From 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.
Put another way, this is pretty similar to the interpolation approaches that would normally be used for datasets like this in the world of mineral exploration. Kriging/co-kriging (i.e. gaussian processes) is the more commonly used approach in this particular field due to both the long history and the available hyperparameters for things like spatial aniostropy.
However, kriging is really quite difficult to use with non-continuous inputs. RF is a lot more forgiving there. You don't need to develop a covariance model for discrete values (or a covariance model for how the different inputs relate, either).
So it turns out that there's no theoretical reason that gradient boosting will always outperform RF (which would violate the "no free lunch" theorem). But it does usually seem to be the case in practice, even with small and noisy data.
I would hazard a guess that with better tuning, XGBoost would still have won. (The paper notes that the authors chose a suboptimal set of hyperparameters out of fear of overfitting - maybe the same logic justifies choosing a suboptimal model type...)
That's been my experience. RF tends to do quite well out of the box, and is very fast to fit. It's less of a pain to cross-validate too, with fewer tuning parameters. XGBoost has a huge number of knobs to tune, and its performance varies from god-awful with bad hyperparameters to somewhat better than RF with good ones. Giant PITA with nested cross-validation, etc. though.
I haven't read in detail what their validation strategy is but this seems like the kind of problem where it's not so easy as you'd think -- you need to be very careful about how you stratify your train, dev, and test sets. A random 80/10/10 split would be way too optimistic: your model would just learn to interpolate between geographically proximate locations. You'd probably need to cross-validate across different geographic areas.
This also seems like an application that would benefit from "active learning". given that drilling and testing is expensive, you'd want to choose where to collect new data based on where it would best update your model's accuracty. A similar-ish ML story comes from Flint, MI [1] though the ending is not so happy
The drilling and active learning part reminded me of this very nice article on Bayesian Optimization from Distill publication [0].
They explain it for selecting the hyper parameters for ML models:
> In this article, we talk about Bayesian Optimization, a suite of techniques often used to tune hyperparameters. More generally, Bayesian Optimization can be used to optimize any black-box function.
But the example at the beginning of the article is mining gold:
> Let us start with the example of gold mining. Our goal is to mine for gold in an unknown land 1 . For now, we assume that the gold is distributed about a line. We want to find the location along this line with the maximum gold while only drilling a few times (as drilling is expensive).
> your model would just learn to interpolate between geographically proximate locations
At a particular scale, this is entirely correct; if what I'm looking for is 'large', a measurement 1m away from a known hit would also be likely to be a hit.
That particular issue sounds like it should be addressed with more negative samples.
There 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.
RF 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).
A GBM like XGBoost is an ensemble of trees. It may be that when you load RandomForest modules they fit based on entropy or whatever the typical DecisionTree does but imo the term “random forest” should really convey nothing more than “ensemble of trees”.
There'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.
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
You'll never obtain universal agreement for a mine, because there will always be a contingent for whom the correct number of mines is zero. They'll never put it that way, of course. But the decision process they exhibit is "new mine? no", and the consequence of realizing those preferences would be zero new mines.
Fortunately, checking to make sure the entire Internet does not have a website disagreeing with the decision to start a mine, is not part of the process by which mining is started.
On the topic of interpolation, I wonder if other areas along the trail of the Yellowstone hotspot might be easier/better sources of lithium. I suspect Nevada makes access easier than areas in the Snake river plain. But some of those areas might be more amenable to Lithium mining with less of an impact.
I specifically went out of my way on a trip a couple years ago to check out Thacker Pass to see where this planned Lithium mine was going. Unfortunately there was thick smoke followed a significant thunderstorm as a front came through and I didn't get to explore much.
We are in a crisis of climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss. Thacker Pass is critical wildlife habitat for threatened, endangered, and endemic species including the greater sage-grouse, pronghorn, Lahontan cutthroat trout, and golden eagles. Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, is sacred to regional Native American tribes.
It’s too late to prevent Phase 1 of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, but there are opportunities to help prevent Phase 2. More broadly, we hope to protect the rest of McDermitt Caldera from Southern Oregon down to Thacker Pass from catastrophic lithium mining.
Your 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. :)
Right. 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.
I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :)
4-5 digits should be enough for any use outside of surveying, that's a precision of 10 meters and 1 meter respectively.
Even Wikipedia is making me suspicious by using hundredths of arc seconds, despite linking the document that came from. How do you localize a mining site down to a single foot?
Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big.
If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1]
The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken.
The mine hasn't built their side yet.
I assume single foot would be what they consider to be the center of the mine? Though I don’t know how Wikipedia would have that information yet; maybe it’s the default output of their map selector or something. An actual survey of the mine would need to be done to know where its center is
Looks like Google got "Thacker Pass Lithium Mine" in the McDermitt Caldera confused with an old gold mine called "Thacker Placer Mine" that was southeast of Mill City: https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/
Yeah I asked Google Gemini to make a map showing the three principle lithium developments of Nevada and it pinned the historical Thacker Mine, not the new Thacker Pass Mine.
Then I asked chatgpt and it refused to make a map but said that I should just look on the map for Thacker Pass, which is almost right but it also said I should look northeast of Winnemucca, which isn't correct. It's north and west.
Is 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"
Well 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.
> cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material.
This mining offsets mining for other things that is happening at several orders of magnitude larger scale. Oil, coal, gas, etc. mining is huge and lithium batteries plus renewables are already reducing the need for those. So, the transition to renewables and batteries might actually result in a net reduction of mining.
Of course doing lithium mining cleanly and responsibly is an important topic. Especially in places close to where people live. But considering the vast amounts of other stuff we mine already at a much larger scale than we'll ever need to mine lithium, this is a drop in the ocean.
And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.
Lithium recycling processes are working fine already of course but there's very little recycling being done at scale for the simple reason that most lithium batteries in use are still very young and quite far away from needing any recycling. If anything, the improved life times of batteries is pushing the date that we need to be recycling at scale further and further away.
Extraction methods very much depend on composition of the deposits and whether they are in brine or other form and what other materials are present. There's a wide variety of brines, rock compositions, clays, etc with some lithium in them.
> ”And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.”
This point is overlooked so often in these discussions. Lithium is not a consumable in batteries, whereas oil / tar / coal etc. is. So, we do some ugly mining for a bit, and then basically stop once we have the lithium we need for use in batteries over and over again. It’s a completely different model than extract-and-burn.
I understand the argument that it’s a net positive if we reduce mining, but the ideal green solution probably doesn’t include mining. It’s accessing a limited resource in a way that damages local ecosystems. It’s admitting a comprise.
What is this ideal green solution which doesn't include mining? All solutions are inferior to magically snapping your fingers to solve your problems, but that's not an option.
You 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.
Extremely 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?
There 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.
