USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

"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.

It depends entirely on what scope one considers for impact. Do we count maintenance roads? Total land area disturbed? Windmill foundation pads? Global co2 levels? Abandoned equipment in general? Noise levels over how much area?

What is ‘leftover’ from an abandoned well can be as simple as a buried 6” ground level plug, or as messy as an acre of abandoned equipment and a giant oil spill/hazmat area. Plus a billion tons of atmospheric co2 - which is invisible.

If you drive I5 in California through the Central Valley, you’ll see hundreds of active oil wells that have been active since the early 1900’s, mixed in with active orchards and farmlands. They are a bit hard to find. Like this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TiWATTxP1jWmu4Et7?g_st=com.google.ma...]. And this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSeCzys8W2q4ubeJ9?g_st=com.google.ma...].

What you won’t see is that even downtown Los Angeles has similar wells that still produce significant oil hidden in special buildings.

If you take a little detour, you can see the thousands of acres of windmills in Tehachapi that produce similar amounts of total energy. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TBVn1JUbgqSYTduu5?g_st=com.google.ma...].

And if you keep driving, you can see the thousands of acres of solar farms that are doing similar. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/XGBtWZLppWH7vjqc8?g_st=com.google.ma...]

Oil is so widely used because it is incredibly cheap and easy to use at large scale, with minimal obviously visible consequence.

Because co2 is invisible. And as long as we don’t spill large quantities of it, it doesn’t seem to cause any visible problems.

The effect of the low density from wind, solar, etc. isn’t visible until you go to areas it is widely deployed and then do the math on how much energy they are actually producing, which is a small fraction of what would be produced if the same area was impacted to produce oil or nuclear.

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.

> cost of ripping open huge swaths of earth to get at the raw material.

This mining offsets mining for other things that is happening at several orders of magnitude larger scale. Oil, coal, gas, etc. mining is huge and lithium batteries plus renewables are already reducing the need for those. So, the transition to renewables and batteries might actually result in a net reduction of mining.

Of course doing lithium mining cleanly and responsibly is an important topic. Especially in places close to where people live. But considering the vast amounts of other stuff we mine already at a much larger scale than we'll ever need to mine lithium, this is a drop in the ocean.

And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.

Lithium recycling processes are working fine already of course but there's very little recycling being done at scale for the simple reason that most lithium batteries in use are still very young and quite far away from needing any recycling. If anything, the improved life times of batteries is pushing the date that we need to be recycling at scale further and further away.

Extraction methods very much depend on composition of the deposits and whether they are in brine or other form and what other materials are present. There's a wide variety of brines, rock compositions, clays, etc with some lithium in them.

And all that shuffling introduces more costs, creates negative externalities for exports does it not?