Column: US forms ‘friendly’ coalition to secure critical minerals

Reuters | June 30, 2022 | 

Ferromagnetic fluid magnetized by a neodymium magnet (Stock Image)

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, Andy Home, a columnist for Reuters.)


A metallic NATO is starting to take shape, though no-one is calling it that just yet.

The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) is in theory open to all countries that are committed to “responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives”.

But the coalition assembled by the United States is one of like-minded countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany with an Asian axis in the form of Japan and South Korea.

It is defined as much as anything by who is not on the invite list – China and Russia.

China’s dominance of key enabling minerals such as lithium and rare earths is the single biggest reason why Western countries are looking to build their own supply chains.

Russia, a major producer of nickel, aluminium and platinum group metals, is now also a highly problematic trading partner as its war in Ukraine that the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” grinds on.

A previously highly globalised minerals supply network looks set to split into politically polarised spheres of influence, a tectonic realignment with far-reaching implications.
‘Friend-shoring’

The United States and Europe have realised that they can’t build out purely domestic supply chains quickly enough to meet demand from the electric vehicle transition.

The answer is “friend-shoring”. If you can’t produce it yourself, find a friendly country that can.

“Friend-shoring is the idea that countries that espouse a common set of values (…) get the benefits of trade so we have multiple sources of supply and are not reliant excessively on sourcing critical goods from countries where we have geopolitical concerns,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in “a fireside chat” with Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland.

The process was already well underway before the US State Department announced the formation of the MSP on June 14.

US and Canadian officials have been working closely as Canada fleshes out a promised C$3.8 billion ($3.02 billion) package to boost production of lithium, copper and other strategic minerals.

European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič has just been in Norway to seal “a strategic partnership” on battery technologies and critical raw materials.

The Pentagon is getting in on the friend-shoring trend too.

It has asked Congress to amend the Cold War-era Defense Production Act (DPA) to allow it to invest directly in Australia and the United Kingdom.

The Defense Department (DoD) says it is “unnecessarily” constrained by the existing requirement to invest only on home soil or in Canada. Leveraging the resources of two “closest allies” would “increase the nation’s advantage in an environment of great competition”.

Rare earths breakthrough

The first tangible rewards of all this heightened mineral diplomacy are starting to be seen.

Rare earths have posed a particular headache for Western countries because of China’s dominance of the supply chain, particularly the processing stage of production.

The only operating rare earths mine in the United States, for example, has been shipping its concentrate to China for refining.

The DoD is investing $120m in a new plant for heavy rare earths separation. It has chosen an Australian company as its partner.

Lynas Rare Earths will supply the plant in Texas with mixed rare earths carbonate from its mine in Western Australia as well as working with third-party suppliers “as they become available,” it said.

The plant is due to become operational in 2025 and Lynas and the DoD are already working on a complementary light rare earths separation facility.

Expect many more such “friendly” tie-ups in the coming months as the United States and Europe attempt to pivot away from “unfriendly” nations.
Hostilities

As for China and Russia, “we’re still going to have a relationship with countries outside this closest circle but it’s going to be a (…) relationship that has less trust at its heart,” according to Chrystia Freeland.

The days of unlimited Chinese mining investment in countries such as Canada and Australia are probably over.

Canada waved through Zijin Mining Group’s 601899.SS acquisition of Toronto-listed Neo Lithium Corp last year, saying it saw no risks to national security.

But speaking to the Globe and Mail earlier this month, Jonathan Wilkinson, Natural Resources Minister, signalled a change in stance. “I do think that it is appropriate for us to pause and reflect on whether we will allow those kinds of transactions going forward,” he said.

This is not just a question of ownership but also of off-take deals if material is being shipped to China for refining. “Canada needs to ensure that it is protecting itself in an area that is clearly strategic and ensuring that those supply chains will be robust for our allies,” Wilkinson said.

The investment climate has just got a lot chillier for Chinese operators and there has already been a hostile reaction.

The DoD said on Tuesday it was “aware of the recent disinformation campaign” against Lynas and other rare earth mining companies operating in the United States.

This follows claims by US-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant that a pro-China propaganda campaign used fake social media accounts to try to stir up opposition to proposed new mines and plants.

China’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and embassy in Washington did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

It’s a warning sign of what may come if the geopolitical polarisation of critical minerals supply turns ugly.