Yeah, underground brine is rarely nice to be around, especially when concentrated, but does often have a lot of useful minerals. Related facts, I’m guessing.
Those are expensive and are avoided when possible. Brine ponds are cheap if you can use them. But with that said, yeah, evaporation ponds don't work especially well on the Gulf Coast.
The process for here, I was reading, would involve concentration of the lithium with resin absorbers (to separate it from other alkali elements, I imagine), followed by elution into water, reverse osmosis, and only then evaporation. This is called "DLE": Direct Lithium Extraction.
Yes, but that's among the most expensive ways of approaching the problem. In regions where it's feasible, evaporation approaches are far cheaper, which is why they're still the most widely used approach. In humid regions with a lot of precipitation like the gulf coast, though, you have to take more expensive and energy-intensive approaches to concentrate things.
A serious issue with pond evaporation is that it wastes all the waster. The DLE approach evaporates 98% less water. It's increasingly being used even in places like Chile where evaporation can be used.
Do you have the same trepidation about aluminum, iron, dish soap, and table salt? I ask because the amount of "ripping open" involved in lithium production is like a speck in the eye of a whale compared to all the other mining. In terms of scale all existing and proposed lithium mines are teensy tiny by the standards of mines.
Sure, yes I do wish that we weren't opening such huge holes as we are for aluminum, iron, coal, etc. I worked in the upstream oil industry for a bit and live in an area heavily coal mined, I just wasn't clear how lithium mining compared and didn't want to assume that damage was on the same scale as the others.
It's not even close to as large as the footprint of oil and gas. The Thacker Pass project, which is one of several that are all individually described as satisfying global demand, will ultimately disturb only 7000 acres. Fossil fuel wells usually disturb 5 net acres each, and there are five million such wells in America alone.
Additionally, that area in Nevada can be - at best - charitably described as moonscape.
Which, for those of us that like moonscape, is a bit sad. But there is a lot of moonscape in that region, and there aren’t a huge number of moonscape fans. At least that are going to try to picket any projects. So overall, meh.
That area of Nevada is also pretty economically ‘challenged’, so why not.
Also, at some point you need to tell people "you don't own this land, so you don't get to say what gets done to it."
I'm half expecting the future more conservative SCOTUS to shoot down land use regulation as a taking, requiring such regulation to be combined with payment for the value lost instead.
Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land.
The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it.
I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.
Public land in Nevada (and many other western states) has a long history of being ‘stolen’ in various ways. There is quite a racket around it, actually.
For instance, if you drive along I80 east of Reno, once you get away from the city, that land is all BLM. Yet it’s gated off, with incredibly difficult to get gate access. If you call around, you’ll eventually talk to the person who controls those gates, and eventually figure out that those gates are closed for a variety of ever changing reasons.
For a given gate, I’ve heard everything from ‘National security’ to ‘Nevada state law and interstates’ to ‘only utility companies’ to ‘only directly approved persons’.
Once you know the local roads, it’s trivial to get to the other side of those gates though, just a bit more out of the way.
I’ve also seen BLM land gated off by private gates, and individuals threaten people trapped on BLM land due to those gates with fines for ‘trespassing’.
They shut up pretty quick when I pulled out the map showing it was public land, and started quoting the Nevada law they were violating with the presence of their gate though. All the sudden, the lady they were threatening (in this case) was free to go.
When I was in Nevada, I kept a pair of bolt cutters in my truck. And a gun.
This is a particularly tricky year to argue voting, particularly for the president, is the right level of public oversight. We were offered two candidates with comparatively little say or visibility (compared to the last few decades) during the primaries.
Trump effectively sat out of the primary season, though primary voters did overwhelmingly support him they did so without ever having the chance to hear him pressed during a debate or contentious interview. There is at least a case with Trump to argue voters already knew they wanted him and simply didn't need a primary, the democrats don't have that argument to make.
The democrats didn't even bother to have a primary and went out of their way to pressure debate organizers to block Kennedy entirely before swapping out their candidate last minute.
We 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!
Extracting 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.
Someone 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).
> It seems backwards, but pretty much the only fuel that protects ecosystems on a large scale are fossil fuels and nuclear.
This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining. Nuclear seems likely, though as the other commenter noted it's not a magic bullet either.
> Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
This is a European phenomena mostly, and is a result of urbanization mostly.
> This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining.
The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy.
> is a result of urbanization mostly
Urbanization, made possible by the economical source of energy that is fossil fuels.
One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.
The issue with fossil fuels is that they liberate fossil carbon, which has larger macro effects on the global environment. (It injects a lot of ‘new’ carbon into the carbon cycle)
They also do sometimes have some medium sized local effects from spills or contamination. But those can usually be controlled.
Geothermal is also usually ‘low footprint/high value’, but is only viable in specific limited locations.
Solar, wind, hydropower, tidal energy all have large physical footprints for the amount of energy they produce. Aka ‘low density’. All are also somewhat tied to specific, and often limited geology.
For solar for instance, areas with a lot of desert or other open ‘non productive’ land nearby, it’s great (assuming decent insolation). In areas where land is at a premium for other uses, or is very rugged/high maintenance, it definitely is a problem. Aka cities, certain types of high intensity farmland, heavily forested areas, high snow load/storm areas, etc.
Solar is not an awesome economic choice in Siberia, for example. It is an awesome economic choice in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, etc.
For areas with geography that supports it (typically the right kind of mountain ranges) and rainfall, hydropower is awesome, though has serious side effects on wildlife and river health. For a place that doesn’t have the right geography (say England), it’s a non starter.
> One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.
Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while a oil well will eventually run dry.
The idea that fossil fuels are more ecologically favorable because it's 'dense' needs to address not only external factors, but that fossil fuels are non-renewable.
> Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while an oil well will eventually run dry.
Perhaps more true in that the wind (as far as we know) won’t run out but wind turbines do have a limited lifespan. After 20-30 years they usually need to be replaced. Some of the components are recycled but a significant portion - including the blades - are either not recyclable or not economically recyclable. Work is being done on this but there’s no guarantee it’ll produce dividends.
It depends entirely on what scope one considers for impact. Do we count maintenance roads? Total land area disturbed? Windmill foundation pads? Global co2 levels? Abandoned equipment in general? Noise levels over how much area?
What is ‘leftover’ from an abandoned well can be as simple as a buried 6” ground level plug, or as messy as an acre of abandoned equipment and a giant oil spill/hazmat area. Plus a billion tons of atmospheric co2 - which is invisible.
Oil is so widely used because it is incredibly cheap and easy to use at large scale, with minimal obviously visible consequence.
Because co2 is invisible. And as long as we don’t spill large quantities of it, it doesn’t seem to cause any visible problems.
