Why the push to mine the deepest depths of the oceans? You’re looking at it right now. Maybe holding it in your hand. Perhaps it powered the car that carried you to the office today or it’s helping cool you during a brutal heatwave.
Driven by everyday technology — like our cellphones, computers and tablets — and the batteries to fuel electric vehicles and the raw material to wean the world from fossil fuels, demand for rare and exotic metals is surging. If some governments, financiers and mining conglomerates have their way, the coming rush to riches could be miles below the surface of the seas.
The International Seabed Authority, a little-known United Nations agency headquartered in Jamaica, is trying to establish a framework for overseeing, regulating and sharing the wealth from deep-sea mining. Representatives of the agency’s 167 member nations and the European Union were meeting on the Caribbean Island to hammer out details for a framework.
A July 16 deadline came and went without an agreement, raising the possibility that mining operations could get underway without effective global regulation.
The agency has issues more than 30 licenses for exploring, mainly in the Clarion Clipperton Zone in the Eastern Pacific, but none yet for mining. Its members will again take up plans for how to regulate proposed mining in November.
Whatever the members do or do not eventually decide, it is sure to be controversial.
Moratorium or total ban?
Greenpeace is calling for an out-right ban on seabed mining. Other environmental groups and some countries, including Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, New Zealand and Switzerland, support either a moratorium or ban on commercial deep-sea mining.
Some major corporations, like Google, BMW and Volvo, want to see a hold on mining until researchers have a better understanding of its effect on the marine environment.
A coalition of seafood producers representing major market suppliers has also joined the call for a pause “until there is a clear understanding of the impacts the industry may have on the marine environment, its living resources and those dependent on them.”
Sidestep China's dominance?
Where some see a little understood environment in need of protection, supporters of deep-sea mining are eager to exploit an untapped resource for the raw materials necessary for a global-scale transition to green energy.
“Do not tell me to ignore the potential for promoting the green transition by not exploring these much-needed minerals for the green revolution that sit in my ocean,” Mark Brown, prime minister of the Cook Islands, a self-governing group of South Pacific islands, said last year at a U.N. climate conference.
There is also an opportunity to end the reliance on Russia and China, the two nations that control much of the traditional land-based mining of these metals.
The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank that receives funding from the U.S. government, calls mining the deep seas a way to “break China’s stranglehold on supplies of some of the world’s most important natural resources.”
“China's dominance leaves the global availability of critical minerals vulnerable to supply disruptions resulting from trade restrictions, political instability, natural disasters, or other disturbances,” writes Tom LaTourrette, a physical scientist at RAND. As demand increases in the coming years, this supply risk is expected to grow, he says.
But in his analysis, LaTourrette glosses over environmental concerns as well as the challenge of collecting the “potato-sized concretions” from some 5,500 meters (more than three miles) below the sea surface.
A high-tech, risky business
Deep-sea mining is a risky, expensive and highly technical process that employs robots to scrape and mine minerals from the ocean floor miles beneath the surface. The minerals sought in seabed mining include manganese nodules, cobalt-rich crusts, nickel, copper, phosphorites and seafloor massive sulfides.
Earlier this year, for instance, U.S.-based Impossible Metals revealed its plan for harvesting polymetallic nodules from the seabed using Eureka 1, an autonomous underwater vehicle, for "selective harvesting."
The company says the vehicle uses advanced robotics, AI, and a patent-pending buoyancy engine to glide above the seabed and find nodules while "minimizing disruption to habitat function and native biodiversity," then bring them to the surface without discharge sediment plumes.
While the minerals are indeed valuable, some critics doubt that mining them from the depths of remote seabeds and then transporting the ores to the mainland for processing could ever be profitable.
Deep-sea habitats at risk
An analysis of the impact of deep-water drilling tests off Japan two years ago recorded a marked decrease in marine life in the surrounding area.
The study headed by Travis Washburn, an ecologist with the Geological Survey of Japan and published July 14 in Current Biology, found that while deep-sea mining “may possibly help satiate increasing global demand for various metals, it also has the potential to greatly disrupt many deep-sea habitats.”
These possible “disruptions,” the study said, include totally wiping out some species, destruction of significant ecosystems, and harm to an environment essential to human health and the planet.
