19 ms·
USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoGreat, now ask the AI to engineer a fungal genome that'll help us purify it more easily: Frack in the substrate and spores, harvest fruit bodies on the surface, profit.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoThis entire problem will solved without offering human employment in a place that would probably welcome it at this pace.
- moffkalast 2y agoI mean, what could possibly go wrong?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWhat are you worried about, zombies that want to eat your batteries?
- moffkalast 2y agoWas thinking more about sink holes and the entire area caving in after much of the underground is destabilized and/or removed, but battery eating zombies would be worse.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIdeally we'd just be removing lithium and adding mycelium (mostly carbon) so the net mass removed would be near zero. The zombies though, yeah, that's a worry. I assumed you were worried about GMO fungus wrecking the soil ecology or somesuch. Not an insignificant risk, but it's hard to believe that it could be worse than tiling the surface with evaporation ponds.
- chromatin 2y agoSerious question: Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?
- no_wizard 2y agoI am not a health researcher or anyting, but a quick googling seems to suggest its possible that it lowers risks of suicide[0] and other affective disorders, which by extension it would lower the rates of issues that can contribute to these issues I'd think. That said, I honestly am unsure. It also is a requisite that it must be in the water in sufficient but low amounts [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716281/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716281/
- kranke155 2y agoIt also shrinks your white matter I think, and has other gigantic bad effects. Source: am bipolar and take 600mg daily.
- astrange 2y agoIt also causes obesity and may be the cause of American obesity in the South. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-part-vii-lithium/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p...
- pfdietz 2y agoI wonder how much lithium leaches out of Corningware (made of lithium aluminum silicate glass ceramic), particularly when cooking acid foods. Probably not a huge amount.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe formation is 7000 feet below the surface, if I understand correctly, so I don't think there would be any communication of its brine with potable groundwater.
- hiddencost 2y agoLove to see a project that uses bog standard ML techniques and doesn't call them AI. Respect.
- strbean 2y agoAre we getting to the critical point where we declassify a bunch of stuff as AI? Used to be expert systems were considered AI. Now anything-not-an-LLM is going to stop being AI?
- lovich 2y agoThat treadmills been going on for a long time. Didn’t OCR used to be classified as AI?
- jpk 2y agoYep, back when programming language syntax started trending toward more natural language, compiler development was considered AI research. Which makes sense, because in an era of assembly on punch cards, computers that could translate higher-level instructions that read more like English into machine code you used to have to write (or punch) by hand probably felt pretty intelligent.
- bloopernova 2y agoIt's the new Hacking vs Cracking. Or calling any computer a PC.
- gowld 2y agoIn this case it's Fracking
- driggs 2y agoQuoth the article: The USGS predictive model provides the first estimate of total lithium present in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.
- folli 2y agoFrom the paper's method section, a bit more about which type of ML algo was used: An RF machine-learning model was developed to predict lithium concentrations in Smackover Formation brines throughout southern Arkansas. The model was developed by (i) assigning explanatory variables to brine samples collected at wells, (ii) tuning the RF model to make predictions at wells and assess model performance, (iii) mapping spatially continuous predictions of lithium concentrations across the Reynolds oolite unit of the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, and (iv) inspecting the model for explanatory variable importance and influence. Initial model tuning used the tidymodels framework (52) in R (53) to test XGBoost, K-nearest neighbors, and RF algorithms; RF models consistently had higher accuracy and lower bias, so they were used to train the final model and predict lithium. Explanatory variables used to tune the RF model included geologic, geochemical, and temperature information for Jurassic and Cretaceous units. The geologic framework of the model domain is expected to influence brine chemistry both spatially and with depth. Explanatory variables used to train the RF model must be mapped across the model domain to create spatially continuous predictions of lithium. Thus, spatially continuous subsurface geologic information is key, although these digital resources are often difficult to acquire. Interesting to me that RF performed better the XGBoost, would have expected at least a similar outcome if tuned correctly.
- jandrese 2y agoDid they actually verify the predictions? In my reading of the article I didn't see any core samples being made to verify the model is correct.
- jofer 2y agoThere wouldn't be any core for this. It would be a holdout of the brine samples used in training. The thing that would be being produced is brine, so lithium concentrations in brine samples are the validation dataset as well. In other words, this is spatial interpolation.
