USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

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.

> ripping open huge swaths of earth

Do you have the same trepidation about aluminum, iron, dish soap, and table salt? I ask because the amount of "ripping open" involved in lithium production is like a speck in the eye of a whale compared to all the other mining. In terms of scale all existing and proposed lithium mines are teensy tiny by the standards of mines.

Sure, yes I do wish that we weren't opening such huge holes as we are for aluminum, iron, coal, etc. I worked in the upstream oil industry for a bit and live in an area heavily coal mined, I just wasn't clear how lithium mining compared and didn't want to assume that damage was on the same scale as the others.

It's not even close to as large as the footprint of oil and gas. The Thacker Pass project, which is one of several that are all individually described as satisfying global demand, will ultimately disturb only 7000 acres. Fossil fuel wells usually disturb 5 net acres each, and there are five million such wells in America alone.

Additionally, that area in Nevada can be - at best - charitably described as moonscape.

Which, for those of us that like moonscape, is a bit sad. But there is a lot of moonscape in that region, and there aren’t a huge number of moonscape fans. At least that are going to try to picket any projects. So overall, meh.

That area of Nevada is also pretty economically ‘challenged’, so why not.

Also, at some point you need to tell people "you don't own this land, so you don't get to say what gets done to it."

I'm half expecting the future more conservative SCOTUS to shoot down land use regulation as a taking, requiring such regulation to be combined with payment for the value lost instead.

Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land.

The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it.

I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.

Yes, and that degree of say comes in the form of voting.

This is a particularly tricky year to argue voting, particularly for the president, is the right level of public oversight. We were offered two candidates with comparatively little say or visibility (compared to the last few decades) during the primaries.

Trump effectively sat out of the primary season, though primary voters did overwhelmingly support him they did so without ever having the chance to hear him pressed during a debate or contentious interview. There is at least a case with Trump to argue voters already knew they wanted him and simply didn't need a primary, the democrats don't have that argument to make.

The democrats didn't even bother to have a primary and went out of their way to pressure debate organizers to block Kennedy entirely before swapping out their candidate last minute.

Whether it's the "right" level of oversight is another question entirely.