Posted by antidnan 10/22/2024
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.
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).
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
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...)
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...
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).
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.
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.
I’m saying XGBoost would be a subclass of RF
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."
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...
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.
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.
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. But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor.
Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...
Like a child wanting two incompatible things.
And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.
Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"
And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.
Casting into the void.
But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.
These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:
https://www.edf.org/revamped-cost-curve-reaching-net-zero-em...
> $0 per ton or less
> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.
> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.
> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.
“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.
What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.
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. :)
"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...
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo.
h/t Saul Griffith.
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).
Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
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.
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.
Can you expand on this? How does the density of fossil fuel make them a better source of energy than say wind?
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.
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.
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.
What analysis do you point to that suggests fossil fuels have a smaller impact than, say, wind?
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.
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.
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.
That is very unfortunate because it is the only real long-term solution to prevent climate change and maintain our current standard of living.
It's high time we realize that Pax Americana is our era to lose, (re)start mining and (re)start development.
we don't need it happening upstream.
and watch as the nations destroy themselves (ecosystems)
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.
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.
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.
American labor and real estate (shelf space) are what make up the vast majority of the cost for goods purchased here.
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.
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.
So yea desert sand is essentially free, even if you pay for shipping.
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.