Twitter

Deep Sea Mining

This Mining Executive Is Fighting Her Own Industry to Protect the Environment – by Aryn Baker (Time Magazine – April 13, 2022)

https://time.com/

In her 16-year career in the mining industry, Renee Grogan has battled hostile environments, arduous work conditions, and the perception that women don’t belong at a mine site—let alone in a mining-company boardroom. But her biggest battle has only just begun: getting climate-conscious car buyers to care as much about how the metals going into their new electric-vehicle (EV) batteries are mined as they do about their carbon emissions.

“Consumers don’t generally know what their metal footprint looks like,” says Grogan, the co-founder and chief sustainability officer of California-based Impossible Mining, a battery-metal mining startup.

Read more

We Don’t Need Nickel From Russia – by Johnna Crider (Clean Technica – April 15, 2022)

https://cleantechnica.com/

We don’t need nickel from Russia. There is a critical need for nickel and other EV battery metals worldwide, but we don’t need to get it from Russia. In March 2022, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas shared worries about Russia’s outsized role in the nickel supply chain for EVs.

CNBC’s Phil LeBeau then discussed the note from Jonas. Jonas noted that Ford announced a target of 2 million EV unit sales by 2026, and that this will require a lot of EV battery metals. The question he posed was where Ford would source all of these raw materials. LeBeau pointed out that everyone in the auto industry has been talking about this issue for quite a while.

Read more

Seabed mineral exploration licences approved in the Cook Islands – by Caleb Fotheringham (RNZ – March 13, 2022)

https://www.rnz.co.nz/

Five kilometres deep on the Cook Islands seafloor, potato-shaped rocks pave the bottom loaded with expensive minerals like cobalt, copper, manganese and nickel. They’re called polymetallic nodules and three weeks ago the Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown referred to them as “golden apples”.

Brown made the comment during an official signing ceremony where three companies were awarded a seabed minerals exploration licence. The licence allows the companies to see if mining is a viable option which includes reviewing the environmental risks associated with the task.

Read more

Canada absent from global conversation on deep-sea mining – by Natasha Bulowski (National Observer – January 2022)

https://www.nationalobserver.com/

Environmental groups want the Canadian government to call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, joining countries like Chile and the EU Parliament.

Companies around the globe want to mine metals such as cobalt, manganese, nickel, and copper deep on the ocean floor, but hundreds of scientists warn the area is under-researched and its impacts on delicate ocean ecosystems could be devastating.

Read more

Earth’s final frontier: China and the deep-sea gold rush set to cause environmental catastrophe – by Stuart Heaver (Hong Kong Free Press – January 2, 2022)

Home Page

Scientists say that a highly controversial deep-sea “gold rush” risks potentially devastating consequences for marine ecosystems, biodiversity, coastal communities and climate change.

The deep seabed is Earth’s final frontier but this mostly unexplored, dark and pristine abyss is threatened by highly destructive deep-sea mining which could be at full throttle within months.

Read more

Deep-Sea Mining Could Help Meet Demand for Critical Minerals, But Also Comes with Serious Obstacles (U.S. Government Accountability Office – December 16, 2021)

https://www.gao.gov/blog/

Deep below the sea lay critical minerals that are both high in value and demand. These critical minerals—such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese—are used in everyday devices like cellphones and cars. But they are hard to come by, and demand is expected to double or triple by 2030.

Because of this demand, interest has turned toward the deep ocean seabed, which contains vast quantities of critical and other minerals. Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our new Science & Tech Spotlight on deep-sea mining—how it works and its challenges.

Read more

Deep sea miner insists it has enough cash despite missing $200m – by Neil Hume (Financial Times – November 22, 2021)

https://www.ft.com/

The Metals Company has enough cash to complete the “important work” needed to secure a permit to mine deep in the Pacific Ocean, according to its executive chair, despite an investor’s failure to hand it an agreed $200m in funding.

Gerard Barron said the deep-sea miner could finance its operations until the third quarter of 2023, when it expects to apply for a licence to collect so-called nodules, or rocks, containing energy transition metals such as nickel and copper from the seabed.

Read more

Can Mining the Seabed Help Save the Planet? – by Christopher Pala (Foreign Policy – November 7, 2021)

https://foreignpolicy.com/

The solutions to climate change—solar panels, windmills, electric cars—seem so blissfully clean and also within reach. Yet they also require vast amounts of minerals: cobalt, manganese, copper, nickel, and rare earths. Electric cars, for instance, are made with about six times more minerals than conventional vehicles, and such staggering amounts simply aren’t available now. Not on land, anyway.

Parts of the ocean seabed, lying some 15,000 feet deep, are littered with the stuff. Black, potato-sized lumps called polymetallic nodules can be found in great volumes on the oceans’ muddy bottoms. The nodules contain large amounts of copper, manganese, nickel, and cobalt, as well as other minerals in smaller amounts.

