Usgs Critical Deposits MCP Server

@pipeworx/usgs-critical-deposits

USGS's "Critical mineral deposits of the United States" (ver. 3.0, September 2026) — 1,271 documented mineral deposits across 41 states and Puerto Rico, each classified by mineral system and deposit type, with production history, resource/reserve figures and references, compiled from MRDS, ARDF and USMIN plus industry reports and the literature. Distinct from usgs-mrdata (raw MRDS occurrences, no curated critical-mineral resource/reference compilation) and usgs-mineral-commodities (national production/trade summaries, no per-deposit records).

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1764+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• usgs_cmd_deposits_search(commodity?, state?, bbox?, limit?) — search by critical mineral/commodity (e.g. "lithium", "cobalt", "ree"), US state or territory abbreviation, and/or a bounding box. Returns each deposit's id, name, state, coordinates, minerals, deposit type and resource figures. An unrecognized commodity returns found: false plus the full list of commodities this dataset actually has deposits for (see "Commodity vocabulary" below).
• usgs_cmd_deposit_detail(id) — one deposit's full record: minerals, deposit type, mineral system, production history, resource/reserve figures, references, a link to the underlying MRDS/ARDF/USMIN record, and the release version/DOI.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://energy.usgs.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Hosted/Critical_mineral_deposits_of_the_United_States/FeatureServer/0/query — the live ArcGIS FeatureServer this pack proxies per request.
• https://doi.org/10.5066/P9K1HBNT — the data release itself (ScienceBase item 6464de5bd34ec179a83d9e6c), "Critical mineral deposits of the United States (ver. 3.0, September 2026)". FGDC metadata revision date 2026-09-09; USGS's public announcement of the update is dated 2026-09-29.

Why this proxies live rather than baking a table

The release also ships a download-only Excel/shapefile bundle, but USGS also stands up the identical table as a keyless ArcGIS FeatureServer (verified live 2026-10-08) — so, unlike usgs-mineral-commodities (genuinely file-only), this is a live-call-per-request proxy, not a mirror, and needs no reuse grant under root CLAUDE.md's "PROXYING is not REDISTRIBUTING". No KV bake, no module-scope data table.

The upstream is measurably flaky

Measured live 2026-10-08: the exact same unmodified query (where=1=1& outFields=fid&resultRecordCount=3) returned HTTP 502 on six consecutive attempts over ~45 seconds, then HTTP 200 on the next attempt with nothing changed on this end — this is the upstream ArcGIS hosting infrastructure hiccuping, not a malformed request. Every call in this pack throws loudly on a non-2xx status, a non-JSON body, or an ArcGIS-shaped {"error": {...}} response, naming the upstream status — never degrading into found: false or an empty deposits list, which would be indistinguishable from a real zero-result query. See src/index.test.ts for the pinned contract.

Commodity vocabulary

The CritMin field in the underlying dataset is open text, comma-separated, and mixes individual elements with USGS's own group shorthand ("ree", "pge") and a few raw multi-word entries ("palladium rhenium", "tantalum tin") — it is not a clean one-token-per-commodity field, and it is not the same list as USGS's press-release count of "59 critical minerals" (the 2025 List of Critical Minerals, 60 commodities, minus metallurgical coal, which this compilation does not address). The two numbers differ because several of the 60 named commodities have zero documented deposits in this release, and because grouped tokens (ree, pge) stand in for multiple individually-named elements on the official list.

This pack therefore validates commodity against the vocabulary derived live from the dataset itself — every distinct comma-split, lower-cased token actually present across the 1,271 deposits (measured 2026-10-08: 47 tokens) — rather than a retyped copy of the press-release list. That keeps deposits_search from ever saying "not found" for a commodity it would then also fail to match. The vocabulary is fetched once per isolate and memoized; a fetch failure clears the memo so the next call retries rather than latching an empty vocabulary for the isolate's whole life.

Known field quirks

• state is a 2-letter US state/territory abbreviation; Puerto Rico is PR. There is no country filter — this dataset is US-only (with PR).
• resources1–resources4, prduction1–prduction3 and comments1–comments3 are USGS's own text-overflow continuation columns (a single free-text cell that ran past 254 characters spills into the next numbered field) — this pack concatenates the non-empty ones into resources / production_history / comments arrays rather than exposing the raw numbered fields.
• references_ (trailing underscore in the raw field name — references is a reserved-ish word in some ArcGIS client libraries) is exposed as references in this pack's output.
• Empty cells in the source come back as a single space " " or the literal string "--", not an empty string or null — both are filtered out before building the resources/production_history/comments arrays.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "usgs-critical-deposits": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/usgs-critical-deposits/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/usgs-critical-deposits/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1764+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/usgs_cmd_deposits_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"commodity":"lithium","state":"AR"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/usgs_cmd_deposits_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "usgs-critical-deposits": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-usgs-critical-deposits"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-usgs-critical-deposits

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Usgs Critical Deposits data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT