From the paper's method section, a bit more about which type of ML algo was used:
An RF machine-learning model was developed to predict lithium concentrations in Smackover Formation brines throughout southern Arkansas. The model was developed by (i) assigning explanatory variables to brine samples collected at wells, (ii) tuning the RF model to make predictions at wells and assess model performance, (iii) mapping spatially continuous predictions of lithium concentrations across the Reynolds oolite unit of the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, and (iv) inspecting the model for explanatory variable importance and influence. Initial model tuning used the tidymodels framework (52) in R (53) to test XGBoost, K-nearest neighbors, and RF algorithms; RF models consistently had higher accuracy and lower bias, so they were used to train the final model and predict lithium.
Explanatory variables used to tune the RF model included geologic, geochemical, and temperature information for Jurassic and Cretaceous units. The geologic framework of the model domain is expected to influence brine chemistry both spatially and with depth. Explanatory variables used to train the RF model must be mapped across the model domain to create spatially continuous predictions of lithium. Thus, spatially continuous subsurface geologic information is key, although these digital resources are often difficult to acquire.
Interesting to me that RF performed better the XGBoost, would have expected at least a similar outcome if tuned correctly.
Put another way, this is pretty similar to the interpolation approaches that would normally be used for datasets like this in the world of mineral exploration. Kriging/co-kriging (i.e. gaussian processes) is the more commonly used approach in this particular field due to both the long history and the available hyperparameters for things like spatial aniostropy.
However, kriging is really quite difficult to use with non-continuous inputs. RF is a lot more forgiving there. You don't need to develop a covariance model for discrete values (or a covariance model for how the different inputs relate, either).
So it turns out that there's no theoretical reason that gradient boosting will always outperform RF (which would violate the "no free lunch" theorem). But it does usually seem to be the case in practice, even with small and noisy data.
I would hazard a guess that with better tuning, XGBoost would still have won. (The paper notes that the authors chose a suboptimal set of hyperparameters out of fear of overfitting - maybe the same logic justifies choosing a suboptimal model type...)
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).
There's also a big lithium deposit in Nevada, and preparations for mining are underway there.[1] General Motors put in $650 million for guaranteed access to the output of this Thacker Mine.
It's in a caldera in a mountain that I-80 bypassed to go through Winnemuca, Nevada. Nearest town is Mill City, NV, which is listed as a ghost town, despite being next to I-80 and a main line railroad track.
The mine site is about 12km from Mill City on a dirt road not tracked by Google Street View.
Google Earth shows signs of development near Mill City. Looks like a trailer park and a truck stop. The road to the mine looks freshly graded. Nothing at the mine site yet.
It's a good place for a mine. There are no neighbors for at least 10km, but within 15km, there's good road and rail access.
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
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. :)
Well I guess this is a good win for short term energy infrastructure, though I'm always pretty torn when its at the cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material.
It is interesting to see how much of this data could be modelled based on wastewater brines from other industries in the area, assuming we go on to mine the lithium it will say a lot if the ML predictions prove accurate.
One thing I couldn't tell, and its probably just a limitation of how much time I could spend reading the source paper, is what method would be needed to extract the bulk of the lithium expected to be there. If processing brine water is sufficient that may be easier to control externalities than if they have to strip mine and get all the overburden out of the way first.
> cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material.
This mining offsets mining for other things that is happening at several orders of magnitude larger scale. Oil, coal, gas, etc. mining is huge and lithium batteries plus renewables are already reducing the need for those. So, the transition to renewables and batteries might actually result in a net reduction of mining.
Of course doing lithium mining cleanly and responsibly is an important topic. Especially in places close to where people live. But considering the vast amounts of other stuff we mine already at a much larger scale than we'll ever need to mine lithium, this is a drop in the ocean.
And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.
Lithium recycling processes are working fine already of course but there's very little recycling being done at scale for the simple reason that most lithium batteries in use are still very young and quite far away from needing any recycling. If anything, the improved life times of batteries is pushing the date that we need to be recycling at scale further and further away.
