{"id":9153,"date":"2026-05-30T05:36:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T09:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=9153"},"modified":"2026-05-30T05:36:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T09:36:29","slug":"mit-researchers-low-cost-lithium-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/mit-researchers-low-cost-lithium-rocks\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-Five Years Ago an MIT Professor Used Hardware-Store Glass-Etching Cream to Frost His Bathroom Windows. The Same Chemical Just Halved the Cost of Getting Lithium From Rock \u2014 the Reason China Controls Refining"},"content":{"rendered":"

China refines most of the world’s lithium, even though the U.S., Australia and Europe are sitting on plenty of the rock that contains it. That’s the awkward backdrop to every “onshore the supply chain” speech you’ve heard in the past three years<\/a>, and it has a pretty boring chemistry reason behind it: getting lithium out of hard rock is expensive, energy-hungry and wasteful. So the cheapest route runs through brine ponds and Chinese refineries, and everybody else watches.<\/p>\n

A team out of MIT thinks it has a way around that, and they published it on May 28 in the journal Science<\/em>. Instead of cooking spodumene rock past 1,000 degrees Celsius and leaching the lithium out with aggressive chemistry, they dissolve the rock at low temperature \u2014 topping out around 200 \u00b0F \u2014 using a weak acid you can buy at a craft store. The leftover bits aren’t waste either: they come out as alumina good enough for a smelter and silica you can mix into cement. An MIT News writeup<\/a> puts the projected cost at roughly half of conventional hard-rock extraction, which would finally put hard rock in the same price conversation as brine.<\/p>\n

The MIT spinout commercializing it is called Rock Zero, and it has already designed a pilot plant.<\/p>\n

The bathroom remodel that became a lithium process<\/h2>\n

The origin story is genuinely ridiculous. About 25 years ago, Yet-Ming Chiang \u2014 MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and a serial founder behind Form Energy, Sublime Systems and Addis Energy \u2014 was redoing a shower in Framingham, Massachusetts, and wanted to frost some glass blocks. He grabbed an etching cream off a hardware store shelf. The active ingredient was ammonium fluoride, a weak acid that eats silica.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to the present, and Chiang’s team was hunting for a way to dissolve spodumene, the most common lithium-bearing mineral. Spodumene is mostly silica, just like glass. Standard mining chemistry is bad at silica because silicon-oxygen bonds are stubborn, so the usual move is to attack the more reactive elements first and leave a silica-heavy sludge behind. Chiang flipped that. Go after the silica first with the etching-cream chemistry, and the rest of the rock falls apart on its own.<\/p>\n

The team also came to spodumene sideways. That same etching-cream chemistry is useful for making the highly reactive silica that goes into low-carbon cement \u2014 the space Chiang’s other venture, Sublime Systems, works in \u2014 and, as MIT Technology Review reports<\/a>, it was Doug Wicks, a Rock Zero advisor and former ARPA-E program director, who suggested pointing the chemistry at lithium ore instead.<\/p>\n

Why ammonium fluoride and not hydrofluoric acid<\/h2>\n

Dissolving silicates isn’t new science. The classic way to do it is hydrofluoric acid, which is one of the more terrifying chemicals you can keep in a lab. It eats glass, eats bone, and several other fluorine-based chemicals will produce HF as a byproduct mid-reaction, which is the kind of surprise nobody wants.<\/p>\n

Ammonium fluoride doesn’t do that. It’s the same weak acid sitting in glass-etching cream at any craft store, and the team found a recipe that dissolves silicates without spinning off hydrofluoric acid along the way. That matters a lot if you’re trying to scale this to industrial volumes without building a small chemical weapons facility next to your lithium mine.<\/p>\n

The lab setup is also unfussy. The process runs in basic stirred plastic tanks at temperatures topping out around 200 \u00b0F. Earlier runs pulled out nearly all of the lithium in the ore over a couple of days; the team has since cut that to under 12 hours, per Benjamin Mowbray, first author on the Science<\/em> paper and Rock Zero’s CTO and cofounder. Across 17 different spodumene sources from around the world, the process recovered more than 95 percent of the lithium every time.<\/p>\n