- tomrod 2y agoRF is a heavy hitter when it comes to tabular data. XGBoost is good as well, but more often than not needs and autotuner to really unlock it (e.g pycaret).
- bilsbie 2y agoMe thinks we might switch batteries to sodium in just a few years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jandrese 2y agoI think there will be markets for many different chemistries and there's unlikely to be some total winner in the near future. Each chemistry has its own tradeoffs and use cases. Some will fade and die over time like Ni-Cad, but even that takes longer than you would expect. It would be amazing for some low weight, low volume, high energy density, high discharge rate, high charge rate, cheaply manufactured from abundant materials, low thermal sensitivity, high thermal tolerance, low passive loss, non-explosive, high cycle count, low memory, shelf stable battery chemistry to appear, but thus far every one fails in several of the categories.
- idontwantthis 2y agoSay Lithium becomes essentially free because we find so much of it…would that drastically lower battery costs? Is our current supply of lithium limiting production?
- astrange 2y agoNo, lithium is not rare and we have enough of it. It's available from friendly countries like Australia too.
- EA-3167 2y agoThe major limiting factor of lithium is not really availability so much as the cost of extraction. China is the leader in this field, not so much because of abundance or stellar technology, but out of a willingness to completely ignore environmental externalities (including those of the power generation involved in the whole process). As a result the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially impossible to compete with them unless a country had similar... "advantages"... or some new and impressive technology. In the US environmental regulations, the cost of producing power, labor costs, would all drive up the price of the end product in a way that makes it totally noncompetitive. That's also why the US and some other countries are investing in other ways to find lithium (among other things) on seabeds, where it's hoped that extraction would be less expensive. Of course the threat to the seabed environment is a concern, which in turn might drive up prices by imposing regulation, etc etc etc.
- p00dles 2y agoWhat an informative comment, thank you
- engineer_22 2y ago> the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially impossible to compete with them... In an export model, yes. However, given their negative externalities (including geo-political factors), importing countries may place tariffs on Chinese lithium in order to make use of other sources. If the total embodied value of lithium in any particular product is small compared to the overall value of the product, the tariff might not represent a significant drag on the indigenous industry.
- nubinetwork 2y agoRelated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907144
- flenserboy 2y agoInteresting, & not necessarily in a good way. This method could well presage unprecedented numbers of attempts at eminent domain takings or other means of forcing people out of their properties.
- richwater 2y agoNational security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
- ifdefdebug 2y agosure. just make sure to pay them what their land is worth... with the lithium below.
- jumploops 2y agoDo most residential land parcels include mining rights?
- chx 2y agohttps://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-the-minerals-under-your-property.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-the-mineral... > Mineral rights are automatically included as a part of the land in a property conveyance, unless and until the ownership gets separated at some point by an owner/seller. > Since sellers of land can convey only property that they own, each sale of the land after the minerals are separated automatically includes only the land. Deeds to the land made after the first separation of the minerals will not refer to the fact that the mineral rights are not included. > in most cases, you cannot determine whether you own the rights to the minerals under your land just by looking at your deed. Owners are sometimes surprised to find out someone else owns the rights to the minerals under their land > U.S. laws regulating mining and mineral rights typically prohibit mineral owners from damaging or interfering with the use of any homes or other improvements on the land when extracting minerals. As a result, mineral owners do not typically attempt mineral extraction in highly populated areas. This means that if you live in a city, or an area with many houses on small plots of land, you probably won't need to worry about whether or not you own any minerals that might be under you
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hello_computer 2y ago[flagged]
- greenie_beans 2y agough i really don't want people to mine in the mobile basin. that's one of the most diverse ecosystems in north america. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j9coyJeB4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j9coyJeB4Q
- mmaunder 2y agoExtracting lithium from brine is cleaner than e.g. extraction from spodumene ore. Also direct lithium extraction from brine is faster, cleaner, smaller footprint, lower energy consumption.
- pfdietz 2y agoSomeone was telling me a proposed hard rock lithium mine in the US would be powered by burning sulfur. They need the sulfuric acid so produced to dissolve the spondumene anyway, and trucking in solid sulfur is cheaper than trucking in the sulfuric acid made elsewhere. Sulfur, currently extracted by desulfurization of oil and gas, gets more expensive in the post fossil fuel society, but there are other sources (like pyrite).
