- Welcome to 2050.
Nearly every new car manufactured around the world
is entirely electric,
and 95% of all cars still on the road
run on long-range batteries.
Emissions for the entire transportation sector
have been reduced by 90% since 2020.
Mixed with emerging carbon capture technologies,
the climate trends of the previous century are reversing.
But the forests of Myanmar and Indonesia
have been decimated.
Massive radioactive waste ponds
devastate ecosystems across China.
Tens of thousands of species
have been lost to habitat removal.
Human rights abuses have traumatized
entire generations in the Congo,
and that's just on the surface, the literal surface.
Meanwhile, 5,000 meters deep,
clouds of mud suffocate ocean floors,
fragile landscapes formed over millions of years
have been extracted,
leaving thousands of mysterious unnamed species
homeless or extinct.
And beyond our home on Earth, an arms race rages
as nations and corporations fight for the right
to extract minerals from asteroids,
and all that damage in service of the rare metals
needed to power clean energy technology.
This is a complicated future, not entirely dystopian, sure,
but one where we've made major sacrifices
in favor of the clean energy revolution.
But does it have to be that way?
Do we need to plunder the cold depths of the ocean
and outer space to get materials
to make clean energy possible?
Is there a responsible solution on land,
the seas, or the stars?
I'm Sinead Bovell, and this is "Far Out."
[upbeat playful music]
Okay, let's introduce some of the key precious metals
at the core of our clean energy dilemma:
cobalt, manganese, nickel, and lithium.
They dominate electric battery chemistries
and are essential to smartphones, HD displays,
military drones, you name it.
These elements are currently essential to clean energy.
How rare are they really?
Well, let's take cobalt, which makes up less than 100th
of 1% of the Earth's crust.
Sounds tiny, right?
But even that fraction of a percent is dispersed.
Trace amounts exist in many places,
but deposits that can actually be mined
and refined are incredibly rare.
In fact, 70% of the world's cobalt
is mined from the Democratic Republic of Congo,
making extraction particularly fraught.
Here's the big thing to keep in mind, demand is growing.
The global supply of lithium needs to increase 42 times
by 2050 to meet the demand for electric vehicles.
In the US, nine states have committed
to banning gasoline powered vehicles by 2035,
and major manufacturers like General Motors
plan to only sell zero-emission cars by that same year.
All factors ramping up demand.
So right now, it looks like we need these metals
to stave off the climate crisis,
especially if we don't wanna give up driving,
flying, and our smartphones,
but mining them is outrageously bad
for people and the planet.
Let's focus on just one example,
nickel mining in Indonesia.
One of the islands has seen almost 1.35 million acres
of rainforest destroyed since 2011.
That's nearly seven times the land area of New York City,
and one refining facility produces roughly
4 million metric tons of toxic waste every year.
Disposal of that material has proven difficult
in a landscape surrounded by ocean and prone to heavy rains.
That's just one example.
I haven't mentioned the toll on people.
One study tracked 510 allegations
of human rights abuse from 2010
to 2022 in the mining of precious metals.
Yikes, this is the crux of the issue.
Mining is fundamentally not eco-friendly,
but the metals that it yields
are essential to moving away from fossil fuels.
But what if we could move this dirty mining off the land,
like way off the land, and into cold, distant,
and difficult places, the deep sea and outer space?
Let's start with space.
Some of the asteroids in our solar systems
are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars,
which sound absurd,
but even if mining these asteroids is possible,
we have to first build
completely non-existent infrastructure,
which could take decades.
Not to mention the economic space race it could trigger,
which is its own complex nightmare of who owns outer space.
While I'm excited about the idea
of hydrogen-powered spacecraft,
snagging payloads of refined nickel and returning to earth,
there are some companies that are looking
at more of an immediate payoff, the deep ocean.
Let's dive in.
The ocean is big, right?
Like 70% of our planet big.
But the most intense mining focus
is on an area of the Pacific Ocean floor
between Hawaii and Mexico,
the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or the CCZ.
What makes this area so special?
The ocean floor, on average about 5,000 meters deep,
contains the greatest density
of polymetallic nodules on the planet.
These nodules look like lumpy black potatoes,
and they contain more nickel, manganese, and cobalt
than all terrestrial sources combined.
There's no need for digging
or detonating this area to free up material.
Instead, it's possible
to just suck these rocks up to the surface.
Problem solved, right?
Oh, if only it were that simple.
The metals company based in Canada,
as one of the companies leading the push
for deep sea mining,
they envision a tank-like machine with deep treads
that rolls across the ocean floor,
scooping the nodules into a pipe
and sucking them up to the surface.
You know those automatic vacuums
that rove the bottom of pools?
Like that, but the size of a farm combine,
and it won't be tidying up.
