran the world's second mass production line in 1999, sits in third place with LG Energy Solution at 8.6%. Once again, the pioneers who started making them first and the leaders who make the most today have drifted apart. The phrase 'first-mover advantage' has rarely held true in this industry. And who takes the next turn is far from settled.

Worth remembering Not a prophecy, but a spectator's guide: solid-state timelines, the globalization of LFP, lithium prices, and charging speeds—you only need to watch these four.