Deep Sea Mining

https://e360.yale.edu/

The U.N. body charged with regulating deep-ocean mining will soon consider whether to permit the first project to move forward. But ecologist Lisa Levin, who has long studied the deep sea, worries that in the rush for key minerals, a pristine and important ecosystem will be lost.

Few people know the deep ocean as intimately as Lisa Levin, an ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Not content with doing pure science, Levin, who has participated in more than 40 oceanographic expeditions, founded the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, a global network of more than 2,000 scientists, economists, and legal experts that seeks to advise policymakers on managing the ocean’s depths.

Of particular concern to Levin now is the prospect of deep-sea mining. The tiny island nation of Nauru has notified the International Seabed Authority on behalf of its Canadian partner, the Metals Company, of its intent to seek a permit to mine in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 1.7- million-square-mile region of the Pacific where polymetatallic nodules are scattered that have high concentrations of cobalt and other valuable minerals.

Read more

https://apnews.com/

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Pressure is mounting on an obscure U.N. body based in Jamaica to hit pause on plans to potentially open the world’s deep seas to mining as companies push for permission to extract metals from seabeds in international waters.

The International Seabed Authority on Friday closed two weeks’ worth of negotiations without approving rules and regulations to oversee deep sea mining amid growing calls to pause, ban or place a moratorium on the quest to extract minerals from the Earth’s watery depths that are used in green technology like electric car batteries.

Read more

https://www.realclearworld.com/

Tom LaTourrette is a senior physical scientist and interim director of the Community Health and Environmental Policy program at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. The views expressed are the author’s own.

China dominates global supply chains for nearly all critical mineral resources. Especially important are elements such as nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, and the rare earths that power decarbonization technologies such as batteries, electric motors, and turbines. The rapidly increasing demand for these minerals has rekindled interest in extracting polymetallic nodules from the deep seabed.

China controls the supply of these resources through extraction, either within its borders (especially in the case of rare earths) or through ownership of critical foreign mineral resources (for example, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Read more

https://www.voanews.com/

UNITED NATIONS — The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders.

“I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP. “There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.”

Read more

https://www.france24.com/en/

Park City (United States) (AFP) – He is best known as hunky, sea-dwelling superhero “Aquaman,” but actor Jason Momoa brought a stark and sober warning about the perils of deep-sea mining to the Sundance film festival on Friday.

The Hawaiian-born A-lister narrates “Deep Rising,” a new documentary about the frenzied efforts by resource-hungry corporations to scrape valuable metals from vast swathes of the Pacific floor.

Supporters of deep-sea mining claim that pellets of nickel and cobalt — used in electric car batteries — can be conveniently scooped off the seabed, helping reduce our fossil fuel reliance.

Read more

https://theconversation.com/

As companies race to expand renewable energy and the batteries to store it, finding sufficient amounts of rare earth metals to build the technology is no easy feat. That’s leading mining companies to take a closer look at a largely unexplored frontier – the deep ocean seabed.

A wealth of these metals can be found in manganese nodules that look like cobblestones scattered across wide areas of deep ocean seabed. But the fragile ecosystems deep in the oceans are little understood, and the mining codes to sustainably mine these areas are in their infancy. A fierce debate is now playing out as a Canadian company makes plans to launch the first commercial deep sea mining operation in the Pacific Ocean.

Read more

https://www.forbes.com/

Renee Grogan is the cofounder and chief sustainability officer at Impossible Metals.

The noise around carbon emissions reduction and the transition to a green economy is deafening, particularly as we observe the progress of COP27. As a result, it can be hard to get a feel for what is going well and what isn’t.

Except when leaders from Pacific nations address COP standing in several feet of water that wasn’t there a few years ago—that seems to send a pretty clear message that whatever’s happening, it’s not really happening fast enough. In the context of this busy and noisy space, deep-sea mining might be one of the biggest issues you’ve never heard about.

Read more