Recently, DeepGreen penned an open letter to BMW, Volvo, Google, and other brands about the importance of seafloor minerals and approached extraction cautiously with an exacting commitment to science-based impact analysis and environmental protection. I also interviewed DeepGreen’s CEO, Gerard Barron, via email last year.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of a second interview with Gerard, this time through Zoom. In yesterday’s interview, Gerard answered a few questions I had about the open letter and he expressed his passion for helping the environment through his work of collecting deep-sea nodules filled with metals needed in the battery industry.
JC: For those who may not know, how exactly do you collect these nodules from the seafloor? What makes DeepGreen different from any other company doing deep-sea mining?
GB: To fully understand that, you have to appreciate that the oceans are filled with three different types of metal. There are nodules, which we’re entirely focused on. And then there are these chimneys or these seafloor massive sulfides and the seafloor crusts. We’re not so supportive of these because they form an integral part of the ocean floor and require big machines to drill and crunch up big rocks, turn them into smaller rocks, and pump them to the surface.
By contrast, nodules lie unattached on the seafloor like golf balls on a driving range and can be collected directly. So our job now is to find a way of collecting these with the lowest impact and the greatest efficiency.
For the rest of this interview: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/04/14/deepgreen-ceo-gerard-barron-opens-up-about-deepgreens-open-letter-to-bmw-other-brands/