Nose-to-tail mining, which Chiang means literally<\/h2>\n

Here’s the part that separates this from “neat lab trick.” After the ammonium fluoride does its work, the team isolates three products from a single batch of rock. There’s lithium, which they can pull out as lithium fluoride for battery electrolytes, or as lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate for cathode chemistry \u2014 both of which required new sub-processes involving carbon dioxide or sodium carbonate. There’s alumina, separated using a high-temperature step, which is the same alumina that feeds aluminum smelters. And there’s silica, recovered by precipitation, which can go straight into cement.<\/p>\n

Chiang calls this “nose-to-tail” mining. The reagent and solvent get recovered and looped back in \u2014 the silica drops out of solution when ammonia gas from the process is reapplied, which regenerates the starting ammonium fluoride \u2014 so waste lands close to zero. Conventional hard-rock processing, by contrast, throws away most of the rock after the lithium leaves. If you’re a mining company, that’s not just an environmental win, it’s three product streams instead of one out of the same ore body.<\/p>\n

Camden Hunt, a former project manager at MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry and now Rock Zero’s CEO and cofounder, makes the demand math bluntly in the MIT release: lithium production needs to quadruple by 2040, which amounts to hundreds of new producing assets. Hard rock is everywhere. Most of the refining capacity isn’t.<\/p>\n

The kiln problem this dodges<\/h2>\n

One of the underrated wins here is what happens when you skip the kiln. Conventional spodumene processing roasts the ore at extreme temperatures to puff it up and make the lithium reachable. That’s the energy bill everyone complains about, but it’s also a quality filter. Hunt told MIT Technology Review that ore with too much iron doesn’t go through the phase change properly \u2014 it melts into a glassy mess instead of transforming. So a chunk of available ore basically can’t be processed by the standard playbook.<\/p>\n

A low-temperature dissolution process doesn’t care about the phase change, because there isn’t one. In theory that opens up ore bodies that current refiners walk away from.<\/p>\n

The economics the team is projecting are aggressive: a target of under $6,000 per metric ton of lithium, assuming the ammonium fluoride gets recycled at a high rate. The team has also reportedly identified a cheap industrial source of the acid as a backup to recycling, which is the kind of detail that separates a real cost projection from a press release. Chiang has gone on record calling it “the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period.”<\/p>\n

The market it’s walking into<\/h2>\n

The catch is that lithium prices have been on a roller coaster. They peaked in 2022, cratered in late 2024, and started climbing again earlier this year. Rock Zero’s pilot plant is designed, the team is looking for a site, and the plan is to finish construction by the end of 2026 and start running it in 2027. Talks with mining partners are underway.<\/p>\n

Simon Jowitt, who chairs the exploration geology department at the University of Nevada, Reno, told MIT Technology Review that the broader industry is in wait-and-see mode on price. Rising prices help new entrants like Rock Zero. They also pull in every dormant lithium project on a shelf somewhere, which can flatten the price right back down. It’s a crowded room.<\/p>\n

There’s also a parallel chemistry conversation happening elsewhere in batteries that’s worth keeping on the radar. Sodium-ion cells from China’s Hina are now matching some performance benchmarks of Tesla-grade lithium-ion cells<\/a>, according to a teardown study published the same week in Cell Reports Physical Science<\/em>, with sodium-ion’s cost case resting on a raw material that’s far easier to source than lithium. None of that kills lithium demand \u2014 sodium-ion lags on energy density and low-temperature charging, much like the chemistry trade-offs playing out across the solid-state race<\/a> \u2014 but it’s a reminder that “cheaper lithium” is racing against “cheaper not-lithium.”<\/p>\n

If Rock Zero’s cost math holds up at pilot scale, the interesting question isn’t whether it beats brine. It’s whether U.S. and Australian hard-rock deposits stop being a geopolitical talking point and start being an actual refinery pipeline. The chemistry came from a shower remodel. The supply chain implications, somehow, are real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIT researchers built a room-temperature process to pull battery-grade lithium out of hard rock at half the cost, and a spinout called Rock Zero wants to scale it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9157,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9158,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9153\/revisions\/9158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}