Why do Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates want to mine for metals in Greenland?

Lower them emissions of CO2 to acquire the carbon neutrality in 2050 represents one of the major challenges of our century. One of the big ideas for this is to replace the cars To combustion fossil fuel (gasoline and diesel) by electric vehicles. This vision remains elusive and takes time. The main problem lies in the mining of the materials needed to make batteries.

It is to solve this major problem that the company KoBold Metals is looking for deposits to Greenland. Indeed, an area located in the west of the country has notable similarities with the Russian region of Norilsk, known to produce nickel and you palladium in large quantities. KoBold Metals is backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg via the investment fund for the weather Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Bluejay Mining is already present in Greenland. © Bluejay Mining

AI to detect drilling sites

The California-based company has struck a deal with Bluejay Mining to mine the area where it hopes to find metals like nickel, copper, the cobalt or the platinum. For this, KoBold Metals wishes to use a new technique based on artificial intelligence and thedeep learning to find the best drilling locations. To do this, the AI ​​examines 80-year-old maps and combines them with satellite data to find potential sites.

KoBold’s Machine Prospector technology predicts where the ore is focused and then collects additional data that helps reduce uncertainty. The goal is to quickly eliminate the places where the chances of success are low, so that when they drill, they are much more likely to find the earth. What they are looking for are ” anomalies of composition ”, that is to say large pieces of exploitable rock. These anomalies make it much more economical to extract and process the ore. The demand for these materials is likely to become much more important, their identification and their exploitation require to meet the needs of durability.