It will be making a huge unclean mess.
This magical area of the ocean floor
is home to a whole ecosystem teaming with life,
and we have fantastically little information
about its biodiversity, complexity,
or connection to the wider ocean.
- The latest surveys estimate
that there's something like 5,000 species
that live in the CCZ,
and 9 outta 10 of them haven't been found anywhere else,
and they haven't really had a name given to them yet.
Some of these are big things that you can see
with the naked eye that the cameras pick up.
Beautiful octopuses, ghostly pale octopuses
hang around here.
They're known to lay their eggs on sponges.
These tall spikes of sponge that grow up
rooted on these nodules, these rocks.
- It's not densely populated like a coral reef,
but it's wildly diverse,
and the nodules themselves, rich with metals,
are also riddled with exotic life.
- These rocks, these nodules, are the habitat
for amazing diversity of worms and brittle stars.
Those amazing things that if you know about them,
you will love called tardigrade, or water bears,
these tiny microscopic little creatures
that just are adorable under a microscope.
There's all of this hidden life.
- And the whole system may be more fragile than we expected.
A 2020 Japanese study on extracting cobalt
showed that after only a two-hour mining test,
there was a 43% drop in fish and shrimp density
by the following year.
The study also showed a 56% drop
in the fish and shrimp density of surrounding areas.
Though to be fair, the research focused on a different kind
of mining than the one proposed by the metals company.
But what if we could do some kind
of habitat restoration after mining?
Well, that's essentially impossible.
- These take millions of years to form.
I think it's something like 10 million years
to go from the size of a pea to a golf ball.
And these things are forming by themselves on the seabed
by basically precipitating,
taking dissolved metals that are in the water.
They're settling on little hard pieces
of substances on the seabed,
things like old shark's teeth from millions of years ago,
maybe a bit of a whale ear bone,
something hard that acts as a nucleus for these,
these accretions, really, that are forming
around them over very, very slow geological time frames.
I mean, this is one of the slowest geological processes
that have been studied on the planet.
- The consensus among marine scientists is clear,
we don't know enough to proceed, aka,
we probably shouldn't proceed.
But we know strong recommendations from scientists
are seldom enough to sway regulation
when there is money to be made.
So what's stopping companies from ravaging the ocean floor?
A lot of the "will they" or "won't they"
comes down to decisions made
by the International Seabed Authority or the ISA.
This is a governing body of 167 member states and the EU,
established to help regulate activities
on the massive stretches of ocean
that don't belong to any country,
the so-called high seas.
These areas are treated as shared global heritage,
and unlike offshore drilling in areas
owned by specific countries, they are much more complicated.
That's one of the reasons most marine scientists
and oceanographers hope we'll perceive more cautiously.
- We are all part of this picture.
We're all part of this common, you know,
this common heritage,
and I think there need to be ways
to bring all those voices together.
And we're doing that and we're seeing that.
We are seeing people coming to these ISA meetings.
For instance, the 2023 meetings,
we had this incredible influx of indigenous peoples
getting together, bringing their voices,
specifically indigenous peoples from the Pacific Ocean,
who are really on the frontline of where
potentially these first mines could happen
if it does happen in the CCZ.
They are the closest to where this could be happening.
And they're coming together and they're saying,
"We don't want this to happen.
We do not give our permission.
We do not give our blessing for this level of disruption
to what we see as our sacred ocean."
And their voices, their views on why this matters
to them are being heard and they're getting through.
- There are economic holdouts too.
Companies, including Microsoft, Google, and BMW,
have committed to not using deep sea metals
until we know more about the environmental impact.
So how do we create an equation for this?
Nations are eager to electrify fleets
and abandon fossil fuels as they should be.
But what cost is acceptable?
Are we merely exchanging one known environmental disaster
for a lesser known one?
Crucially, there's also zero reason to believe
that ocean mining will halt all terrestrial mining.
It might lessen the load, sure,
or it may increase competition and urgency,
but without regulations in those mines,
the activity will continue unabated,
hurting multiple ecosystems on land and sea.
There's some reason to hope.
Battery makers are trying to find ways to use less cobalt
and nickel with promising results.
But this will take time.
- And the bare minimum on that, which is widely agreed,
is that we need at least 10 years to go
and do the research that's necessary.
- So what does 10 years buy us?
Well, I hope it buys us a few things.
Time to sort out regulations on terrestrial mining
to be more sustainable and ethical,
time to develop a realistic timeline for asteroid mining,
time for scientists to convince regulators
we may be walking into the next planetary catastrophe
by mining the ocean floor,
and time for those of us who want to protect the planet
to join the cause.
How do you see this playing out?
Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for watching.
[gentle upbeat music]