A ‘big deal’

The MSP marks a new chapter in the critical minerals story. The pressure to decouple from China has been growing for several years but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has concentrated minds.

While the immediate focus is on Russia’s role in the energy sector, there is a recognition that critical minerals could be next.

“Being dependent on countries that do not always share our perspectives on global affairs, and that have shown the ability at times to use their control of some of these resources as a weapon, is not a very good strategy,” warned Canada’s Wilkinson.

The era of globalised trade patterns in strategic commodities is over, according to Chrystia Freeman.

Friend-shoring is going to be “the big economic and geopolitical issue” going forwards and “the world has not yet really started to properly grapple with how big a deal this is”.

(Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

EU’s Green Deal demands switch from fossil fuels to domestic metal production – report

Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | July 3, 2022 

Wind turbines in the Netherlands. (Image from Pxhere).

In a recently published whitepaper, researchers from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities analyze the geopolitical context within which the European Union’s Green Deal is being advanced and conclude that the focus of the block’s energy transition should be on a switch from fossil fuels to metals.


However, given the resources available in the EU, the researchers believe the continent will have to build its own urban mining and refining operations to decrease its raw materials dependency and will need to foster the materials that will accumulate in the energy infrastructure in the coming decades.



“We will need huge amounts of steel to build the wind turbines, and neodymium for the magnets that will replace the high-maintenance gearbox,” René Kleijn, one of the study’s co-authors, said. “We will also need large quantities of copper for cables, nickel and lithium for making batteries, and we have to produce a lot of solar panels based on a variety of materials including silicon, silver, indium and tellurium.”

In Kleijn’s view, there is no shortage in the ores that need to be mined. The issue that needs to be dealt with is the ability of supply chains to keep up with rapidly increasing demand as research has shown that, for some metals, global mining will have to increase by a factor of 20 to 50 by 2050.

“The problem is that it can take up to two decades to build a new mine,” the industrial ecologist said. “This means that all major industrial countries are scrambling for these metals, leading to increased geopolitical tension. We will also see a shift in geopolitical power as metal ores are not located in the same countries as to where coal, oil and gas are located.” (Graph from Metabolic’s Toward a circular energy transition report).

For Kleijn, Europe has made a big mistake by not building its refinery capacity and becoming dependent on other countries for oil, coal and gas, as well as for the resources needed to realize the energy transition.

The researcher points out that, meanwhile, China has become a major producer of critical raw materials, including the cobalt that is mined in Congo but then immediately shipped to China for processing.

Kleijn and his co-authors believe that for the EU to address its dependence on other countries, it is important to allow for some government and community involvement, as the free market falls short when it comes to upscaling critical raw materials.

It is also important to build enough capacity that allows moving away from a system based on extraction to one based on availability.

“We will be much less dependent on inputs once we have erected enough wind turbines, installed enough solar panels, built enough batteries and are able to produce hydrogen on a big scale. After all, wind and solar energy are free resources,” Kleijn said. “[But] it takes a sense of urgency to realize this vision. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that global supply chains are vulnerable. And depending on a single country can lead to huge price fluctuations. We must therefore diversify our most important supply chains.”

As an example, the whitepaper mentions how lithium prices are increasing rapidly simply because demand is outpacing production, despite it being an abundant resource worldwide. Similarly, the price of nickel skyrocketed, and the London Metal Exchange even temporarily halted trade in this metal, as a consequence of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, thus highlighting how geopolitical aspects play a critical role in the provision of resources in general, and the metals needed to shift toward clean energies in particular.

“Decreasing European dependency on imports means that we will have to build our own mining and refining operations,” the document states. “Reducing our consumption is an important priority as well, of course, but the reality is that our current society needs energy, mobility, and technology. We must really ask ourselves where we want to source the raw materials that we will need in the coming decades.”

For the experts behind the study, besides ensuring critical materials supply through industrial policy, circular thinking can also help reduce shortages of critical metals, something that can be achieved by increasing the lifespan and recyclability of products. 

Battery material lithium isn’t a health threat – industry groups

Reuters | July 4, 2022 |

Lithium production in Argentina. 

Electric vehicle battery material lithium should not be classified as a hazardous substance by the European Union because the scientific evidence on which the proposal is based is weak, seven industry groups said.


