The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge - a five-fold increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said.

The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery.