Lithium sits at the center of the battery economy. Yet getting it out of rock still looks surprisingly crude. Spodumene, the world’s most common lithium-bearing hard rock, is usually blasted with heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. After that, acids and other chemicals pull out the metal. What remains is largely waste. That old route has helped China dominate lithium refining. Even though countries like the United States and Australia hold large lithium resources of their own, China still leads the industry. Additionally, it has made hard-rock lithium more expensive than lithium drawn from brines. Yet brine extraction can place environmental strain on water-stressed regions. A team led by researchers from MIT now says it has found a way around one of the industry’s central bottlenecks. Specifically, the challenge is how to crack open hard rock without the punishing heat, heavy waste, and long chain of cleanup steps that define conventional refining. In a paper published in Science, the group describes a low-temperature, closed-loop process that extracts battery-grade lithium salts from spodumene. It also recovers alumina …