Lithium was added to the EU’s list of critical raw materials in 2020 because it is important for electric vehicles which are key to meeting targets for cutting carbon emissions.

The proposal by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), which cited studies based on lithium containing medicines used over the long term as a treatment for mood disorders, wants to classify lithium salts as dangerous for human health.

“The analysis finds only a “quite weak association” between lithium exposure and developmental effects, said Violaine Verougstraete, chemicals management director at Eurometaux, which represents the metal industry.

“For fertility, the opinion is based on selected studies with serious limitations, contradicted by more robust guideline studies which showed no effect of lithium exposure.”

EU member states are currently giving their views on the proposal to a committee which meets on July 5-6 to discuss chemicals including lithium that have been recommended for classification as dangerous.

A final decision is expected at the end of 2022 or beginning of 2023.

Classifying lithium as dangerous would have a major impact on Europe’s energy transition goals, the industry groups including Eurometaux and Recharge, the European industry association for rechargeable lithium batteries, said in a letter to the EU.

“Europe is at a critical period in its energy transition, needing to stimulate new investment into a full electric vehicle battery value chain,” the groups said.

“Europe is playing catch-up with China, which is already over a decade ahead, now controlling most global processing for lithium and other battery metals … Europe has a narrowing window of opportunity to attract the investments needed, and lithium is a central material to our success.”

Classifying lithium as hazardous will hamper investment in European refining and recycling capacity and give an advantage to companies in the electric vehicle battery supply chain outside the European Union, the letter said.

The proposal doesn’t ban lithium imports, but if legislated it will add to costs for processing companies from more stringent rules controlling processing, packaging and storage.

(By Pratima Desai; Editing by David Evans)

Battery makers warn EU that lithium proposal may hurt EV sector

Bloomberg News | July 4, 2022 |

Image from Albemarle

Lithium and battery producers warned the European Union that a proposal to classify the metal as a reproductive toxin could severely hurt Europe’s burgeoning electric-vehicle industry.


The material is a key part of EV batteries and widely used in pharmaceuticals, industrial lubricants and specialty glasses. A proposal being considered by the European Commission this month would put some lithium chemicals in the highest category of reproductive and developmental toxins, based partly on human studies carried out in the 1980s and 1990s.

That may stigmatize use of the materials and cut investment in the EV sector, lobby groups including Eurobat, the International Lithium Association and Eurometaux said in an open letter to politicians. EVs play a crucial role in green efforts and automakers such as Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. have warned that soaring materials prices and supply-chain bottlenecks threaten their rollout.

In the letter, the lobby groups raised concerns about the scientific rationale for the classification, which could lead to the chemicals being established as a “substance of very high concern” alongside severely carcinogenic and mutagenic toxins that the EU wants to gradually phase out by restricting usage.

That could undermine separate efforts to boost domestic production of lithium, which the commission designated as a critical raw material in 2020. The proposals refer to lithium carbonate, hydroxide and chloride.

“If the three lithium salts go down this path it could have significant unintended consequences in the EU, putting in question the long-term viability of lithium being produced, refined, used, and recycled” in the EU, International Lithium Association Secretary General Roland Chavasse said by email.

Categorizing the chemicals as reproductive and developmental toxins could impose higher costs on buyers and crimp producers’ margins, hindering the rationale for further investment in the industry, according to Francesco Gattiglio, director of external affairs for the EU at Albemarle Corp. The company is the world’s top lithium miner and operates a lithium chemicals plant in Langelsheim, Germany.

“While the impact to our specialty customers is unclear at this point, we do not anticipate closure of our Langelsheim plant,” Gattiglio said by email. “For sure, the classification would have a negative impact on the possibility to establish lithium conversion plants in Europe.”

(By Mark Burton)

California approves lithium tax despite industry’s warnings

Reuters | June 30, 2022 

California Governor Gavin Newsom. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

California on Thursday approved a plan to tax the electric vehicle battery metal lithium to generate revenue for environmental remediation projects despite industry concerns that it will harm the sector and delay shipments to automakers.


Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, approved the tax as part of a must-pass state budget on Thursday. The state legislature had signed off on the levy during deliberations on Wednesday night.

The tax is structured as a flat-rate per tonne and will go into effect in January. The tax will be reviewed every year, and state officials have agreed to study potentially switching to a percentage-based tax.