The effect of the low density from wind, solar, etc. isn’t visible until you go to areas it is widely deployed and then do the math on how much energy they are actually producing, which is a small fraction of what would be produced if the same area was impacted to produce oil or nuclear.
They used coal, but apartment blocks use considerably less energy per unit living space vs detached houses thanks to their lower surface area to volume ratio.
Not really. I live close to Hamburg, Germany. _Very_ eager to be eco-friendly and sustainable.
Currently: 64% coal, lots of nat gas, ~20 renewables.
The future plan is to use a lot more industrial waste heat. Burning garbage is done and planned, but nowhere near a major factor. Not to mention that the garbage would also need to come from something: plastics from oil, wood from trees etc.
Germany shutting down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors instead of their coal plants was so stupid. Germany emits 5 to 6 times more CO2 per J than France.
Uranium is extracted by mining the surface. I don't know ore concentrations though, so maybe not much land area is needed since it is a dense energy source?
A significant reason the real holders of power in the world today are Saudi Arabia and China is because we've refused to gather and use our resources while they have theirs.
It's high time we realize that Pax Americana is our era to lose, (re)start mining and (re)start development.
The counter view is that it's better to save your natural resources for when you really need them and pay others to exhaust their own, rather than to exhaust yours before you have to.
And a counter to that is that if you don't flex an economic muscle, it withers away. The ability to extract a natural resource depends on extracting it.
But then when you really need them you have no infrastructure with which to extract them nor experience doing so. You have also lost out on tremendous economic opportunity from money you needed to spend on resources while the people you've paid, assuming they manage their income responsibly, have invested that money in further productive assets.
we are already extracting a lot of resources around the mobile bay. i recommend that you do some research before you post knee jerk contrarianism comments
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.
Say 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?
The 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.
> 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.
Congress plays whack-a-mole with policy while importers shuffle goods or various parts of the manufacturing process to neighboring countries or follow tighter packaging constraints to avoid specific tax rules or earn specific tax incentives. Tariffs are political showmanship. It's not really a viable nor an enforceable option in the modern economy, at least not based on my experience in the industry.
Keyword there is may. Putting aside whether the sentiment is justified, it is currently extremely unpopular to impose Chinese tariffs.
It's also worth noting that Chinese prices are so low that certain tariffs can reach the stratosphere (eg: American 100% tariff on Chinese EVs), further making them unpopular with the commons.
This goes double if your refining and battery production is still in China as well. If you are using the material domestically then the situation could be made more fair with tariffs, but if you're exporting that obviously won't work.
Lithium currently accounts for ~10% of the cost of the battery, so no.
As proof of that there are sodium-ion batteries on the market right now, but they're not price-competetive yet[0] despite using largely the same infrastructure.
[0] The potential is there though as they have an important advantage: you can safely discharge a sodium-ion battery to 0V for storage/transportation.
Is sand essentially free because we have beaches and deserts full of it? It can be used to make concrete, a valuable material? (Don't forget the shipping, storage, and refining costs)
Logistics depends on where you are not the inherent price of the commodity. Plenty of things like air and are freely available but you still need ventilation systems in caves and whatnot. Moving free dirt around when building roads can be extremely expensive due even if it’s just being moved a few miles volume adds up.
So yea desert sand is essentially free, even if you pay for shipping.
Not the greatest analogy since the sand found in deserts isn't used for making concrete (wind-blown sand is too rounded/smooth), and there's actually a global shortage of the appropriate (alluvial, iirc) type.
Lithium is too abundant in the world right now (as expected - we've just gotten better at discovering it).
To be honest, the energy problem is more or less a solved problem with the current technologies we have. We just need to accelerate our pace of adoption to hard-reverse on fossil fuels (except Germany). We already have large reserves of Uranium, of which only a small amount is needed to fuel a power plant. We already have lithium battery tech to store the power. We already have solar panels being mass produced and adopted to fill in the gaps. All we need is connecting the dots and making sure these resources play well with each other in symbiosis.
I'm skeptical. China is already mass-producing batteries, securing as much lithium as possible. Additionally, US regulations will significantly increase costs for battery manufacturers.
> "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...
Lithium 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.
Great, 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.
Was 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.
Ideally 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.
I would have guessed better results in the 1am to 2am time slot, but 3am is not totally out of line. I bet the fraction of drivers at 3am that are drunk is much higher than at, say, 3pm.
"Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?"
Cops trying to catch drunks speeding home after the bars have closed. In the south, last call was 2:45AM where I served as a freshly-turned 21 year old.
Towns that make a living by ticketing people passing through.
The worst place in the world for this is Italy. Every time I go there they find some esoteric rule to ticket me for. This time in Padova, apparently I drove in an area where only locals are allowed to drive. Bunch of swindlers.
Indeed in Italy there are area (mostly historical centres) where cities limit the influx of cars to keep it liveable and walkable, therefore only residents are allowed to bring their car in.
People downvoted you to the point that your comment is grayed out and about to be hidden but there is hardly metric by which Arkansas is not in the bottom ten on a list of states.
Infant mortality rate? 3rd most deadly for babies.
Poverty rate? 7th poorest.
Homicide rate? 7th most dangerous.
Obesity rate? 3rd fattest.
Practically any map of any measurable statistic where states are colored red for "bad" and green for "good" Arkansas will be a deep, blood, red.
It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Places with billboards aren't my vibe and when every other one is an ad for a personal injury or drunk driving attorney the place is DEFINITELY not for me.
You are citing the US News "best states" ranking. In that ranking, California is ranked #37 overall and Arkansas is ranked #47 overall. Even your own hand picked data source supports the OP...
37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same.
This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.
I'm not saying that 37 out of 50 is good. I'm saying that 47 out of 50 is bad. Your data source doesn't refute the OPs argument that Arkansas is not a great place to live -- it actually supports the OP.
"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)."
Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.
1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro
2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.
3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.
4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.
5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.
6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.
Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.
Thanks, I think. But no, I didn't mean to pick on California as a bad state, I thought for some reason most people thought it was a nice state. I do, at least, despite its warts.
All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.
If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.
"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.
It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.
Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.
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Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).
The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.
""Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today."
From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.
"Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population,"
The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist. I talk to the population there regularly before I go out to the Chambless skarn to dig. ditto the mining community that's there for the quarry at Kelbaker road (I own the uranium mine nearby.)
"The road to Dish Hill"
Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover. You have to come from Amboy's power line backroads.
Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.
> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.
The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.
It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.
> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.
Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?
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But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.
There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.
I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.
The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.
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tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.
A large portion of the USA sees California as a place to avoid- so those sweeping generalities and those particular metrics might be accurate. California is only a nice place to live if you're rich, and most people are not.
