On the day this video is being posted, which is the 9th of July twenty-twenty-three,
a regulatory organisation called the International Seabed Authority or ISA, will adopt regulations
enabling them to grant licences for engineering companies to start mining the deep ocean
floor for minerals that they plan to sell for a handsome profit on the global commodities market.
The companies in question claim their mining activities will cause no significant harm to
life in the deep oceans and that the minerals they collect will play a crucial role in the
so-called ‘green transition’. In April twenty-twenty-three,
environmental journalist, Lucy Murray, made an excellent documentary on the subject for
the public broadcasting network, Al Jazeera. Following that video Lucy and I had a very
interesting conversation via Zoom which brought to my attention a potential new industry,
with global ramifications, which, to my great shame, I had not previously been aware of.
Since discovering the potential enormity of the ISA’s ruling,
I’ve been on a bit of a research odyssey, and I’ve ended up with a set of difficult questions.
I thought you might be interested to find out what those questions are,
which is why I made this video. But I’m not sure you’ll be all that keen on some of the answers.
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think, Way down on the floor of our oceans,
at depths greater than four thousand metres or thirteen thousand feet,
there are ecosystems and marine species that we humans have barely even begun to explore,
let alone fully understand. What we do know though, is that there are billions, possibly even
trillions of these things, called polymetallic nodules, scattered all over the deep sea bed.
They’re the result of a natural process called precipitation, where minerals that were either
dissolved in the water, or which made up part of the ocean floor, gradually clumped together over
almost unimaginably long geological timescales to form these sort-of golf ball sized lumps,
just sitting there, apparently ripe for the picking, like apples from a tree.
For a proper detailed analysis of how that precipitation process happened over
hundreds of millions of years, I highly recommend watching this superb video over
at the Real Engineering channel, which you can jump straight to by clicking up there,
or by following the link that I’ve included in the description section below here.
The nodules contain extremely valuable elements like manganese, cobalt and nickel,
which are of course used in all sorts of industrial applications.
I’ll come back to those applications a bit later on, and the details might surprise you.
The largest concentration of nodules is in a region called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone,
or CCZ, located up here in the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. Just that one
area alone covers six million square kilometres or two point three million
square miles. That’s more than ten times the size of France.
Until relatively recently, there’s been no real economic incentive or technological capability to
go down to such uncharted depths to collect these things. But now the mining companies
tell us that it can be done, using a fleet of remotely operated vehicles or ROVs, that they
say will act a bit like industrial scale vacuum cleaners to suck the nodules up to the surface.
But marine scientists, ecologists and environmentalists all over the world have pointed
out some very sobering caveats to this ostensibly innocuous proposal, not least of which, as I
mentioned earlier, is the fact that we humans only have a very sketchy idea of what ecosystems exist
down there, how they interact with each other, and what role they play in sustaining marine life in
the shallower waters where we catch much of our own food. We’ve only mapped about a quarter of
the planet’s deep ocean floor so far and it’s reckoned we’ve only discovered a tiny fraction
of the marine life that exists at that depth. By definition then, our scientists argue, it
is surely impossible to quantify how much damage any disruptive industrial activity could cause.
This guy is Dr Malcolm Clark from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in
New Zealand. He’s one of the world’s most respected marine experts and he had a few
observations to share with Lucy Murray as part of the Al Jazeera documentary I mentioned earlier.
Dr Clark points out that one of the few important species we do know about down in the depths are
these things, called Seabed worms. Essentially, they’re scavengers that live off the carcasses of
billions of marine creatures falling to the depths from above when they die. Without these worms the
deep seabed would be lethally polluted. They also represent base level prey in an unbroken ocean
food chain that goes all the way up to very large apex predators like sharks, and highly intelligent
marine mammals like dolphins and whales, not to mention the countless species of fish and other
marine creatures that make up such an important part of the diet of billions of human beings.