The largest American state sits atop giant lithium reserves in its Salton Sea region, east of Los Angles, an area heavily damaged in the 20th century by years of heavy pesticide use from farming. Funds generated from the tax are earmarked in part to cleanup of the area.

Federal officials have praised the area’s start-up lithium industry because it would deploy a geothermal brine process that is more environmentally friendly than open-pit mines and brine evaporation ponds, the two most common existing methods to produce lithium.

Two of the area’s three lithium companies warned the tax would scare off investors and customers. Both said they may leave the state for lithium-rich brine deposits in Utah or Arkansas.

Privately-held Controlled Thermal Resources Ltd said the tax would force it to miss deadlines to deliver lithium to General Motors Co by 2024 and Stellantis NV by 2025.

EnergySource Minerals LLC, also privately held, said it halted discussions with potential financiers and an automaker.

“Supporting a tax that ensures lithium imports from China are less expensive for auto manufacturers to secure will devastate this promising Californian industry before it has begun,” said Rod Colwell, Controlled Thermal’s chief executive.

(By Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Michael Perry)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

JPMorgan’s ‘big hitters’ of gold market face trial over spoofing

Bloomberg News | July 7, 2022 | 

Credit: Bullion Vault

Michael Nowak was once the most powerful person in the gold market.


The former JPMorgan Chase & Co. managing director ran the bank’s precious metals business for more than a decade, making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit trading everything from silver to palladium. Now, he and two of his former colleagues face a federal jury in Chicago on criminal charges for thousands of so-called spoofing trades, which prosecutors say were used for years to generate illicit gains for JPMorgan and its top clients.

The trial, slated to kick off Thursday, threatens to lay bare the inner workings of the prestigious bank that has long dominated the market for gold. The government says Nowak’s business operated as a criminal enterprise, manipulating prices from 2008 to 2016 by placing thousands of trade orders that were never intended to be executed. If convicted, the three men are among the biggest players yet to face prison for price manipulation.

“These are big hitters,” said Robin Bhar, a former metals strategist at Societe Generale SA who spent more than three decades in the industry. “Coming to court gives it a lot more transparency in what is a very opaque market.”

The trial comes after years of a US government crackdown on price manipulation that saw JPMorgan pay $920 million to settle spoofing claims two years ago. With $330 billion of notional value in precious metals derivative contracts at the end of March, the New York-based bank accounts for 67% of the positions put through US banks. It holds three times as much as the next-biggest player, Citigroup Inc., data show.

Nowak, who was also a board member of the body that runs the London gold market, faces 15 counts including commodities fraud, conspiracy to engage in racketeering and price manipulation, and spoofing — planting fake orders into the market to steer others into buying or selling at prices that favor the bank. Trader Gregg Smith faces 13 counts, while Jeffrey Ruffo, a salesman, faces two counts. A fourth defendant, trader Christopher Jordan, is scheduled to be tried separately on Nov. 28.

All four have pleaded not guilty and face decades in prison if convicted on all charges.

Nowak’s lawyer declined to comment, as did federal prosecutors. Attorneys for Smith and Ruffo didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Nowak was arrested in September 2019, sending a shock wave through the metals and proprietary trading world. Industry insiders told Bloomberg in 2020 that Nowak, an introverted and brainy young father with a house in the Manhattan suburbs, had a clean reputation. He was released on $250,000 bond.

His arrest was part of a raft of prosecutions brought by the Justice Department since spoofing was defined and made illegal by the Dodd-Frank act in 2010. The government has extracted more than $1 billion in fines for banks and filed criminal charges against dozens of individuals, using trading records and internal bank chat logs as evidence.

US crackdown

In 2021, two Bank of America Corp. precious-metals traders were convicted in Chicago. A year earlier, a jury found two from Deutsche Bank AG guilty, while others reached plea agreements and cooperated with authorities. The most infamous spoofer was Navinder Singh Sarao, a British day trader accused of contributing to the 2010 Flash Crash in US stock markets.

While cases have involved alleged crimes such as commodities fraud or conspiracy, prosecutors have upped the ante with the JPMorgan defendants. They’ve added charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law more commonly used against gangs or the mafia.

The government claims members of the precious metals desk worked together to use unlawful trading practices to maximize the bank’s profit and minimize its losses on trades in gold and silver. More recently, RICO statutes were used in criminal charges against Bill Hwang, whose Archegos Capital Management collapsed last year, costing banks billions.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a nuclear option in a financial context,” said Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School who has written about white-collar crime.