Extraction methods very much depend on composition of the deposits and whether they are in brine or other form and what other materials are present. There's a wide variety of brines, rock compositions, clays, etc with some lithium in them.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Very good work - but typically we don't build prospectivity models this way (or rather we don't validate them this way anymore). Great to see the USGS starting to dip their toe back in this though, they and the GSC were long the leaders in this, but have dropped it on the last 5-7 years.
Say Lithium becomes essentially free because we find so much of it…would that drastically lower battery costs? Is our current supply of lithium limiting production?
The major limiting factor of lithium is not really availability so much as the cost of extraction. China is the leader in this field, not so much because of abundance or stellar technology, but out of a willingness to completely ignore environmental externalities (including those of the power generation involved in the whole process). As a result the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially impossible to compete with them unless a country had similar... "advantages"... or some new and impressive technology.
In the US environmental regulations, the cost of producing power, labor costs, would all drive up the price of the end product in a way that makes it totally noncompetitive. That's also why the US and some other countries are investing in other ways to find lithium (among other things) on seabeds, where it's hoped that extraction would be less expensive. Of course the threat to the seabed environment is a concern, which in turn might drive up prices by imposing regulation, etc etc etc.
Lithium currently accounts for ~10% of the cost of the battery, so no.
As proof of that there are sodium-ion batteries on the market right now, but they're not price-competetive yet[0] despite using largely the same infrastructure.
[0] The potential is there though as they have an important advantage: you can safely discharge a sodium-ion battery to 0V for storage/transportation.
Is sand essentially free because we have beaches and deserts full of it? It can be used to make concrete, a valuable material? (Don't forget the shipping, storage, and refining costs)
Lithium is too abundant in the world right now (as expected - we've just gotten better at discovering it).
To be honest, the energy problem is more or less a solved problem with the current technologies we have. We just need to accelerate our pace of adoption to hard-reverse on fossil fuels (except Germany). We already have large reserves of Uranium, of which only a small amount is needed to fuel a power plant. We already have lithium battery tech to store the power. We already have solar panels being mass produced and adopted to fill in the gaps. All we need is connecting the dots and making sure these resources play well with each other in symbiosis.
I'm skeptical. China is already mass-producing batteries, securing as much lithium as possible. Additionally, US regulations will significantly increase costs for battery manufacturers.
> "the amount of lithium present would meet projected 2030 world demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over"
Does that mean the entire field has enough lithium for the requirements of 2030, 9 times? Or in other words, it can supply the lithium needs of car batteries from 2030 to 2039? That's not particularly long...
Lithium is infinitely recyclable. We cannot really predict lithium demand in 2039, because technology changes much.
Look at steel. Most of the steel used is recycled steel, we don’t mine a lot of it any more. If you asked someone 90 years ago, they would have assumed global steel demand would continue to rise.
Great, now ask the AI to engineer a fungal genome that'll help us purify it more easily: Frack in the substrate and spores, harvest fruit bodies on the surface, profit.
My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!
The formation is 7000 feet below the surface, if I understand correctly, so I don't think there would be any communication of its brine with potable groundwater.
I 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
It may surprise you to learn that lithium is actually a toxic substance. No human being has ever suffered from a lithium deficiency. Lithium is not a natural or healthy component of anyone's diet.
So, the so-called therapeutic dose of lithium is merely a sub-toxic level, and must be monitored by frequent blood tests.
There are horrific side effects from using lithium in the long term, including convulsions, hair loss, diarrhea, suicidal and homicidal ideations, and extreme thirst (polydipsia).
So personally, I would rather not be tapping into lithium reserves for my health.
When the tide goes out on the AI hype there’s going to be a lot of companies currently using expensive API calls for simple classification tasks that will be quietly revamped to use a simple CNN.
ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.
The USGS predictive model provides the first estimate of total lithium present in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.
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?
I think there will be markets for many different chemistries and there's unlikely to be some total winner in the near future. Each chemistry has its own tradeoffs and use cases. Some will fade and die over time like Ni-Cad, but even that takes longer than you would expect.
