A research team from Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho is trying to make it easier to get information about critical minerals in our region.
The U.S. government designates certain minerals — such as lithium, cobalt and nickel — as “critical” because the country relies on them for everything from smartphones to electric cars to nuclear reactors, and they can be vulnerable to foreign supply chain disruptions.
Now, the Mountain West team, composed of university employees and state geologists, is aiming to be one piece of the puzzle addressing those supply chain challenges. It’s using non-generative AI to digitize data around critical minerals and put it in a searchable database.
“The phrase is ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” said Alathea Davies, research scientist at the University of Wyoming School of Computing. “So you want good data that has been cleaned.”
Currently, when a researcher wants to see how many critical minerals are in an area, they often have to dig through “legacy data.”
That’s “data that exists only on paper,” according to Tyler Brown, minerals program manager at the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources.
“Whether that is a geologic map, whether that is a geophysical well log, a geophysical survey,” he added.
He said cleaning up this data and putting it in a database will save time for researchers. It will help the universities compete for federal grants in these areas, such as those under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, which encourages the use of AI in science.
This comes as researchers, industry partners and governments try to figure out how to produce more critical minerals domestically.
“We don't want to have to be reliant upon a foreign entity to get these materials that we need,” Brown said.
He added that Mountain West states are rich in critical minerals. Wyoming has various rare earth elements and uranium, which were added to the critical minerals list late last year. Nevada has lithium, tungsten and magnesium, while Idaho has antimony, copper and cobalt.
The yearlong data project was selected for seed funding under the Intermountain Critical Minerals Research Launchpad, an initiative from the University of Wyoming, the University of Nevada-Reno and the University of Idaho.
Davies said another team is focused on efficiently recovering critical minerals from electronic waste.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