Among the government’s witnesses are former JPMorgan employees, including John Edmonds, who told prosecutors about Nowak’s trading in 2018, as well as Armand Nakkab, Kristen Pfeiffer and Christian Trunz, court records show. Another is former Bear Stearns and Bank of Nova Scotia trader Corey Flaum, who pleaded guilty to price manipulation in 2019. The defense witness list includes Tudor Capital trader James Phelan, former Soros Fund Management trader James Ragusa and Moore Capital Management trader Joseph Giunta.

The trial will be closely watched by gold market participants eager to learn more about how JPMorgan operated its trading desk, including evidence from internal chat logs showing how the team communicated.

In one chat entry from May 27, 2008, a bank employee informed Nowak that Smith had “just bid it up to…sell,” according to the indictment.

In another, a colleague warned his teammates that “gregg is bidding up on futures trying to get some off.” At that moment, Smith placed an order to sell seven gold futures while placing offers to buy 77, prosecutors said. The activity was viewable for 59 seconds before Smith sold three of his contracts and canceled his swarm of buy orders. “Appreesh,” the colleague responded, “that worked!”

JPMorgan, which has already admitted wrongdoing and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, has been fighting to keep some of its internal communications out of the trial, including messages involving Mike Camacho, who was head of global metals.

Prosecutors said in court filings they’ll seek to show jurors communications between Ruffo and former Moore Capital Management money manager Christopher Pia about an allegedly illicit trade.

High-frequency trading

Market players say that before Dodd-Frank, spoofing as it’s known today was prevalent on Wall Street. Some traders sought to bluff rivals like high-frequency trading firms to gain an edge, canceling orders before a trade was executed.

“If you have a large order and the algorithms pick up that you are selling selling selling, then they are going to jump in front of you,” said Matthew Mazur, an attorney at Dechert LLP, who defended a Deutsche Bank trader in 2020. “If you telegraph to the market what you actually want to do, you would be killed.”

That argument hasn’t worked with jurors in recent trials, where defense lawyers asserted that their clients intended to execute their trades, but canceled for legitimate reasons. In the trial for the Deutsche Bank traders, their attorneys argued that fooling competitors in financial markets is no different than bluffing in a high-stakes poker game.

“The defense is going to say the market is changing and the traders wanted to change their minds and make adjustments,” said Soltes, the Harvard professor. “But you have to have a genuine willingness to execute that trade.”

The government also intends to bring in experts in algorithmic trading, including David Pettey of Susquehanna International Group LLP. Prosecutors allege the defendants broke the law to try to outsmart firms like Susquehanna, whose edge in speed allowed them to get ahead of bankers placing high-value orders.

By placing orders with the intent to cancel them before execution, the defendants could cause markets to react to a false picture of supply and demand, creating an opening to complete trades and moving prices in favorable directions, prosecutors said in their indictment.

The case is US v. Smith et al, 19-cr-00669, US District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Chicago)

(By Eddie Spence and Tom Schoenberg, with assistance from Jack Farchy)

EXPLAINER: Nuts and bolts of the LME’s cancelled nickel trades legal case

Reuters | July 1,2022

Nickel. Credit: LME

Hedge fund Elliott Associates and Jane Street Global Trading are suing the London Metal Exchange for up to $500 million after the LME cancelled nickel trades on March 8 when prices soared to record highs above $100,000 a tonne in chaotic trade.


The nickel trading debacle is the biggest crisis to hit the world’s oldest metals forum in decades. Suspension of trading on March 8 left consumers and producers without key benchmark prices and damaged the 145-year-old LME’s reputation.

Sources familiar with the events around the suspension said that if the LME hadn’t cancelled the trades, some of its members would not have been able to pay their margins, known as default.

“Decisions were made in part due to our conclusion that the significant price movements during early hours trading activity on 8 March had created a systemic risk to the market, including in relation to margin calls,” an exchange spokesperson said in response to a request for comment.

The spokesperson added margin calls would have hit levels “far in excess of those ever experienced in the LME market”.

Following are details about how margin calls work, what happened on March 7 and 8 and what happens if a LME member fails to pay margin calls.
How do margin calls work?

Margin calls are deposits of cash or collateral with the exchange’s clearing house, LME Clear, to cover potential losses in a member defaults.