People vote in good faith, I presume. Sometimes a comment’s factual basis matters less than its overall contribution to a productive and open discussion. Downvotes in this case are an example of HN’s surprisingly effective system for self-moderation working as it should. It isn’t vile enough to censor, but it also isn’t what a lot of readers come here for. It didn’t personally offend me (I didn’t vote either way), but I take occasional downvoting that I don’t fully agree with in stride, as the overall system seems to work better than most.
My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!
The 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.
I would like to think that if there were any interaction between theses putative deposits to the groundwater that we wouldn't have needed an ML model to find these deposits in the first place!
I 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
I 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.
It may surprise you to learn that lithium is actually a toxic substance. No human being has ever suffered from a lithium deficiency. Lithium is not a natural or healthy component of anyone's diet.
So, the so-called therapeutic dose of lithium is merely a sub-toxic level, and must be monitored by frequent blood tests.
There are horrific side effects from using lithium in the long term, including convulsions, hair loss, diarrhea, suicidal and homicidal ideations, and extreme thirst (polydipsia).
So personally, I would rather not be tapping into lithium reserves for my health.
When the tide goes out on the AI hype there’s going to be a lot of companies currently using expensive API calls for simple classification tasks that will be quietly revamped to use a simple CNN.
ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.
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.
I was disappointed in that line. They could’ve mentioned it used a random forest, which is much more informative. “ML is a type of AI” isn’t even a cocktail party understanding of the topic.
Are 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?
Yep, 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.
Isn’t it a critical component of everything currently sporting anything remotely close to a legit “AI” label? I wouldn’t call cows “one part of a broader beef ecosystem” for example. They’re fundamental to it.
I 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.
I 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.
Interesting, & 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.
Which government agency would use eminent domain to take land and start mining? We have historical precedence with the oil industry using various scanning methods in a similar manner, but it was the oil companies who went to the landowners to acquire the rights to extract. Then the government would buy the (usable) product from them.
Local government condemned a bunch of perfectly fine homes in Wisconsin, by declaring them blighted, to make room for a Foxconn plant which never really panned out. Where there is greed there is a way.
National security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
Globally price-competitive domestic electric car production is a national security concern only if we are willing to accept a rather short time horizon and a rather narrow definition of security in our analysis.
This kind of article can perhaps be understood as an attempt to turn a federal organization's sails into the prevailing political winds, so to speak, at a time when funding seems insecure. I say this as someone who strongly supports most of the survey's mission. It would be ideal if national power brokers recognized the value of water science, geology, ecology, etc, on their own terms.
And of course you would not mind owners of extraction company leaving all the profits to people who got kicked out of their home. After all they should be happy just fulfilling your "national security" goal.
> 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
From 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.
Put another way, this is pretty similar to the interpolation approaches that would normally be used for datasets like this in the world of mineral exploration. Kriging/co-kriging (i.e. gaussian processes) is the more commonly used approach in this particular field due to both the long history and the available hyperparameters for things like spatial aniostropy.
However, kriging is really quite difficult to use with non-continuous inputs. RF is a lot more forgiving there. You don't need to develop a covariance model for discrete values (or a covariance model for how the different inputs relate, either).
RF is random forest[0].
We had this discussion a couple of days ago: "Why do Random Forests Work? Understanding Tree Ensembles as Self-Regularizing Adaptive Smoothers".
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873968
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest
So it turns out that there's no theoretical reason that gradient boosting will always outperform RF (which would violate the "no free lunch" theorem). But it does usually seem to be the case in practice, even with small and noisy data.
I would hazard a guess that with better tuning, XGBoost would still have won. (The paper notes that the authors chose a suboptimal set of hyperparameters out of fear of overfitting - maybe the same logic justifies choosing a suboptimal model type...)
That's been my experience. RF tends to do quite well out of the box, and is very fast to fit. It's less of a pain to cross-validate too, with fewer tuning parameters. XGBoost has a huge number of knobs to tune, and its performance varies from god-awful with bad hyperparameters to somewhat better than RF with good ones. Giant PITA with nested cross-validation, etc. though.
I haven't read in detail what their validation strategy is but this seems like the kind of problem where it's not so easy as you'd think -- you need to be very careful about how you stratify your train, dev, and test sets. A random 80/10/10 split would be way too optimistic: your model would just learn to interpolate between geographically proximate locations. You'd probably need to cross-validate across different geographic areas.
This also seems like an application that would benefit from "active learning". given that drilling and testing is expensive, you'd want to choose where to collect new data based on where it would best update your model's accuracty. A similar-ish ML story comes from Flint, MI [1] though the ending is not so happy
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/how-m...
The drilling and active learning part reminded me of this very nice article on Bayesian Optimization from Distill publication [0].
They explain it for selecting the hyper parameters for ML models:
> In this article, we talk about Bayesian Optimization, a suite of techniques often used to tune hyperparameters. More generally, Bayesian Optimization can be used to optimize any black-box function.
But the example at the beginning of the article is mining gold:
> Let us start with the example of gold mining. Our goal is to mine for gold in an unknown land 1 . For now, we assume that the gold is distributed about a line. We want to find the location along this line with the maximum gold while only drilling a few times (as drilling is expensive).
[0] https://distill.pub/2020/bayesian-optimization/
> your model would just learn to interpolate between geographically proximate locations
At a particular scale, this is entirely correct; if what I'm looking for is 'large', a measurement 1m away from a known hit would also be likely to be a hit.
That particular issue sounds like it should be addressed with more negative samples.
The 'no free lunch' theorem is almost useless, because no real world data set is made of white noise.
Did 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.
There 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.
RF 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).
XGBoost models are random forest models. They’re also just consistently better for very little effort.
Not only RF, they incorporate GBM too as I understand it.
Often they are the best "just run it and forget it" but compared to tuning they don't always achieve top -- sometimes surprisingly so.
XGBoost and similar are solid first stops in model building.
you surely mean that both are ensemble models. RFs and GBMs differ in how they fit the data
A GBM like XGBoost is an ensemble of trees. It may be that when you load RandomForest modules they fit based on entropy or whatever the typical DecisionTree does but imo the term “random forest” should really convey nothing more than “ensemble of trees”.
I’m saying XGBoost would be a subclass of RF
for other folks wonder what the acronym means; RF in this context is Random Forest
For a moment I was excited that they had done surveys entirely on RF backscattering and ML.
There'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
Not everyone agrees that this is a good place for a mine: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...
You'll never obtain universal agreement for a mine, because there will always be a contingent for whom the correct number of mines is zero. They'll never put it that way, of course. But the decision process they exhibit is "new mine? no", and the consequence of realizing those preferences would be zero new mines.
Fortunately, checking to make sure the entire Internet does not have a website disagreeing with the decision to start a mine, is not part of the process by which mining is started.
On the topic of interpolation, I wonder if other areas along the trail of the Yellowstone hotspot might be easier/better sources of lithium. I suspect Nevada makes access easier than areas in the Snake river plain. But some of those areas might be more amenable to Lithium mining with less of an impact.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/locations-yellowstone-hots...
