Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Rock formations in the Texas Hill Country date back billions of years and may contain graphite, which is needed for advanced batteries.
A plane with a wonky looking tail, packed with magnetic and radiometric collection abilities, will fly over the Llano Uplift in search of graphite and other critical minerals, such as tantalum, niobium, and tungsten.
Uplifts form hills and valleys, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which also can force deeply buried minerals to the surface. Erosion helps uncover them further.
The flyover is part of a collaborative effort between the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (Earth MR!) and the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology. The initiative seeks to modernize the nation's maps of geology and minerals as well as identify energy and groundwater resources and natural hazards.
Jamey Jones, the science coordinator for Earth MRI, explained how the airborne survey works.
"We measure the natural magnetic field that's being emitted from the rock and just beneath the earth's surface and then there's also these interesting crystals that pick up on these really low-level radio isotopes that are emitted from the minerals at the surface," he said.
No videos or photos are taken by the low-flying aircraft, which will make runs over Blanco, Burnet, Gillespie, Kerr, Kimble, Lampasas, Llano, McCulloch, Mason, Menard and San Saba Counties. Flights will leave the Llano Municipal Airport this month and into December, when weather permits.
Jones said awareness is heightened around the world and in the U.S. about the need to find critical minerals used in everyday objects vital to daily life. He called the nation "under mapped," and said it's hard to make informed decisions if we don't have good data on where to find critical minerals.
He said the search for those critical minerals is akin to the gold rush of the western U.S. in the 1800s.
"It is equivalent to the gold rush in a sense, but it is much more than that because there are so many different things that our way of life requires," he said.
Jones said the space below the aircraft is mowed like one would mow a lawn to determine what critical minerals it may contain, and the process sometimes has other benefits, too.
"We just got contacted by one of the water conservation districts out in the Llano region, saying 'can the data help us with groundwater mapping?' The answer is absolutely. We can map things like faults. We can map rocks under the surface that might have the potential to carry groundwater," Jones said.
Dallas-based Paladin Exploration, a U.S. flake graphite exploration production company, has interest in the outcome of the airborne survey of the Llano outlift.
Still years away and awaiting community input, the company said it could revive a former Burnet County graphite mine it now owns, creating jobs and boosting the local economy.
The former Southwestern Graphite Mine was the United States' last flake graphite mine, which closed in 1979.
"Geopolitics with the resurgence of China and their focus on critical minerals really sank the business there," said Paladin Exploration Co-founder and CEO Dakon Montgomery. "And the reshoring of critical minerals in the U.S. is absolutely critical to domestic security."
He also mentioned the economic component of reviving the mine.
"Our project will inject, at least in phase one, $100 million in capital into the Burnet economy, and employ roughly 200 people — just on the production side. We are really looking forward to what this could mean to the local economy there."
Montgomery said the previous graphite mining in Burnet County covered about 10 acres over its 80 years. He called the mining "a very clean process," using picks and shovels.
The Burnet County graphite in the Llano Uplift is one of only four locations in the U.S. that contains "any graphite of consequence," he said.