Any Seabed worms in the direct path of one of these machines will get sucked up along
with the everything else, including the top few centimetres of the sea bed itself.
Research also shows that larger deep sea marine creatures depend directly on
the nodules for their existence. For example, sea sponges anchor themselves to the nodules,
and deep-sea Octopus lay their eggs under them and use them for protection.
The dredging activity itself will whip up an underwater sandstorm that’ll clog up the
feeding apparatus of seabed creatures and bury them completely as the sand settles back down
again - a process that may also restrict the amount of oxygen that would otherwise penetrate
to deeper layers below the surface. Long term studies on deep sea beds where mining has been
trialled found that, even after more than thirty years, ecosystems show little or no
recovery at all from what, to marine life, must feel like a category five hurricane.
The ’pragmatic view’ of the marine mining companies is that the world needs these minerals,
so there’s no place for what they see as naïve idealism. They tell us they will make every
effort to be as mindful of this uncharted marine environment as possible but that we
will inevitably have to accept a certain level of collateral damage for the good of humanity. They
say they’ll start small and then carefully analyse the real-world impacts before proceeding. That
way, if they do find they’re causing unacceptable levels of damage, they will immediately stop what
they’re doing and think of a better idea. I wonder what our own human history can
tell us about how well that philosophy has been implemented on land-based resource management?
One company pressing ahead with explorations in anticipation of licences being granted is
Moana Minerals. They’re working in close cooperation with the government of the
Cook Islands with a view to initially mining nodules from just one percent of that nation’s
ocean territory. That’s a deep-sea area of about twenty thousand square kilometres or about eight
thousand square miles with an estimated five hundred million tonnes of nodules containing
minerals with a potential market value that could be as much as ten billion dollars.
All coastal nations have their own internationally recognised ocean territories called ‘Exclusive
Economic Zones’ stretching out a certain distance from their coastlines. Beyond that are
international waters, known as ‘the area’, which is where the ISA comes in. The organisation was
created by the United Nations in nineteen-ninety- four to police these international waters. It
comprises a hundred and sixty-seven member states, plus the EU. It has the exclusive mandate to
manage seabed minerals in waters beyond national jurisdiction on behalf of “mankind as a whole”
and the responsibility of protecting the marine environment from any harmful consequences. It also
has the exclusive right to issue exploration and exploitation contracts for minerals.
By all accounts, the ISA is not what you might call a spectacularly transparent organisation.
It's based in Kingston Jamaica. Its meetings take place behind closed doors with no minutes made
available for public scrutiny. According to the International Justice Foundation,
the ISA is highly intertwined with corporations, both through lobbying and by its institutional
structure. And there are concerns that, in the longer term, its existence will be funded by
revenues from deep sea mining itself, setting up a clear conflict of interest. Not all of the member
states get to vote on licensing decisions either. There’s a small sub-group called
the Legal and Technical Commission that does that. Each exploration licence costs
about five hundred thousand dollars – money which goes towards the ISAs operating budget.
To date, the Legal and Technical Commission has not rejected a single exploration application.
After today, it will be this group that also approves exploitation licences allowing mining
companies to actually go ahead and start dredging, possibly as early as twenty- twenty-four.
Over on the Cook Islands, Moana Minerals reckon their five-year exploration project to find the
most profitable and exploitable zones within the one percent of Cook Islands ‘Exclusive
Economic Zone’ will cost them somewhere in the region of one to two hundred million dollars.
They also state quite categorically that if the International Seabed Authority votes
against granting licences for Deep Sea Mining, the company will simply write off
that capital expenditure and walk away. Let’s take a wild punt the dark though,
and make the assumption that the ISA does grant exploitation licences. How long do you think it
will be before one percent of one nation’s coastal region grows into every last inch of
the rich picking zones across the deep sea beds of all our oceans? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years maybe?
Seven hundred international scientists and marine policy experts have now signed a petition
calling for a ten-year moratorium on deep sea mining to allow for much more in depth, and
genuinely independent, research into its potential impacts. It’s not just scientists who are calling
for a pause though. Companies like Volvo, BMW, Renault and VW all back the ten-year moratorium.