I specifically went out of my way on a trip a couple years ago to check out Thacker Pass to see where this planned Lithium mine was going. Unfortunately there was thick smoke followed a significant thunderstorm as a front came through and I didn't get to explore much.
Your 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. :)
Right. 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-operati...
And they can all visit us at Burning Man every year!
I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :)
4-5 digits should be enough for any use outside of surveying, that's a precision of 10 meters and 1 meter respectively.
Even Wikipedia is making me suspicious by using hundredths of arc seconds, despite linking the document that came from. How do you localize a mining site down to a single foot?
Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big.
If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1] The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken. The mine hasn't built their side yet.
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.6994929...
I assume single foot would be what they consider to be the center of the mine? Though I don’t know how Wikipedia would have that information yet; maybe it’s the default output of their map selector or something. An actual survey of the mine would need to be done to know where its center is
could be artificial precision coming from degs min sec to decimal??
Looks like Google got "Thacker Pass Lithium Mine" in the McDermitt Caldera confused with an old gold mine called "Thacker Placer Mine" that was southeast of Mill City: https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/
Yeah I asked Google Gemini to make a map showing the three principle lithium developments of Nevada and it pinned the historical Thacker Mine, not the new Thacker Pass Mine.
Then I asked chatgpt and it refused to make a map but said that I should just look on the map for Thacker Pass, which is almost right but it also said I should look northeast of Winnemucca, which isn't correct. It's north and west.
Zero for two, for robots.
Is 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"
Well 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.
> cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material.
This mining offsets mining for other things that is happening at several orders of magnitude larger scale. Oil, coal, gas, etc. mining is huge and lithium batteries plus renewables are already reducing the need for those. So, the transition to renewables and batteries might actually result in a net reduction of mining.
Of course doing lithium mining cleanly and responsibly is an important topic. Especially in places close to where people live. But considering the vast amounts of other stuff we mine already at a much larger scale than we'll ever need to mine lithium, this is a drop in the ocean.
And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.
Lithium recycling processes are working fine already of course but there's very little recycling being done at scale for the simple reason that most lithium batteries in use are still very young and quite far away from needing any recycling. If anything, the improved life times of batteries is pushing the date that we need to be recycling at scale further and further away.
Extraction methods very much depend on composition of the deposits and whether they are in brine or other form and what other materials are present. There's a wide variety of brines, rock compositions, clays, etc with some lithium in them.
> ”And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.”
This point is overlooked so often in these discussions. Lithium is not a consumable in batteries, whereas oil / tar / coal etc. is. So, we do some ugly mining for a bit, and then basically stop once we have the lithium we need for use in batteries over and over again. It’s a completely different model than extract-and-burn.
I understand the argument that it’s a net positive if we reduce mining, but the ideal green solution probably doesn’t include mining. It’s accessing a limited resource in a way that damages local ecosystems. It’s admitting a comprise.
What is this ideal green solution which doesn't include mining? All solutions are inferior to magically snapping your fingers to solve your problems, but that's not an option.
You 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.
Extremely 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?
There 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.
Yeah, underground brine is rarely nice to be around, especially when concentrated, but does often have a lot of useful minerals. Related facts, I’m guessing.
I think they're using better processes than evaporation these days. For example, concentrating the brine using reverse osmosis first.
Those are expensive and are avoided when possible. Brine ponds are cheap if you can use them. But with that said, yeah, evaporation ponds don't work especially well on the Gulf Coast.
The process for here, I was reading, would involve concentration of the lithium with resin absorbers (to separate it from other alkali elements, I imagine), followed by elution into water, reverse osmosis, and only then evaporation. This is called "DLE": Direct Lithium Extraction.
Yes, but that's among the most expensive ways of approaching the problem. In regions where it's feasible, evaporation approaches are far cheaper, which is why they're still the most widely used approach. In humid regions with a lot of precipitation like the gulf coast, though, you have to take more expensive and energy-intensive approaches to concentrate things.
A serious issue with pond evaporation is that it wastes all the waster. The DLE approach evaporates 98% less water. It's increasingly being used even in places like Chile where evaporation can be used.
> ripping open huge swaths of earth
Do you have the same trepidation about aluminum, iron, dish soap, and table salt? I ask because the amount of "ripping open" involved in lithium production is like a speck in the eye of a whale compared to all the other mining. In terms of scale all existing and proposed lithium mines are teensy tiny by the standards of mines.
Sure, yes I do wish that we weren't opening such huge holes as we are for aluminum, iron, coal, etc. I worked in the upstream oil industry for a bit and live in an area heavily coal mined, I just wasn't clear how lithium mining compared and didn't want to assume that damage was on the same scale as the others.
It's not even close to as large as the footprint of oil and gas. The Thacker Pass project, which is one of several that are all individually described as satisfying global demand, will ultimately disturb only 7000 acres. Fossil fuel wells usually disturb 5 net acres each, and there are five million such wells in America alone.
Additionally, that area in Nevada can be - at best - charitably described as moonscape.
Which, for those of us that like moonscape, is a bit sad. But there is a lot of moonscape in that region, and there aren’t a huge number of moonscape fans. At least that are going to try to picket any projects. So overall, meh.
That area of Nevada is also pretty economically ‘challenged’, so why not.
Also, at some point you need to tell people "you don't own this land, so you don't get to say what gets done to it."
I'm half expecting the future more conservative SCOTUS to shoot down land use regulation as a taking, requiring such regulation to be combined with payment for the value lost instead.
Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land.
The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it.
I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.
Public land in Nevada (and many other western states) has a long history of being ‘stolen’ in various ways. There is quite a racket around it, actually.
For instance, if you drive along I80 east of Reno, once you get away from the city, that land is all BLM. Yet it’s gated off, with incredibly difficult to get gate access. If you call around, you’ll eventually talk to the person who controls those gates, and eventually figure out that those gates are closed for a variety of ever changing reasons.
For a given gate, I’ve heard everything from ‘National security’ to ‘Nevada state law and interstates’ to ‘only utility companies’ to ‘only directly approved persons’.
Once you know the local roads, it’s trivial to get to the other side of those gates though, just a bit more out of the way.
I’ve also seen BLM land gated off by private gates, and individuals threaten people trapped on BLM land due to those gates with fines for ‘trespassing’.
They shut up pretty quick when I pulled out the map showing it was public land, and started quoting the Nevada law they were violating with the presence of their gate though. All the sudden, the lady they were threatening (in this case) was free to go.
When I was in Nevada, I kept a pair of bolt cutters in my truck. And a gun.
Yes, and that degree of say comes in the form of voting.
That's not at all how our system works. This is comically wrong.
