Program Summary
Critical minerals are defined as commodities essential to the U.S. economy and national security with significant supply chain vulnerabilities. The supply of many critical minerals remains highly vulnerable to disruption due to high levels of import reliance, particularly on unstable or even adversarial nations. Clean energy infrastructure, along with many other next-generation technologies, consume more critical minerals than traditional energy sources, and expected demand for critical minerals used in clean energy will quadruple by 2040.
In addition to assessing the nation’s mineral resources, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) tracks production, use, and trade statistics for over 100 commodities; 50 of which exceed criticality thresholds owing to high supply risk.
Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support (CriticalMAAS) aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to automate and accelerate key, time-consuming parts of USGS’ critical mineral assessment workflow. The goal of this AI exploration effort is to transform the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications.
The Energy Act of 2020 called for the USGS to assess all critical mineral resources in the U.S. In addition, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law called on the USGS to assess potential critical mineral resources in mine waste. These assessments can quantify potential mineral sources from existing domestic mines – whether historical or active – and help identify opportunities for economically and environmentally viable resource development.
The challenge is that critical mineral assessments are labor intensive and using traditional techniques, assessing all 50 critical minerals would proceed too slowly to address present-day supply chain needs.
An AI-assisted workflow could enable the USGS to accomplish its mission, produce high-quality derivative products from raw input data, and deliver timely assessments that reduce exploration risk and support decisions affecting the management of strategic domestic resources.
While the primary focus will be critical minerals, it is expected that the resulting technologies and resulting data products will be valuable for a wide variety of U.S. government mission areas ranging from water resource management, to potential new clean energy sources.
The CriticalMAAS Broad Agency Announcement is available at: https://sam.gov/opp/4d53a0f7461e4e51b36495f9d0ec199c/view