Initial margin is a percentage of the purchase price that members must deposit with LME Clear for their trades.

Variation margin is the difference between the price originally bought or sold at and the current market price or closing price. As prices move up or down the variation margin has to be topped up or cash is returned.

LME Clear calls for variation margin every hour during the day, to be settled within an hour. It also calls for variation margin at close of business, to be settled by 0900 London time the next working day.
What happened?

Short position holders sell metal contracts on the LME and long positions buy.

The problem was Tsingshan Holding Group, China’s largest private stainless steel producer, couldn’t immediately get the cash it needed to meet margin calls on a large short position when nickel prices soared in early March.

Tsingshan can’t trade on the LME as it is not a member.

Its short position would have been built via a LME member using over the counter (OTC) trades — bi-lateral agreements between LME members and their clients.

Members that traded with Tsingshan would have held long positions, which can be netted off against other client positions or hedged by selling contracts on the LME, on which they would pay margin calls.

Tsingshan would have had a credit line with members to pay its margins. Once that credit was exhausted, members would have asked for cash.
What happens in a default?

In the event of a member default, LME Clear takes over the member’s portfolio and sells it.

Any losses are initially offset against margins paid by the defaulter, then by LME Clear’s default fund, which in March amounted to $1.1 billion. Separately, LME Clear would contribute an additional 25% of its regulatory capital in the event of a default to cover the losses.

If there isn’t enough money in the default fund, the clearing house and members have to keep topping up the fund until all the losses are covered.
Size of potential losses?

Tsingshan had a short nickel position totalling around 300,000 tonnes at prices between $18,000 and $19,000 a tonne in early March, according to one source familiar with the matter.

How much of that was on the LME is not known and Tsingshan sold down some of its position on March 7. However, using the 300,000-tonne figure gives an idea of the scale of losses.

On March 4, LME Clear raised initial margin requirements for nickel by 12.5% to $2,250 a tonne effective at close of business March 8, which meant Tsingshan would have had to deposit another $75 million taking the total to $675 million.

Tsingshan would also have had to add $5.7 billion to its variation margin — 300,000 tonnes multiplied by $19,159, the difference between the closing price on March 4 and 7.

This would have taken the variation margin Tsingshan needed to deposit on March 7 to $8.8 billion — 300,000 tonnes multiplied by $29,578, the difference between the closing price on March 7 and costs between $18,000 and $19,000 a tonne.

On March 8, nickel trading was halted at $80,000 a tonne. At this level, if the LME hadn’t cancelled the trades, Tsingshan would have had to find another $9.6 billion.

(By Pratima Desai; Editing by Veronica Brown and David Evans)

Newmont hands $70 million to Peñasquito mine workers
Cecilia Jamasmie | July 5, 2022 | 

Peñasquito is the world’s fifth largest silver mine and Mexico’s second biggest. (Image courtesy of Newmont Corp.)

Newmont (NYSE: NEM) (TSX: NGT), the world’s No. 1 gold miner, has reached a profit-sharing agreement with the workforce at its Peñasquito gold-silver mine in Mexico.


The uncapped profit-sharing bonus of up to 10% is valued at $70 million, the company said.

“We are pleased to have reached this agreement with the National Union of Mining, Metallurgical, Iron and Steel and Similar Workers of the Mexican Republic (…) without interruption to the operation,” Newmont CEO Tom Palmer said in a statement.

The Greenwood Village, Colorado-based miner spent last year building a pipeline of new exploration targets at Peñasquito, where just 20% of the 650km2 property has been drilled.

The gold miner expects to extend the operation’s productive life beyond 2040.

Peñasquito, located in Mexico’s Zacatecas state, is forecast to produce 475,000 ounces of gold this year.

The open pit mine is the world’s fifth largest silver mine and Mexico’s second biggest.

POSTMODERN ALCHEMY

Molybdenum, sulphur key to converting CO2 into methanol

Staff Writer | July 4, 2022 | 

Molybdenum disulphide under the scanning electron microscope. (Image courtesy of the Vienna University of Technology).

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have developed a solution that allows for the production of liquid methanol from carbon dioxide using a catalyst material made of sulphur and molybdenum.


The new technology, already patented and in the process of being brought to industrial scale, is meant to sequester CO2 from the exhaust gas stream of large industrial plants.

