I came across an interesting article in Wired Magazine recently, The Mining Industry’s Next Frontier Is Deep, Deep Under the Sea | WIRED. The article was about polymetallic nodules. I had not previously been aware of these nodules.
"...One March day in 1873, some of these subaqueous artifacts were dragged for the first time into sunlight. Sailors aboard the HMS Challenger, a former British warship retrofitted into a floating research lab, dredged a net along the sea bottom, hauled it up, and dumped the dripping sediment onto the wooden deck. As the expedition’s scientists, in long trousers and shirtsleeves, eagerly sifted through the mud and muck, they noted the many “peculiar black oval bodies” that they soon determined were concretions of valuable minerals. A fascinating discovery, but it would be almost a century before the world began to dream of exploiting these stones."
"In 1965, an American geologist published an influential book called The Mineral Resources of the Sea, which generously estimated that the nodules contained enough manganese, cobalt, nickel, and other metals to feed the world’s industrial needs for thousands of years. Mining the nodules, he speculated, “could serve to remove one of the historic causes of war between nations, supplies of raw materials for expanding populations. Of course it might produce the opposite effect also, that of fomenting inane squabbles over who owns which areas of the ocean floor.”
"The nodules have been growing, in utter blackness and near-total silence, for millions of years. Each one started as a fragment of something else—a tiny fossil, a scrap of basalt, a shark’s tooth—that drifted down to the plain at the very bottom of the ocean. In the lugubrious unfolding of geologic time, specks of waterborne nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese slowly accreted onto them. By now, trillions lie half-buried in the sediment carpeting the ocean floor."
"...In October of last year, an enormous new creature appeared on the seabed of the Pacific Ocean, about 1,400 miles southwest of San Diego. It was a remote-controlled, 90-ton machine the size of a small house, lowered from an industrial ship on a cable nearly 3 miles long."
"The world’s long-overdue, fitful transition to renewable energy is hobbled by an Achilles’ heel: It requires staggering quantities of natural resources. Manufacturing enough electric vehicles to replace their fossil-fueled counterparts will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, and other metals. To meet the exploding demand, mining companies, carmakers, and governments are scouring the planet for potential mines or expanding existing ones, from the deserts of Chile to the rain forests of Indonesia. Meanwhile, what might be the richest source of all—the ocean floor—remains untapped. The US Geological Survey estimates that 21 billion tons of polymetallic nodules lie in a single region of the Pacific, containing more of some metals (such as nickel and cobalt) than can be found in all the world’s dryland deposits."
"...The ship, called the Hidden Gem, was a former oil-drilling vessel nearly 800 feet long, retrofitted for sea mining by the Metals Company, an international firm officially headquartered in Canada. This was the first test of its system to collect the ancient black stones. They are officially known as polymetallic nodules, but the Metals Company’s CEO, Gerard Barron, likes to call them “batteries in a rock.” That’s because the stones happen to be packed with metals that are essential for manufacturing electric cars—a market that is surging worldwide. Barron’s company is at the front of a pack of more than a dozen enterprises slavering over the billions of dollars that could be reaped from those little subsea rocks."
"The world’s long-overdue, fitful transition to renewable energy is hobbled by an Achilles’ heel: It requires staggering quantities of natural resources. Manufacturing enough electric vehicles to replace their fossil-fueled counterparts will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, and other metals. to meet the exploding demand, mining companies, carmakers, and governments are scouring the planet for potential mines or expanding existing ones, from the deserts of Chile to the rain forests of Indonesia. Meanwhile, what might be the richest source of all—the ocean floor—remains untapped. The US Geological Survey estimates that 21 billion tons of polymetallic nodules lie in a single region of the Pacific, containing more of some metals (such as nickel and cobalt) than can be found in all the world’s dryland deposits."
For years, Barron has "...been traveling the world to talk up deep-sea mining to investors and government officials. He and other would-be sea miners argue that collecting nodules from the deep will be not only cheaper than traditional mining but also gentler on the planet. No rain forests uprooted, no Indigenous peoples displaced, no toxic tailings poisoning rivers."
"...Here’s what makes all of this urgent. The mining ban has a loophole: the two-year trigger. A section of the treaty known as Paragraph 15 states that if any member country formally notifies the Seabed Authority that it wants to start sea mining in international waters, the organization will have two years to adopt full regulations. If it fails to do so, the treaty says the ISA “shall none the less consider and provisionally approve such plan of work.” This text is commonly interpreted to mean mining must be allowed to go ahead, even in the absence of full regulations."
..."Very little is truly known about the deep ocean. Gathering data hundreds of miles from land and miles below the water’s surface is extraordinarily difficult. A single day’s work can cost up to $80,000, and sophisticated tools such as remotely operated vehicles have only recently become available to many scientists. In 2022, 31 marine researchers published a paper that reviewed hundreds of studies on deep-sea mining. The authors also interviewed 20 scientists, industry members, and policy-makers; almost all said the scientific community needed at least five more years “to make evidence-based recommendations” for regulating the industry."
The bottom line is that the polymetallic nodules have a potential for relieving some of the problems associated with the transition to renewable energy. Some of these problems include "dirty" land-based mining operations; including dangerous conditions, and exploitation of child labor in some African countries. The undersea mining operations would be unmanned, using automated and robotic technology. The environmental degradation associated with land-based mining are well-known. And some of the Pacific island nations which in the past were thoroughly screwed over by economic and colonial exploitation would reap a financial benefit. These are the "pro" side of the undersea harvesting of the nodules.
The "con" side is that we know virtually very little about the abyssal ocean depths where the nodules are found. These are similar depths to where the wreck of the Titanic lies, perhaps three miles or more. We know less about the floor of our oceans at these depths than we do about the surface of Mars. We do know that there are unique life forms and ecosystems found there. And that the harvesting techniques for the nodules basically plow up the ocean floor, and the ecosystems are not known to regenerate. A case can certainly be made for making time for more research rather than allowing mining companies to plow blindly ahead without knowing for sure the consequences. And we might even learn more about our planet in the process of studying the abyssal ocean floor.
The Wired article is interesting and worth reading in its entirety.
Hopefully, this mining technology can provide some respite from the environmentally damaging mining going on now. The personal conveyance called the automobile has caused much damage and sorrow throughout the world with its hunger for metal and fossil fuel. Our entanglement in the wars of the Middle East are rooted in the need to fuel cars. Now we have the electric car to save us from that. But watch this video about how the cobalt required for lithium ion batteries for cell phones and electric cars is procured.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/JcJ8me22NVs
Electric cars will cause environmental damage and oppression, as well. Will the mining of nodules from the sea prevent this? I hope so. But our modern civilization with its capitalist materialism is ravenous.
Thanks for the link to the video, Stanley. I watched it. There is a longer podcast by Joe Rogan on the same subject that came up after this one. I had heard about the child labor, but the conditions are much worse than I had imagined. And the pay is barely enough to feed the workers.
DeleteThe videos pushed the needle for me to favor the deep sea mining. It's hard to imagine that it would be more damaging than than this kind of mining. Tragic that the ROC has this kind of mineral wealth but the people are basically enslaved to the mining companies.
Katherine, it's a hellscape. All that's missing are demons with horns and pitchforks prodding the workers. It's some small comfort that it's Chinese corporations driving the exploitation and not American companies. But American companies have done the equivalent in foreign lands, i.e., Chevron in Ecuador. My Samsung cell phone is going on four years now. I thought of getting a new one but I think I'll use it until it crashes. I avoid running the battery down. The fewer deep cycles, the better.
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