A team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. Until now, extracting lithium from hard rock is an energy- and waste-intensive process that’s often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard-rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000°C and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard-rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water. A paper describing the process, titled “Valorization of lithium hardrock concentrates into battery raw materials and commodity products,” was recently published in Science.