[HN Gopher] USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium pot...
___________________________________________________________________
USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in
Arkansas
Author : antidnan
Score : 327 points
Date : 2024-10-22 17:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usgs.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usgs.gov)
| chromatin wrote:
| Serious question:
|
| Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living
| here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for
| poverty / SES) ?
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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/
| kranke155 wrote:
| It also shrinks your white matter I think, and has other
| gigantic bad effects.
|
| Source: am bipolar and take 600mg daily.
| astrange wrote:
| 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...
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| mbreese wrote:
| 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!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Only when Mercury is in retrograde
| coldbrewed wrote:
| 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...
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| janice1999 wrote:
| Potentially. See "Lithium in drinking water linked with lower
| suicide rates" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lithium-in-drinking-water-
| linked-...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I would assume any positive effects are balanced out by
| living in Arkansas.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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...
| elpakal wrote:
| Um, why were you waking up while driving at 3 in the
| morning?
| hinkley wrote:
| Some cars have seats for up to seven people, including
| the driver.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Happened to me on Ambien.
| hinkley wrote:
| Hah! No I did my turn behind the wheel from 10-1 so
| nobody died on my watch. I was in the back.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think that is a socially damning statement about
| Arkansas if the drunks are still out driving at 3 am.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| thinkindie wrote:
| 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.
| atq2119 wrote:
| 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.)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Possibly but having extensively driven all over the rest
| of Europe without a ticket, I don't think the fault is
| entirely mine.
| tomrod wrote:
| Both areas can be great.
| Eumenes wrote:
| > waking up
|
| you were sleeping and driving? lol
| lightedman wrote:
| "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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Good god.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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...
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| EB66 wrote:
| 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...
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| EB66 wrote:
| 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.
| lightedman wrote:
| "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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| volkl48 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| -------
|
| 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/
| bluedino wrote:
| When was the last time you heard someone clamoring to
| move to Nebraska or New Hampshire?
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| 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.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >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#P675e8969
| 3a5...
|
| 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.
| Agree2468 wrote:
| I think in terms of natural beauty, it's definitely in
| the upper half. Specifically Ouachita National Forest in
| my opinion.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| 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 :)
| stevage wrote:
| 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.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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.
| jaxgeller wrote:
| 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
| hiddencost wrote:
| Love to see a project that uses bog standard ML techniques and
| doesn't call them AI. Respect.
| bloopernova wrote:
| It's the new Hacking vs Cracking. Or calling any computer a PC.
| gowld wrote:
| In this case it's Fracking
| driggs wrote:
| Quoth the article: The USGS predictive model
| provides the first estimate of total lithium present in
| Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine
| learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| textlapse wrote:
| 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'.
| gowld wrote:
| The only informational dividable from the statement is
| "we used a computer to analyze data".
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| 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
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > Not every problem needs a transformer.
|
| They do if they want to get the intention of a Venture
| Capitalist!
| janalsncm wrote:
| Venture Capitalist Attention Is All You Need!
| Tagbert wrote:
| ML is one particular field in the overall area of AI.
| nativeit wrote:
| 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.
| strbean wrote:
| 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?
| lovich wrote:
| That treadmills been going on for a long time. Didn't OCR
| used to be classified as AI?
| jpk wrote:
| 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.
| folli wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| jofer wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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).
| jncfhnb wrote:
| XGBoost models are random forest models. They're also just
| consistently better for very little effort.
| prog_1 wrote:
| you surely mean that both are ensemble models. RFs and GBMs
| differ in how they fit the data
| jncfhnb wrote:
| 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
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| 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...)
| levocardia wrote:
| 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/ho
| w-m...
| dwattttt wrote:
| > 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.
| youoy wrote:
| 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/
| eru wrote:
| The 'no free lunch' theorem is almost useless, because no
| real world data set is made of white noise.
| jofer wrote:
| 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).