This is a particularly tricky year to argue voting, particularly for the president, is the right level of public oversight. We were offered two candidates with comparatively little say or visibility (compared to the last few decades) during the primaries.
Trump effectively sat out of the primary season, though primary voters did overwhelmingly support him they did so without ever having the chance to hear him pressed during a debate or contentious interview. There is at least a case with Trump to argue voters already knew they wanted him and simply didn't need a primary, the democrats don't have that argument to make.
The democrats didn't even bother to have a primary and went out of their way to pressure debate organizers to block Kennedy entirely before swapping out their candidate last minute.
Whether it's the "right" level of oversight is another question entirely.
Local BLM offices are some of the most corrupt federal institutions in existence, IMO.
More often than not, whoever is in charge seems to get compromised and ends up aiding and abetting all sorts of weird land stuff.
No one higher up ever gets any visibility unless it goes really sideways.
If we get there, it will solve the housing crisis single-handedly. My fingers are crossed.
Work 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.
I eagerly anticipate the day Australia becomes the World's Forge.
All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo.
h/t Saul Griffith.
We 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!
ugh 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
Extracting 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.
Someone 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).
It 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.
> It seems backwards, but pretty much the only fuel that protects ecosystems on a large scale are fossil fuels and nuclear.
This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining. Nuclear seems likely, though as the other commenter noted it's not a magic bullet either.
> Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
This is a European phenomena mostly, and is a result of urbanization mostly.
> This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining.
The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy.
> is a result of urbanization mostly
Urbanization, made possible by the economical source of energy that is fossil fuels.
> The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy.
Can you expand on this? How does the density of fossil fuel make them a better source of energy than say wind?
One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.
The issue with fossil fuels is that they liberate fossil carbon, which has larger macro effects on the global environment. (It injects a lot of ‘new’ carbon into the carbon cycle)
They also do sometimes have some medium sized local effects from spills or contamination. But those can usually be controlled.
Geothermal is also usually ‘low footprint/high value’, but is only viable in specific limited locations.
Solar, wind, hydropower, tidal energy all have large physical footprints for the amount of energy they produce. Aka ‘low density’. All are also somewhat tied to specific, and often limited geology.
For solar for instance, areas with a lot of desert or other open ‘non productive’ land nearby, it’s great (assuming decent insolation). In areas where land is at a premium for other uses, or is very rugged/high maintenance, it definitely is a problem. Aka cities, certain types of high intensity farmland, heavily forested areas, high snow load/storm areas, etc.
Solar is not an awesome economic choice in Siberia, for example. It is an awesome economic choice in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, etc.
For areas with geography that supports it (typically the right kind of mountain ranges) and rainfall, hydropower is awesome, though has serious side effects on wildlife and river health. For a place that doesn’t have the right geography (say England), it’s a non starter.
> One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.
Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while a oil well will eventually run dry.
The idea that fossil fuels are more ecologically favorable because it's 'dense' needs to address not only external factors, but that fossil fuels are non-renewable.
> Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while an oil well will eventually run dry.
Perhaps more true in that the wind (as far as we know) won’t run out but wind turbines do have a limited lifespan. After 20-30 years they usually need to be replaced. Some of the components are recycled but a significant portion - including the blades - are either not recyclable or not economically recyclable. Work is being done on this but there’s no guarantee it’ll produce dividends.
Sure, but the same likely applies to Oil as well right? Fossil Fuels don't magically extract and refine themselves.
What analysis do you point to that suggests fossil fuels have a smaller impact than, say, wind?
It depends entirely on what scope one considers for impact. Do we count maintenance roads? Total land area disturbed? Windmill foundation pads? Global co2 levels? Abandoned equipment in general? Noise levels over how much area?
What is ‘leftover’ from an abandoned well can be as simple as a buried 6” ground level plug, or as messy as an acre of abandoned equipment and a giant oil spill/hazmat area. Plus a billion tons of atmospheric co2 - which is invisible.
If you drive I5 in California through the Central Valley, you’ll see hundreds of active oil wells that have been active since the early 1900’s, mixed in with active orchards and farmlands. They are a bit hard to find. Like this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TiWATTxP1jWmu4Et7?g_st=com.google.ma...]. And this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSeCzys8W2q4ubeJ9?g_st=com.google.ma...].
What you won’t see is that even downtown Los Angeles has similar wells that still produce significant oil hidden in special buildings.
If you take a little detour, you can see the thousands of acres of windmills in Tehachapi that produce similar amounts of total energy. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TBVn1JUbgqSYTduu5?g_st=com.google.ma...].
And if you keep driving, you can see the thousands of acres of solar farms that are doing similar. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/XGBtWZLppWH7vjqc8?g_st=com.google.ma...]
Oil is so widely used because it is incredibly cheap and easy to use at large scale, with minimal obviously visible consequence.
Because co2 is invisible. And as long as we don’t spill large quantities of it, it doesn’t seem to cause any visible problems.
The effect of the low density from wind, solar, etc. isn’t visible until you go to areas it is widely deployed and then do the math on how much energy they are actually producing, which is a small fraction of what would be produced if the same area was impacted to produce oil or nuclear.
Windwills break down. Weather patterns change.
New oil fields get found as well. Many oil wells are still producing from as far back as the early 1900’s.
That wind farm as built definitely won’t last forever.
So theoretically, sure.
Practically, it isn’t as straightforward. Especially if the only land someone has doesn’t actually get good wind. That’s all.
What do you think the people in cities burn for fuel to keep themselves warm?
They used coal, but apartment blocks use considerably less energy per unit living space vs detached houses thanks to their lower surface area to volume ratio.
Trash, mostly.
Not really. I live close to Hamburg, Germany. _Very_ eager to be eco-friendly and sustainable.
Currently: 64% coal, lots of nat gas, ~20 renewables.
The future plan is to use a lot more industrial waste heat. Burning garbage is done and planned, but nowhere near a major factor. Not to mention that the garbage would also need to come from something: plastics from oil, wood from trees etc.
Germany shutting down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors instead of their coal plants was so stupid. Germany emits 5 to 6 times more CO2 per J than France.
Uranium is extracted by mining the surface. I don't know ore concentrations though, so maybe not much land area is needed since it is a dense energy source?
Depends on the kind of deposit. Some they leech in situ.
Lithium isn't a fuel
Contrarianism has definitely entered its self-parody era.
There is always sodium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
A significant reason the real holders of power in the world today are Saudi Arabia and China is because we've refused to gather and use our resources while they have theirs.
It's high time we realize that Pax Americana is our era to lose, (re)start mining and (re)start development.
The counter view is that it's better to save your natural resources for when you really need them and pay others to exhaust their own, rather than to exhaust yours before you have to.
And a counter to that is that if you don't flex an economic muscle, it withers away. The ability to extract a natural resource depends on extracting it.