Read more

Deep sea mining group left in lurch after $200m disappears – by Ortenca Aliaj (Financial Times – October 20, 2021)

https://www.ft.com/

The Metals Company has big ambitions to mine the depths of the Pacific Ocean for rare earth metals used to power everything from iPhones to electric vehicles. The problem is that it is short on cash.

The Canadian start-up went public last month through a special purpose acquisition company but has been left high and dry by one investor who was meant to hand over 60 per cent of $330m it had been counting on to start digging but has now all but disappeared.

Read more

Deep seabed mining is risky. If something goes wrong, who will pay for it? – by Ian Morse (Mongabay.com – October 8, 2021)

https://news.mongabay.com/

Pelenatita Kara travels regularly to the outer islands of Tonga, her low-lying Pacific Island home, to educate fishers and farmers about seabed mining. For many of the people she meets, seabed mining is an unfamiliar term.

Before Kara began appearing on radio programs, few people knew their government had sponsored a company to mine minerals from the seabed. “It’s like talking to a Tongan about how cold snow is,” she says. “Inconceivable.”

Read more

Could Sucking Up the Seafloor Solve Battery Shortage? The Metals Company wants to try, but opposition is fierce – by Prachi Patel (IEEE Spectrum – September 13, 2021)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/

Reeling from a crushing shortage of semiconductor chips for vehicles, carmakers also face another looming crisis: producing enough batteries to drive the global pivot towards electric vehicles.

The supply of metals like cobalt, copper, lithium, and nickel needed for batteries is already shaky, and soaring demand for the hundreds of millions of batteries in the coming decades is likely to trigger shortage and high prices.

Read more

SCRAPING THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA – by Alec Dubro (Foreign Policy in Focus – August 10, 2021)

https://fpif.org/

Deep sea mining companies are not just exploiting the oceans, they’re harming the low-income nations surrounding the proposed mine sites.

On July 29, the two-day Wokisok Shark Calling Festival will begin at Kono village, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. It’s not a new gimmick to capitalize on Shark Week or Sharknado movies—although foreign visitors are welcome. Nor do people stand on the beach and yell, Shark!

Instead it’s a seasonal rite where fishers paddle out from shore and summon sharks with noise and motion makers—and then they hope, capture them. It’s supposed to ensure shark harvests for peoples who depend in part on this source of protein. It’s actually one of many such ceremonies that take place in this area of the Pacific.

Although the Kono Village festival hadn’t been observed for years, it has been revived this year with an added fillip. It’s being held to rally the campaign to stop the relentless attempt by deep-pocketed mining investors called the Solwara 1 project to tear up the local sea bed in search of minerals.

Read more

Vancouver-based miner’s deep sea mining request may force moratorium from international authority – by Gwynne Dyer (London Free Press – August 1, 2021)

https://lfpress.com/

A month ago, it seemed to be just another tale of ruthless miners and desperate poor people conspiring to wreck the environment while distant regulators failed to get a grip. But it turns out to be more complicated than that, and rather more hopeful.

The mining company is DeepGreen, and the poor people are the 11,500 inhabitants of Nauru, a tiny independent island in the Western Pacific.

The regulators are the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN agency that governs the seabed in areas beyond the reach of national laws (i.e. most of the planet).

Read more

With ‘Deep Ocean Mission’, India Begins Quest for Seabed Minerals in Earnest – by Mayank Aggarwal (Science The Wire India – July 6, 2021)

https://science.thewire.in/

Similar to some other countries such as China, the quest for minerals in the deep sea has been on India’s radar for some time now. Recently, in June 2021, it got a significant boost as the Indian government approved a ‘Deep Ocean Mission’ to explore the ocean for resources and develop deep-sea technologies for sustainable use of ocean resources.

But the move towards deep seabed mining has also reignited concerns that many environmental organisations have been pointing out over the potential harm it could cause to marine biodiversity.

The proposal of the Indian government’s Ministry of Earth Sciences was cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with an estimated cost of about Rs 4,077 crore for a period of five years.

Read more

A Mining Startup’s Rush for Underwater Metals Comes With Deep Risks – by Todd Woody (Yahoo/Finance/Bloomberg – June 2021)

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — A seabed mining startup, DeepGreen Metals Inc., has successfully sold itself to investors as a game-changing source of minerals to make electric car batteries that can be obtained in abundance—and at great profit—while minimizing the environmental destruction of mining on land.

But there’s strong scientific evidence that the seabed targeted for mining is in fact one of the most biodiverse places on the planet—and increasing reason to worry about DeepGreen’s tantalizing promises.

Bloomberg Green’s examination of corporate and legal filings, regulatory records and other documents raises questions about DeepGreen’s business plans.

Read more