Oljejätten Exxon lägger om – ska börja borra efter litium

Michael Stanley Whittingham (born 22 December 1941) is a British-American chemist. He is currently a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.Whittingham is a key figure in the history of the development of lithium-ion batteries, which now are used in everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles. He first discovered intercalation electrodes and thoroughly described the concept of intercalation reactions in rechargeable batteries in the 1970s. He holds the original patents on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high power-density, highly reversible lithium-ion batteries. He also invented the first rechargeable lithium metal battery (LMB), patented in 1977, and assigned to Exxon for commercialization in small devices and electric vehicles. Whittingham's rechargeable lithium metal battery is based on a LiAl anode and an intercalation-type TiS2 cathode. His work on lithium batteries laid the foundations for others' later developments, and he is therefore called the founding father of lithium-ion batteries.

Litium, uttal: li't(s)ium (latinskt namn Lithium), är grundämne nummer tre (3) i det periodiska systemet. Litium tillhör gruppen alkalimetaller och har kemiskt tecken Li. Litium var det första grundämne som utsattes för en helt artificiell kärnreaktion. John Cockcroft och Ernest Walton bombarderade 1932 Litium-7 kärnor med protoner från en partikelaccelerator. Försöket resulterade i en splittring av Li-kärnorna på ett sådant sätt, att två helium-kärnor bildades.