But then when you really need them you have no infrastructure with which to extract them nor experience doing so. You have also lost out on tremendous economic opportunity from money you needed to spend on resources while the people you've paid, assuming they manage their income responsibly, have invested that money in further productive assets.
the mobile bay already has a lot of oil mining: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=oil+rig...
we don't need it happening upstream.
and watch as the nations destroy themselves (ecosystems)
we are already extracting a lot of resources around the mobile bay. i recommend that you do some research before you post knee jerk contrarianism comments
Ah 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.
Say 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?
The 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.
> 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.
Congress plays whack-a-mole with policy while importers shuffle goods or various parts of the manufacturing process to neighboring countries or follow tighter packaging constraints to avoid specific tax rules or earn specific tax incentives. Tariffs are political showmanship. It's not really a viable nor an enforceable option in the modern economy, at least not based on my experience in the industry.
And all that shuffling introduces more costs, creates negative externalities for exports does it not?
Maybe for certain complex manufacturing processes (microprocessors?), but for most goods, not really. India, Vietnam, etc. Same, same.
American labor and real estate (shelf space) are what make up the vast majority of the cost for goods purchased here.
Keyword there is may. Putting aside whether the sentiment is justified, it is currently extremely unpopular to impose Chinese tariffs.
It's also worth noting that Chinese prices are so low that certain tariffs can reach the stratosphere (eg: American 100% tariff on Chinese EVs), further making them unpopular with the commons.
This goes double if your refining and battery production is still in China as well. If you are using the material domestically then the situation could be made more fair with tariffs, but if you're exporting that obviously won't work.
The obvious answer is tariffs.
What an informative comment, thank you
No, lithium is not rare and we have enough of it. It's available from friendly countries like Australia too.
Lithium currently accounts for ~10% of the cost of the battery, so no.
As proof of that there are sodium-ion batteries on the market right now, but they're not price-competetive yet[0] despite using largely the same infrastructure.
[0] The potential is there though as they have an important advantage: you can safely discharge a sodium-ion battery to 0V for storage/transportation.
Is sand essentially free because we have beaches and deserts full of it? It can be used to make concrete, a valuable material? (Don't forget the shipping, storage, and refining costs)
Logistics depends on where you are not the inherent price of the commodity. Plenty of things like air and are freely available but you still need ventilation systems in caves and whatnot. Moving free dirt around when building roads can be extremely expensive due even if it’s just being moved a few miles volume adds up.
So yea desert sand is essentially free, even if you pay for shipping.
Not the greatest analogy since the sand found in deserts isn't used for making concrete (wind-blown sand is too rounded/smooth), and there's actually a global shortage of the appropriate (alluvial, iirc) type.
Lithium is too abundant in the world right now (as expected - we've just gotten better at discovering it).
To be honest, the energy problem is more or less a solved problem with the current technologies we have. We just need to accelerate our pace of adoption to hard-reverse on fossil fuels (except Germany). We already have large reserves of Uranium, of which only a small amount is needed to fuel a power plant. We already have lithium battery tech to store the power. We already have solar panels being mass produced and adopted to fill in the gaps. All we need is connecting the dots and making sure these resources play well with each other in symbiosis.
>would that drastically lower battery costs?
I'm skeptical. China is already mass-producing batteries, securing as much lithium as possible. Additionally, US regulations will significantly increase costs for battery manufacturers.
Similar work done in Canada: https://www.juniorminingnetwork.com/junior-miner-news/press-...
Related
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910918
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907144
> "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...
Lithium 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.
In the USA, most steel is recycled. Most of the rest of the world uses basic oxygen furnace by wide margin.
Time to buy some cheap land in southern Arkansas?
Lithium for everyone!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...
Wall-free: https://archive.today/59cJH
Oh, 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
Great, 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.
This entire problem will solved without offering human employment in a place that would probably welcome it at this pace.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
What are you worried about, zombies that want to eat your batteries?
Was 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.
Ideally 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.
Serious question:
Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?
Potentially. See "Lithium in drinking water linked with lower suicide rates" [1].
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lithium-in-drinking-water-linked-...
I would assume any positive effects are balanced out by living in Arkansas.
My only experience with Arkansas was waking up to a speeding ticket at 3 in the morning. Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?
But if it’s anything like Oklahoma…
I would have guessed better results in the 1am to 2am time slot, but 3am is not totally out of line. I bet the fraction of drivers at 3am that are drunk is much higher than at, say, 3pm.
I think that is a socially damning statement about Arkansas if the drunks are still out driving at 3 am.
"Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?"
Cops trying to catch drunks speeding home after the bars have closed. In the south, last call was 2:45AM where I served as a freshly-turned 21 year old.
Good god.
Towns that make a living by ticketing people passing through.
The worst place in the world for this is Italy. Every time I go there they find some esoteric rule to ticket me for. This time in Padova, apparently I drove in an area where only locals are allowed to drive. Bunch of swindlers.
Indeed in Italy there are area (mostly historical centres) where cities limit the influx of cars to keep it liveable and walkable, therefore only residents are allowed to bring their car in.
This is the kind of story that may say more about the story teller than the place it's about.
(I have driven in Italy as a foreigner several times without ever receiving a ticket.)
Possibly but having extensively driven all over the rest of Europe without a ticket, I don’t think the fault is entirely mine.
Both areas can be great.
Um, why were you waking up while driving at 3 in the morning?
Some cars have seats for up to seven people, including the driver.
Happened to me on Ambien.
Hah! No I did my turn behind the wheel from 10-1 so nobody died on my watch. I was in the back.
> waking up
you were sleeping and driving? lol
People downvoted you to the point that your comment is grayed out and about to be hidden but there is hardly metric by which Arkansas is not in the bottom ten on a list of states.
Infant mortality rate? 3rd most deadly for babies.
Poverty rate? 7th poorest.
Homicide rate? 7th most dangerous.
Obesity rate? 3rd fattest.
Practically any map of any measurable statistic where states are colored red for "bad" and green for "good" Arkansas will be a deep, blood, red.
But it is rude to point that out.
Here's another list -
Highest poverty rate?
Lowest literacy rate?
Last in opportunity?
8th worst in public safety?
If you guessed California, you'd be right.
Sweeping generalities and handpicked metrics do not tell an entire story.
>If you guessed California, you'd be right.
No I wouldn't.
California's poverty rate is lower than Arkansas', and California's literacy rate is higher five other states' (practically tied with Arkansas).
https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17826#P675e89693a5...
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/src/PDF/STATE.pd...
Also, I'm in California right now for work.
It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Places with billboards aren't my vibe and when every other one is an ad for a personal injury or drunk driving attorney the place is DEFINITELY not for me.
Still not as bad as Arkansas, though.