“To convert carbon dioxide, catalysts based on copper have often been used so far,” Karin Föttinger, one of the scientists involved in the project, said in a media statement.

“However, they have the disadvantage that they are not robust. If there are certain other substances in the exhaust gas stream besides carbon dioxide, for example, sulphur, the catalyst quickly loses its activity. It is said that the catalyst is poisoned.”

Given this situation, Föttinger and her team set out to find a better material.

“If you want to use such methods not only in the laboratory but also on a large scale in industry, then you need a catalyst that is perhaps a little less active, but robust, durable and reliable,” Föttinger said. “You want to be able to process quite ordinary industrial waste gases without pre-treatment.”

The group was able to show that catalysts based on sulphur and molybdenum fulfill these requirements. Special additional elements, such as manganese, ensure that carbon dioxide, which is actually very unreactive, is activated and converted.

By choosing such additional elements, the properties of the catalysts can be precisely adapted to the desired area of application. In this way, methanol can now be produced from waste gas containing CO2.

“Methanol is an attractive product. It is liquid at room temperature, so it can be stored without any problems. It is needed in the industry; up to now it has normally been produced from fossil raw materials,” Föttinger said. “But it is also possible to use our catalysts to produce other molecules, such as higher alcohols. We are currently still working on figuring out exactly how best to choose parameters like pressure and temperature to produce different products.”

In the researcher’s view, the novel catalyst is likely to make an important contribution to making industry climate-neutral and closing material cycles

French President says deep-sea mining must not go ahead

Reuters | June 30, 2022 | 

French President Emmanuel Macron. 

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday a legal framework was needed to stop deep-sea mining from going ahead and urged countries to put their money on science to better understand and protect the world’s oceans.


There is growing international interest in deep-sea mining but there is also pressure from some environmental groups and governments to either ban it or ensure it only goes ahead if appropriate regulations are in place.

Deep-sea mining would involve using heavy machinery to suck up off the ocean floor potato-sized rocks, or nodules that contain cobalt, manganese, and other rare metals mostly used in batteries.

“We have … to create the legal framework to stop high sea mining and to not allow new activities putting in danger these ecosystems,” Macron said at an event on the sidelines of the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon.

“But at the same time we need to promote our scientists and explorers to better know the high seas… we need to better understand in order to protect,” Macron added.

Although he expressed concerns about deep-sea mining, France holds an exploration contract through the Institut Francais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer, valid until June 2026, for a 75,000-square-kilometre (28,958-square-miles) area in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the North Pacific rich in polymetallic nodules.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), a UN body, is drawing up regulations governing seabed mining in the high seas – areas outside any national jurisdiction. Until global rules are in place, seabed mining is not allowed.

Several nations, such as the Pacific islands of Palau and Fiji but also Chile, have called for a global moratorium on all deep-sea mining activities, citing environmental concerns and a lack of sufficient scientific data.

But not all countries are against it. China is a leader in deep-sea mining exploration, and small nations have also gotten involved. The tiny island nation of Nauru last year asked the ISA to fast-track the adoption of seabed mining regulations.

G7 countries last month agreed they would only consent to such mining projects if they did not seriously harm the environment. Peter Thomson, UN Special Envoy for the Ocean, told Reuters he believed regulations to counter those concerns will appear soon.

(By Catarina Demony and Helen Reid; Editing by Sandra Maler)

‘Terrifying’: WWF chief hits out at plans to mine the deep sea

Reuters | June 28, 2022 

Marco Lambertini, WWF’s director general. Credit: WWF

The World Wildlife Fund’s chief warned on Tuesday that the potential impact of mining the deep sea could be “terrifying” and called for strict regulations to avoid yet another environmental disaster.


There is growing interest in deep-sea mining but there is also pressure from some environmental groups and governments to either ban it or ensure it only goes ahead if appropriate regulations are in place.

Deep-sea mining would involve using heavy machinery to suck up off the ocean floor potato-sized rocks or nodules that contain cobalt, manganese, and other rare metals mostly used in batteries.

“Have we not learned our lesson?” asked Marco Lambertini, WWF’s director general, referring to the environmental impacts of digging for minerals on land. “We simply don’t know what we will unleash by going down hundreds, thousands of meters (feet)to the bottom of the ocean.”

Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Lambertini said the WWF was confident there would be consequences if plans to excavate mineral deposits from the deep seabed get a green light.