- declan_roberts 2y agoIt seems backwards, but pretty much the only fuel that protects ecosystems on a large scale are fossil fuels and nuclear. Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
- jerf 2y agoI read the article carefully, twice. Doesn't have a link to any original paper, of course. And I can't find the answer to my question... did they, you know, validate the model? Did they actually take some samples at new locations and compare it to what the model says? Or are they literally just announcing that "Hey, we told the computer to tell us something, so it told us something"? Yes, that is how it works. The computer will always tell you something if you make it tell you something. That isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting it to tell you things that correspond to reality. In the absence of validation, this means very little, especially in an environment where the USGS is fairly incentivized to loudly announce to the world that we've totes got plenty of lithium, my fellow countries, any effort to keep lithium away from us is just a waste of time, look at us just rolling in lithium over here. Or, maybe they did do the validation, and it's just the reporting that doesn't consider that an important aspect of the story. Somewhere between funding and press release someone's lost the trail but I don't know who exactly.
- gwern 2y agoIt has a link to the original paper clearly visible right at the bottom where they usually are in scientific press releases like this? > The study, which was published in Science Advances, can be found at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8149 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8149 .
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nodesocket 2y agoTime to buy some cheap land in southern Arkansas?
- lovich 2y agoOh, is this where the conspiracy theory about the government controlling hurricanes to wipe out the south so that they could get lithium came from? If not that’s funny timing given that was a few weeks ago
- Animats 2y agoThere's also a big lithium deposit in Nevada, and preparations for mining are underway there.[1] General Motors put in $650 million for guaranteed access to the output of this Thacker Mine. It's in a caldera in a mountain that I-80 bypassed to go through Winnemuca, Nevada. Nearest town is Mill City, NV, which is listed as a ghost town, despite being next to I-80 and a main line railroad track. The mine site is about 12km from Mill City on a dirt road not tracked by Google Street View. Google Earth shows signs of development near Mill City. Looks like a trailer park and a truck stop. The road to the mine looks freshly graded. Nothing at the mine site yet. It's a good place for a mine. There are no neighbors for at least 10km, but within 15km, there's good road and rail access. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine
- diggernet 2y agoYour description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link. Searching in Google Maps, Thacker Mine comes up as 40.58448942010599, -117.8912129833345. As you say, that is near I-80 and Mill City, and there is nothing there. But Wikipedia says it's at 41.70850912415866, -118.05475061324945 in the McDermitt Caldera, nowhere near Mill City or I-80. I'm thinking probably don't trust Google on this one. :)
- Animats 2y agoRight. The Nevada Appeal, which actually has people on the ground, has far more info.[1] North of Thacker Pass is the area to look. The mine is building their own rail yard west of Winnemuca. The mine will be an open-pit mine like a coal mine. Sawtooth Mining division of North American Coal will do the mining. Dig down 350 feet, take out clay with lithium, process, put back clay without lithium. The processing plant will be at Thacker Pass. Big plant, maybe 1800 people. Lithium in clay is a new thing - the usual input is brine. Also a sulfuric acid plant, a power plant, housing, etc. Project assumes a loan of US$2.3 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy. "Lithium Americas will contract with a bus company to drive workers an hour to the site for 10-hour work shifts, he added. An additional two hours will be added for transportation time. If you go to work on our project, you will have free room and board and free transportation to the site every day. You would get three free meals a day." If you're an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia, that might look good. [1] https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2024/oct/12/nevada-operation-could-be-largest-lithium-resource-in-north-america/ https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2024/oct/12/nevada-operati...
- tommykins 2y agoAh spatial autocorrelation, my old friend. Very good work - but typically we don't build prospectivity models this way (or rather we don't validate them this way anymore). Great to see the USGS starting to dip their toe back in this though, they and the GSC were long the leaders in this, but have dropped it on the last 5-7 years.
- _heimdall 2y agoWell I guess this is a good win for short term energy infrastructure, though I'm always pretty torn when its at the cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material. It is interesting to see how much of this data could be modelled based on wastewater brines from other industries in the area, assuming we go on to mine the lithium it will say a lot if the ML predictions prove accurate. One thing I couldn't tell, and its probably just a limitation of how much time I could spend reading the source paper, is what method would be needed to extract the bulk of the lithium expected to be there. If processing brine water is sufficient that may be easier to control externalities than if they have to strip mine and get all the overburden out of the way first.