Big tech corporations like Microsoft, Phillips, Google and Samsung have expressed their opposition
to any form of deep-sea mining and have publicly committed not to purchase minerals from the deep
seabed. There’s also an increasing number of nations voicing their concerns. The Island
State of Palau was the first country to advocate for the moratorium, followed by Fiji, Samoa,
Chile and Micronesia. New Zealand has suggested a “Conditional Moratorium”. Germany and Canada have
called for a “Precautionary Pause” and France supports a complete ban on all exploitation of
deep-sea beds. Even the European Commission itself has called for deep-sea mining to be prohibited.
So, are all these ‘naïve idealists’ putting our future green transition at risk?
Well, maybe not. Because here’s the thing…we might not need all these additional raw materials
anyway. Some analysts have extrapolated today’s energy and raw materials usage as a straight
line into the future simply by typing today’s energy and material consumption numbers into an
Excel spreadsheet and multiplying those numbers by tomorrows projected global population and demand
levels to conclude that the world doesn’t have anything like the quantity of metals
and minerals required for the green transition. Other analysts though, have noticed the major
technological disruptions already taking place in the global marketplace and have calculated that
we’ve got more than ample resources to run the totally transformed world we’re moving towards.
I did a deep dive on these contrasting views in last week’s video, so I won’t labour the point too
much here, but just as a few examples…the world’s largest battery makers are already mass-producing
cells containing no cobalt or nickel at all, and they’re now moving to sodium-ion technology that
doesn’t contain any lithium either. And that’s not to mention myriad other energy storage
solutions that use cheap, abundant and reusable materials. Couple that with huge advances in
energy efficiency, a massive over build of renewables like wind and solar to overcome
intermittency and rid our grids of fossil fuels once and for all, plus a rapid move towards a more
circular economy where products are designed for easy repairs during their operational lifetimes,
and folks like you and me are incentivised to properly recycle electronic devices, just
like many of us do today with things like glass bottles, then you get to a model of sustainability
that is orders of magnitude less resource-hungry, and which starts to looks much more optimistic.
And by the way, let’s not forget that one of the biggest consumers of these minerals is the fossil
fuel industry. Cobalt-based catalysts are used in the petroleum industry for various processes,
including the refining of crude oil. Cobalt alloys find applications in the drilling and
exploration of fossil fuel reserves, and cobalt-based superalloys are used to make
parts for gas turbine engines. Manganese is an essential alloying element in steel production,
and steel is widely used in various aspects of the fossil fuel industry,
including pipelines, drilling equipment, and infrastructure. Manganese oxide catalysts are
used in the production of fuels and the removal of impurities from hydrocarbon
streams. Manganese compounds like manganese dioxide are used in fossil fuel emissions
control technologies like in coal-fired power plants, where manganese-based sorbents are used
to capture and remove mercury emissions. As for nickel, well it’s biggest use by
far is in the production of stainless steel – nothing to do with batteries.
But nickel can also be found in alloys and super alloys used in aerospace,
power generation, and in the production of hydrogenation catalysts for, guess what,
the oil and gas industry, petrochemicals, and other chemical processes.
So, a rapid and comprehensive transition away from fossil fuels will bring yet another
dramatic reduction in our dependence on the raw materials we currently dig out of the ground.
There’s an awful lot more I could say here about the motives, tactics and strategies of deep-sea
mining proponents, and the fossil fuel industry in general, but I would probably stray into unhelpful
conjecture, so I’m not going to do that. All I would say though, is if you think deep sea
mining is a bad idea, then make sure you’re doing whatever you can to accelerate the move away from
fossil fuels, and whenever you buy a big electric thing, like say, an electric car in the future,
check where the raw materials come from before you choose which manufacturer to give your
hard-earned cash to eh? See you next week.