You are citing the US News "best states" ranking. In that ranking, California is ranked #37 overall and Arkansas is ranked #47 overall. Even your own hand picked data source supports the OP...
37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same.
This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.
I'm not saying that 37 out of 50 is good. I'm saying that 47 out of 50 is bad. Your data source doesn't refute the OPs argument that Arkansas is not a great place to live -- it actually supports the OP.
"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)."
Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.
1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro
2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.
3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.
4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.
5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.
6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.
Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.
Thanks, I think. But no, I didn't mean to pick on California as a bad state, I thought for some reason most people thought it was a nice state. I do, at least, despite its warts.
All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.
If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.
"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.
It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.
Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.
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Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).
The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.
Citation: https://dpw.sbcounty.gov/operations/road-closures/
""Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today."
From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.
"Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population,"
The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist. I talk to the population there regularly before I go out to the Chambless skarn to dig. ditto the mining community that's there for the quarry at Kelbaker road (I own the uranium mine nearby.)
"The road to Dish Hill"
Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover. You have to come from Amboy's power line backroads.
> From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.
Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.
> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.
The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.
It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.
> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.
Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?
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But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.
There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.
I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.
The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.
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tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.
When was the last time you heard someone clamoring to move to Nebraska or New Hampshire?
A large portion of the USA sees California as a place to avoid- so those sweeping generalities and those particular metrics might be accurate. California is only a nice place to live if you're rich, and most people are not.
I think in terms of natural beauty, it's definitely in the upper half. Specifically Ouachita National Forest in my opinion.
Our unofficial state motto is "Thank God for Mississippi!"
If not for them, we'd be at the bottom of most of those lists. No one pays attention to the second-worst :)
People vote in good faith, I presume. Sometimes a comment’s factual basis matters less than its overall contribution to a productive and open discussion. Downvotes in this case are an example of HN’s surprisingly effective system for self-moderation working as it should. It isn’t vile enough to censor, but it also isn’t what a lot of readers come here for. It didn’t personally offend me (I didn’t vote either way), but I take occasional downvoting that I don’t fully agree with in stride, as the overall system seems to work better than most.
> But it is rude to point that out.
No, that is not rude at all. Making a flippant derogatory remark gets downvotes, people like to see numbers. Like the ones you just gave...
Wow, that is super interesting.
I think I heard that long term usage of lithium has nasty side effects like damaging kidneys, but perhaps not at these very low concentrations.
My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...
1400 ppm is one part in 700, so you'd get your dose from one cup (250 ml) of that brine.
I agree it's not likely you'd get a measurable effect from the local groundwater.
El Dorado, one of the towns in AR that overlaps with the deposits, does have an above avg level of lithium water supply [1].
[1]: I'm working on a DB of water quality, https://www.cleartap.com/water-systems/AR0000550
The 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.
I would like to think that if there were any interaction between theses putative deposits to the groundwater that we wouldn't have needed an ML model to find these deposits in the first place!
I 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/
It also shrinks your white matter I think, and has other gigantic bad effects.
Source: am bipolar and take 600mg daily.
It also causes obesity and may be the cause of American obesity in the South.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p...
I 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.
It may surprise you to learn that lithium is actually a toxic substance. No human being has ever suffered from a lithium deficiency. Lithium is not a natural or healthy component of anyone's diet.
So, the so-called therapeutic dose of lithium is merely a sub-toxic level, and must be monitored by frequent blood tests.
There are horrific side effects from using lithium in the long term, including convulsions, hair loss, diarrhea, suicidal and homicidal ideations, and extreme thirst (polydipsia).
So personally, I would rather not be tapping into lithium reserves for my health.
Only when Mercury is in retrograde
Love to see a project that uses bog standard ML techniques and doesn't call them AI. Respect.
When the tide goes out on the AI hype there’s going to be a lot of companies currently using expensive API calls for simple classification tasks that will be quietly revamped to use a simple CNN.
ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.
> Not every problem needs a transformer.
They do if they want to get the intention of a Venture Capitalist!
Venture Capitalist Attention Is All You Need!
Quoth the article:
I was disappointed in that line. They could’ve mentioned it used a random forest, which is much more informative. “ML is a type of AI” isn’t even a cocktail party understanding of the topic.
For a layperson, this is an accessible and directionally correct definition.
For the HN audience, of course this is 'technically incorrect'.
The article was written for the (larger) general public.
I am also glad they didn't squeeze in a word salad of LLMs and quantum technology and instead stuck to 'it's just standard ML'.
The only informational dividable from the statement is "we used a computer to analyze data".
Nothing bog standard about contemporary ML. If anything calling it AI is underselling it.
This is what it was called back in the day. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02478259
It's the new Hacking vs Cracking. Or calling any computer a PC.
In this case it's Fracking
Are 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?
That treadmills been going on for a long time. Didn’t OCR used to be classified as AI?
Yep, 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.
ML is one particular field in the overall area of AI.
Isn’t it a critical component of everything currently sporting anything remotely close to a legit “AI” label? I wouldn’t call cows “one part of a broader beef ecosystem” for example. They’re fundamental to it.
Me thinks we might switch batteries to sodium in just a few years.
I 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.
Where does LFP fail? Today's LFP batteries are getting pretty damn good.
Energy density, weight, cost, and discharge rate.
They're doing pretty well on cost compared to other Li-ion chemistries.
Will 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...
at what point in history was the US ever anything approaching "self sufficient"? did I miss the american juche autarky period in history class?
I 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.
It 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 .
Interesting, & 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.
Which government agency would use eminent domain to take land and start mining? We have historical precedence with the oil industry using various scanning methods in a similar manner, but it was the oil companies who went to the landowners to acquire the rights to extract. Then the government would buy the (usable) product from them.
Local government condemned a bunch of perfectly fine homes in Wisconsin, by declaring them blighted, to make room for a Foxconn plant which never really panned out. Where there is greed there is a way.
National security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
Globally price-competitive domestic electric car production is a national security concern only if we are willing to accept a rather short time horizon and a rather narrow definition of security in our analysis.
This kind of article can perhaps be understood as an attempt to turn a federal organization's sails into the prevailing political winds, so to speak, at a time when funding seems insecure. I say this as someone who strongly supports most of the survey's mission. It would be ideal if national power brokers recognized the value of water science, geology, ecology, etc, on their own terms.
And of course you would not mind owners of extraction company leaving all the profits to people who got kicked out of their home. After all they should be happy just fulfilling your "national security" goal.
sure. just make sure to pay them what their land is worth... with the lithium below.
Is there case law on how deep land goes? I could imagine that there will be in the near future.
Yes, mineral rights are well defined in US real property law.
Do most residential land parcels include mining rights?
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
idk, but if you're going to buy a house check if it's "Fee Simple" which does include mineral rights.
https://www.rangerminerals.com/what-does-fee-simple-estate-o...