It would be amazing for some low weight, low volume, high energy density, high discharge rate, high charge rate, cheaply manufactured from abundant materials, low thermal sensitivity, high thermal tolerance, low passive loss, non-explosive, high cycle count, low memory, shelf stable battery chemistry to appear, but thus far every one fails in several of the categories.
I read the article carefully, twice. Doesn't have a link to any original paper, of course. And I can't find the answer to my question... did they, you know, validate the model? Did they actually take some samples at new locations and compare it to what the model says?
Or are they literally just announcing that "Hey, we told the computer to tell us something, so it told us something"? Yes, that is how it works. The computer will always tell you something if you make it tell you something. That isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting it to tell you things that correspond to reality.
In the absence of validation, this means very little, especially in an environment where the USGS is fairly incentivized to loudly announce to the world that we've totes got plenty of lithium, my fellow countries, any effort to keep lithium away from us is just a waste of time, look at us just rolling in lithium over here.
Or, maybe they did do the validation, and it's just the reporting that doesn't consider that an important aspect of the story. Somewhere between funding and press release someone's lost the trail but I don't know who exactly.
Interesting, & not necessarily in a good way. This method could well presage unprecedented numbers of attempts at eminent domain takings or other means of forcing people out of their properties.
Which government agency would use eminent domain to take land and start mining? We have historical precedence with the oil industry using various scanning methods in a similar manner, but it was the oil companies who went to the landowners to acquire the rights to extract. Then the government would buy the (usable) product from them.
National security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
folli|1 year ago
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.
jofer|1 year ago
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).
Loic|1 year ago
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
lordgrenville|1 year ago
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...)
jandrese|1 year ago
tomrod|1 year ago
aaronblohowiak|1 year ago
Animats|1 year ago
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
skyfaller|1 year ago
"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...
diggernet|1 year ago
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. :)
_heimdall|1 year ago
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.
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
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.
jofer|1 year ago
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.
jeffbee|1 year ago
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.
sidewndr46|1 year ago
rmm|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo.
h/t Saul Griffith.
greenie_beans|1 year ago
mmaunder|1 year ago
declan_roberts|1 year ago
Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
krunck|1 year ago
Dalewyn|1 year ago
It's high time we realize that Pax Americana is our era to lose, (re)start mining and (re)start development.
fishcrackers|1 year ago
[deleted]
tommykins|1 year ago
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.
idontwantthis|1 year ago
EA-3167|1 year ago
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.
astrange|1 year ago
Tade0|1 year ago
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.
kylehotchkiss|1 year ago
fakedang|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
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.
nubinetwork|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41910918
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907144
TheThirstyGeo|1 year ago
voidUpdate|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
nodesocket|1 year ago
CHB0403085482|1 year ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...
metadat|1 year ago
lovich|1 year ago
If not that’s funny timing given that was a few weeks ago
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
kylehotchkiss|1 year ago
moffkalast|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
chromatin|1 year ago
Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?
janice1999|1 year ago
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lithium-in-drinking-water-linked-...
coldbrewed|1 year ago
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...
pfdietz|1 year ago
jaxgeller|1 year ago
[1]: I'm working on a DB of water quality, https://www.cleartap.com/water-systems/AR0000550
no_wizard|1 year ago
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/
AStonesThrow|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
renewiltord|1 year ago
hiddencost|1 year ago
janalsncm|1 year ago
ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.
driggs|1 year ago
ImHereToVote|1 year ago
This is what it was called back in the day. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02478259
bloopernova|1 year ago
strbean|1 year ago
Tagbert|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
bilsbie|1 year ago
jandrese|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
joelignaatius|1 year ago
[deleted]
hello_computer|1 year ago
[deleted]
farceSpherule|1 year ago
People in the U.S. would rather be slaves to China than be self sufficient as we once were...
FactKnower69|1 year ago
jerf|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
> The study, which was published in Science Advances, can be found at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8149 .
flenserboy|1 year ago
scottyah|1 year ago
richwater|1 year ago