Bill Gates will search for rare metals in Greenland with artificial intelligence
The American startup KoBold will go looking for metals for electric vehicles in Greenland. It is funded by Equinor and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate-friendly fund of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma
KoBold Metals, a US startup backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma, wants to exploit artificial intelligence to optimize the search for rare metal deposits in Greenland.
THE JOINT VENTURE WITH BLUEJAY MINING
KoBold has signed an agreement with British mining company Bluejay Mining to explore deposits of metals critical for the energy transition in Greenland. The two companies have formed a joint venture: KoBold will have a 51 percent stake, and Bluejay the remaining 49 percent.
15 MILLION DOLLARS
KoBold will pay a sum of $ 15 million by the end of 2024 to finance the exploration activities of the Disko-Nuussuaq project in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland. The startup will search for nickel, copper , cobalt and other metals used in electric vehicles : the European Union has banned the sale of new petrol or diesel cars after 2035; the United States wants half of new vehicles sold to be electric by 2030.
Almost 20 percent of the amount allocated by KoBold will be used for geological assessment operations; the rest for the initial drilling of the site.
SIMILARITIES WITH RUSSIA
Bluejay said that, according to previous assessments, the territory of western Greenland has geological similarities with the Norilsk region, in Russia, where large quantities of nickel and palladium are produced: this is where the Russian mining-metallurgical company operates. Nornickel ', one of the most important on the market.
KoBold's managing director, Kurt House, said that the Disko region, due to past geological events, could now be "a metal repository for first-class batteries".
WHAT KOBOLD DOES WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
KoBold Metals was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Berkeley, California. According to the information on his website , he uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies to optimize mining exploration, deciding which land to buy and where to drill.
The startup has a platform, called TerraShed, which aggregates and classifies large amounts of scientific data. The data is then used by a system of algorithms (the Machine Prospector), which analyzes them using machine learning techniques to predict the composition of the subsoil "in a statistically valid way," says KoBold.
WHO INVESTS IN KOBOLD: GATES, BEZOS, JACK BUT AND NOT ONLY
One of KoBold's major investors is Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the fund dedicated to “clean” energy technologies – those that are useful for decarbonisation – set up by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. The fund was joined, among others, by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Alibaba's Jack Ma, Bloomberg's Michael Bloomberg and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son.
Equinor, the Norwegian state oil company, also invested in KoBold.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/kobold-groenlandia-metalli-batterie-intelligenza-artificiale/ on Mon, 23 Aug 2021 08:14:56 +0000.