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| for other folks wonder what the acronym means; RF in this
| context is Random Forest
| f_devd wrote:
| For a moment I was excited that they had done surveys
| entirely on RF backscattering and ML.
| Loic wrote:
| 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
| bilsbie wrote:
| Me thinks we might switch batteries to sodium in just a few
| years.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| tln wrote:
| Where does LFP fail? Today's LFP batteries are getting pretty
| damn good.
| jandrese wrote:
| Energy density, weight, cost, and discharge rate.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They're doing pretty well on cost compared to other Li-
| ion chemistries.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| 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?
| astrange wrote:
| No, lithium is not rare and we have enough of it. It's
| available from friendly countries like Australia too.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| 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.
| p00dles wrote:
| What an informative comment, thank you
| engineer_22 wrote:
| > 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| 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.
| corimaith wrote:
| And all that shuffling introduces more costs, creates
| negative externalities for exports does it not?
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| The obvious answer is tariffs.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| 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)
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| pengaru wrote:
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| 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.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Related
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910918
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907144
| flenserboy wrote:
| 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.
| richwater wrote:
| National security (by identifying and processing rare earth
| metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to
| society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| sure. just make sure to pay them what their land is worth...
| with the lithium below.
| jumploops wrote:
| Do most residential land parcels include mining rights?
| chx wrote:
| 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
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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...
| ct0 wrote:
| Is there case law on how deep land goes? I could imagine
| that there will be in the near future.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Yes, mineral rights are well defined in US real property
| law.
| walleeee wrote:
| 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.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| This entire problem will solved without offering human
| employment in a place that would probably welcome it at this
| pace.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| What are you worried about, zombies that want to eat your
| batteries?
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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).
| declan_roberts wrote:
| 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.
| bagels wrote:
| 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?
| wbl wrote:
| Depends on the kind of deposit. Some they leech in situ.
| waveBidder wrote:
| > 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.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| What do you think the people in cities burn for fuel to
| keep themselves warm?
| ianeigorndua wrote:
| Trash, mostly.
| luckylion wrote:
| 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.
| UltraSane wrote:
| 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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| gottorf wrote:
| > 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.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| > 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?
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| > 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.
| lanthade wrote:
| > 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.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| 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?
| lazide wrote:
| 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/TBVn1JU
| bgqSYTduu5?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://map
| s.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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Contrarianism has definitely entered its self-parody era.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Lithium isn't a fuel
| krunck wrote:
| There is always sodium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-
| ion_battery
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| the mobile bay already has a lot of oil mining: https://www.g
| oogle.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)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| gwern wrote:
| 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 .
| nodesocket wrote:
| Time to buy some cheap land in southern Arkansas?
| lovich wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| diggernet wrote:
| 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. :)
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| CSSer wrote:
| And they can all visit us at Burning Man every year!
| mjrpes wrote:
| 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/
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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?
| lobsterthief wrote:
| 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
| jaystraw wrote:
| could be artificial precision coming from degs min sec to
| decimal??
| Animats wrote:
| 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/@41.69
| 94929...
| skyfaller wrote:
| 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...
| dendrite9 wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| tommykins wrote:
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| jofer wrote:
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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?
| jofer wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I think they're using better processes than evaporation these
| days. For example, concentrating the brine using reverse
| osmosis first.
| jofer wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| jofer wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| If we get there, it will solve the housing crisis single-
| handedly. My fingers are crossed.
| volkl48 wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, and that degree of say comes in the form of voting.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| That's not at all how our system works. This is comically
| wrong.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > 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.
| pcl wrote:
| > _"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.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| rmm wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| I eagerly anticipate the day Australia becomes the World's
| Forge.
|
| All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo.
|
| h/t Saul Griffith.
| jaza wrote:
| 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!
| farceSpherule wrote:
| 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...
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| at what point in history was the US ever anything approaching
| "self sufficient"? did I miss the american juche autarky period
| in history class?
| CHB0403085482 wrote:
| Lithium for everyone!
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...
| metadat wrote:
| Wall-free: https://archive.today/59cJH
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "the amount of lithium present would meet projected 2030 world
| demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over"
|
| Does that mean the entire field has enough lithium for the
| requirements of 2030, 9 times? Or in other words, it can supply
| the lithium needs of car batteries from 2030 to 2039? That's not
| particularly long...
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| asdflkjvlkj wrote:
| In the USA, most steel is recycled. Most of the rest of the
| world uses basic oxygen furnace by wide margin.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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"
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