Headline, July 25 2024/ ''' A.I.'S PROUD AIRS '''

 

''' A.I.'S PROUD AIRS '''

A NEW FIND UPENDS MINING. A.I. IS RADICALLY CHANGING the mining industry - as competition for minerals grows fierce. Here then is the context when A.I. helped spot copper mining boon.

Peering into their computer screens in California last year, the data crunchers watched a subterranean fortune come into focus : What they saw transported them 10,000 miles [ 16,000 kilometers ] across the world, to Zambia, and then one more mile straight down into the earth.

A rich Iode of copper, deep in the bed rock, appeared before them, its contours revealed by a complex. A.I. driven technology they had been painstakingly building for years.

On Thursday, the company KoBold Metals informed its business partners that their find is likely the largest copper discovery in more than a decade. According to their estimates, reviewed by The New York Times, the mine would produce at least 300,000 tons of copper a year once fully operational. This corresponds to a value of billions of dollars a year, for decades.

The New York Times also reviewed an independent, third-party assessment of KoBold's claims, which while slightly more conservative than KoBold's own, largely corroborated the size of the deposit.

In a statement, KoBold said it expected the value of the mine to grow because it had yet to map the full extent of the highest-grade ore.

It's the first confirmed success for a company that hopes to radically transform from the way we find metals critical not only to the tech industry but to the fight against climate change.

The geopolitical significance is vast. KoBold's find comes as the United States and China are increasingly clashing over global access to the minerals needed to manufacture clean energy technologies.

KoBold originated half a decade ago in the belated realization among Silicon Valley's baron's of what lay ahead.

Their products had become the backbone of the United States economy. But their businesses couldn't grow much farther without a gargantuan increase in the mining of a handful of raw materials that makes batteries, without which everything from cellphones to electric trucks simply can't function.

THEY NEEDED far more copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel.

Hundreds of new mines would be necessary, analysts calculated. And not just for consumer products, but for the housed-sized lithium-ion batteries needed for backup on the nation's power grids as solar and wind power ebbs and flows.

ALL DATA CENTERS demand huge amounts of copper. Advanced weaponry required nickel and cobalt.

Over two-decades of production, KoBold's find in Zambia would yield enough copper for 100 millions of today's average-size electric vehicle batteries.

'' The more you realize how dependent we are on these technologies, the more you ask :  

How the hell were we so slow to the fact that we needed vast amounts of raw material to make it all possible?'' said Connie Chan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the biggest venture capital firm in the United States and an early investor in KoBold.

The traditional mining industry leaked a convincing solution : Using exploration techniques largely unchanged in a century, the cost of new discoveries was rising while the pace of the finds slowed.

Around the same time, the U.S. government had a similar lightbulb moment. America had become far too reliant on China for these essential resources.

China had been heavily investing in global mining and metal processing, and controlled the production of 20 to 80 percent of its supply chains. The United States, on the other hand, had relatively few processing plants or mines, domestic or foreign, for most battery metals.

The International Energy Forum, a research organization, recently estimated that the world would need between 35 and 194 large new mines for copper alone through 2050.

This translates to between one and six new copper mines, every year, the size of the one KoBold plans to dig in Zambia.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on precious metals and mining continues. The World Students Society thanks Max Berak.

With most respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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