Lithium is everywhere: in the battery in your phone, in every electric vehicle on the road, in the grid-scale storage systems that make renewable energy viable. Global demand is surging, and it will only accelerate. There’s just one problem: getting lithium out of the ground is expensive, toxic, and heavily concentrated in the hands of three countries. An MIT startup wants to change all of that, starting with an insight its founder had while renovating his bathroom.
The Concentration Problem
In 2024, roughly three quarters of the world’s lithium came from just three countries: China, Australia, and Chile. That concentration isn’t a geological accident — it’s a consequence of how lithium is currently extracted. Most production relies on brine, where lithium-rich water is pumped into vast evaporation pools and slowly refined. The process is slow, water-intensive, and geographically limited to places where the geology cooperates.
The alternative — pulling lithium from solid rock — has always existed in theory. One ore called spodumene is particularly rich in lithium, at around 1.5% by weight, and deposits of it are widespread across the US, Europe, and Africa. The problem is liberating the lithium. The conventional process involves crushing the rock, blasting it at temperatures up to 1,100 degrees Celsius, and dousing it in toxic chemicals. For every tonne of lithium produced, roughly 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide are released. The economics and the environmental costs have kept it from becoming the dominant extraction method.
The Bathroom Breakthrough
Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials scientist at MIT, made the key connection while standing in his bathroom thinking about how to break apart spodumene. The rock’s high silica content is the main obstacle — silica is exceptionally hard to dissolve without resorting to hydrofluoric acid, one of the most dangerous chemicals in industrial use.
But Chiang noticed that glass etching cream — the kind sold in ordinary home improvement shops — also dissolves silica, using ammonium fluoride, a far milder compound. If it could etch glass at room temperature, could it eat through lithium-rich rock?
It could.
How the Process Works
By mixing ammonium fluoride with water and continuously stirring spodumene ore in a simple plastic tank at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius — well under the boiling point of water — the MIT team was able to completely dissolve the rock and extract lithium salts at 99% purity. No extreme heat. No toxic fumes. Early experiments took several days; the team has since cut the process to under 12 hours.
Crucially, the ammonium fluoride can be regenerated and reused at least five times, dramatically reducing chemical waste. The team has tested the method on 17 different spodumene ores sourced from around the world, and it worked on all of them.
The process doesn’t just produce lithium. Spodumene also contains alumina, a precursor to aluminium, and silica, which can be used directly as a sustainable ingredient in greener cement. Rather than discarding these as waste, the new method separates them out as usable products — what the team calls “nose-to-tail mining.” Nothing useful ends up in a waste stream.
What This Could Change
The economic implications are significant. If the chemical recycling process can be made near-perfectly efficient at scale, the team estimates costs could fall more than 40% compared to conventional hard-rock extraction — making it competitive with brine operations, which currently set the price floor for lithium globally.
But the deeper potential is geographic. Because the process runs at low temperatures and doesn’t require vast waste-treatment infrastructure, it could be deployed in countries that have spodumene deposits but currently lack the capital and industrial capacity to exploit them. That opens the door to a network of smaller, distributed refineries built close to the mines themselves — reducing transport costs, shortening supply chains, and breaking the stranglehold that a handful of countries currently hold over global lithium production.
The low energy requirements also mean the process could plausibly be powered by solar and wind, shrinking its carbon footprint further.
The team has already spun the research into a startup called Rock Zero, and is working to scale the technology.
The Road Ahead
None of this comes without caveats. Taking on established lithium giants is a formidable challenge. The market is volatile, and competing battery chemistries — sodium-ion batteries in particular — are advancing quickly enough to potentially reshape demand for lithium in the medium term. The gap between a successful laboratory process and industrial-scale production is always substantial.
But the underlying logic is compelling. The world needs lithium in quantities that current extraction methods, with their geographic concentration and environmental costs, may struggle to deliver. A cheaper, cleaner, and more widely deployable alternative doesn’t just solve an industrial chemistry problem — it could meaningfully shift the geopolitics of the energy transition.
“We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium out of hard rock — but period,” said Chiang. The ambition is clear. Whether Rock Zero can scale it up to match it is the question that matters now.