- jofer 2y agoYou physically can't remove the overburden for this. The Smackover is at a depth of multiple kilometers in most of these areas. It's mining brine. I.e. the "mines" are basically deep water wells. The limestone itself doesn't have any lithium. It's the water in the pores in the limestone that is relatively concentrated in lithium. In most of these cases, you're already producing brines from the smackover formation as a part of existing oil and gas production, but the brine is being re-injecting after oil is separated from it. The idea is that it's better to keep those and evaporate them down for lithium production. That does require large evaporation ponds, generally speaking, but it's not strip mining.
- _heimdall 2y agoExtremely helpful, thanks for the extra detail here. I have a background in the oil industry and live in a region strip mined for coal (I actually can't tap a useful ground well because of it), but I don't know much about how lithium is actually extracted. As far as evap ponds go, are there usually chemicals or elements in the same brine water as lithium that is important when evaporating into the atmosphere?
- jofer 2y agoThere are a lot of things in deep subsurface brine. It really varies. First and foremost, here are definitely lots of other salts. It is brine, after all. You produce a lot of halite (salt), gypsum, calcite, and all kinds of other evaporite minerals. There are all kinds of things in smaller concentrations, though. What comes out of a oil/water separator would need lots of additional processing before going to something like an evap pond. It's relatively hazardous stuff for a lot of reasons other than oil (e.g. it can be rather radioactive). It typically goes through quite a bit of additional processing unless it's being immediately reinjected.
- joelignaatius 2y ago[dead]
- rmm 2y agoWork in this industry (hard rock mining). Lithium supply is not an issue. Here in oz we have plenty, there is surplus in market (see current lithium prices). Conversion however is an issue, majority of plants are in China. Build some refiners that turn it into lithium carbonate and oz will fill them.
- specialist 2y agoI eagerly anticipate the day Australia becomes the World's Forge. All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo. h/t Saul Griffith.
- jaza 2y agoWe could start by at least processing our own steel (we still process some, but not nearly as much as we used to). Newcastle Steelworks, just north of Sydney, was back in the day one of the biggest in the world, but it closed down in the 90s. Nowadays, we ship iron ore (our number 1 export) to China, and literally ship that same material back to Australia as steel. Insane!
- farceSpherule 2y agoWill never happen, because, you know... The environment... People in the U.S. would rather be slaves to China than be self sufficient as we once were...
- FactKnower69 2y agoat what point in history was the US ever anything approaching "self sufficient"? did I miss the american juche autarky period in history class?
- CHB0403085482 2y agoLithium for everyone! https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environment/arkansas-lithium-ev-batteries.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...
- metadat 2y agoWall-free: https://archive.today/59cJH https://archive.today/59cJH
- voidUpdate 2y ago> "the amount of lithium present would meet projected 2030 world demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over" Does that mean the entire field has enough lithium for the requirements of 2030, 9 times? Or in other words, it can supply the lithium needs of car batteries from 2030 to 2039? That's not particularly long...
- bitmasher9 2y agoLithium is infinitely recyclable. We cannot really predict lithium demand in 2039, because technology changes much. Look at steel. Most of the steel used is recycled steel, we don’t mine a lot of it any more. If you asked someone 90 years ago, they would have assumed global steel demand would continue to rise.
- asdflkjvlkj 2y agoIn the USA, most steel is recycled. Most of the rest of the world uses basic oxygen furnace by wide margin.
- sidewndr46 2y agoIs lithium even rare enough to matter? I've read that the Salton sea may contain enough lithium to supply years of demand anyways. From my observation, it isn't the presence of lithium that matters. It's how to cheaply exploit it into a commercial product. For most purposes this just boils down to "mine it somewhere without environmental regulations"
- TheThirstyGeo 2y agoSimilar work done in Canada: https://www.juniorminingnetwork.com/junior-miner-news/press-releases/1940-tsx-venture/lmr/106571-bourier-lithium-project-update-lomiko-metals-and-critical-elements-report-discoveries-and-identify-lithium-targets-for-exploration-using-goldspot-discoveries-artificial-intelligence-methods.html https://www.juniorminingnetwork.com/junior-miner-news/press-...