He said it could potentially generate damaging sediment plumes and affect fish migration. Lambertini said authorities should instead look into the “great potential of recycling” e-waste for the materials needed for batteries.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), a UN body, is drawing up regulations governing seabed mining in the high seas – areas outside any national jurisdiction. Until global rules are in place, seabed mining is not allowed.
‘Everybody’s waters’

WWF has called for a global moratorium on all deep-sea mining activities, and countries such as the Pacific islands of Palau and Fiji launched an “alliance” on Monday to back it.

But not all nations are against it. China is a major proponent and even smaller nations like the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, for instance, asked the ISA last year to fast-track the adoption of seabed mining regulations.

Speaking to Reuters, US climate envoy John Kerry said his country, which has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, has concerns regarding deep-sea mining and is “very wary of procedures that could disturb the ocean floor”.

The United States is not a member of the ISA but has participated as an observer state in negotiations over the regulations.

“We are looking very closely at the proposals and procedures and we will continue to be involved,” Kerry added.

WWF’s Lambertini also said it was “fundamental” that UN member states reach an agreement on a treaty to protect the open seas beyond national jurisdictions, which they failed to do in March this year.

“Today they are nobody’s waters and we need to turn the concept on its head,” he said, explaining that not having a treaty means the high seas are not regulated enough. “They need to become everybody’s waters.”

Member states will meet again in August to discuss the issue and although Lambertini believes there was a “general consensus” on some countries were likely to oppose the long-awaited treaty.

“Without having a common governance mechanism, I think it will be very difficult to coordinate action,” he said.

(By Catarina Demony; Editing by Sandra Maler)

‘Not worth the risk’: Palau, Fiji call for deep-sea mining moratorium
Reuters | June 27, 2022 | 

Tavarua Island, Fiji. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Concerned about the potential impacts of deep-sea mining on ocean biodiversity, the Pacific islands of Palau and Fiji on Monday launched an “alliance” to call for a moratorium of the nascent industry.


The backing of a moratorium comes amid a wave of global interest in deep-sea mining but also growing pressure from some environmental groups and governments to either ban it or ensure it only goes ahead if appropriate regulations are in place.


Deep-sea mining uses heavy machinery to suck up off the ocean floor potato-sized rocks or nodules that contain cobalt, manganese, and other rare metals mostly used in batteries.

Speaking to a packed room at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Palau President Surangel Whipps asked: “How can we in our right minds say ‘let’s go mining’ without knowing what the risks are?”

“We believe it is not worth the risk,” he said. “We ask all of you to support that… deep-sea mining increases the vulnerability of the seabed floor and marine life.”

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), a U.N. body, is drawing up regulations governing seabed mining in the high seas – areas outside any national jurisdiction. Until global rules are in place, seabed mining is not allowed.

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which also supports a moratorium, said the ISA would meet in July and August to try to push through draft regulations that, if adopted, would see mining licensed to begin in the deep ocean as soon as July 2023.

Earlier this month, Chile also called for a 15-year moratorium on adopting regulations, citing environmental concerns and a lack of sufficient scientific data.

G7 countries last month agreed stringent environmental controls should govern deep-sea mining and that they would consent to such mining projects only if they did not seriously harm the marine environment.

But not all nations are against it. China is a major proponent and even smaller nations like the tiny Pacific island of Naru, for instance, asked the ISA last year to fast-track the adoption of seabed mining regulations.

Companies such as Google, BMW and Samsung were the first globally to sign up to a World Wildlife Fund call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining.

“The costs outweigh the short-term benefits,” said renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle. “We need to hit the stop button.”

(By Catarina Demony, Sergio Goncalves and Helen Reid; Editing by Sandra Maler)

The Metals Company reigniting race to mine the ocean floor

PART TWO

Companies reaching a technology threshold

Despite concerns, the experiments keep coming.

In 2017, Japan conducted a pilot mining test in its Economic Exclusion Zone around Okinawa. And in 2019,Global Sea Mineral Resourcesbegan testing a collector vehicle to suck up nodules in exploration areas handed to Belgium and Germany.

But according to critics and experts interviewed for this story, The Metals Company appears to be leading the field.

In May 2022, the Vancouver-based company said it successfully trialled a pilot nodule collection systemin the North Atlantic.

Deployed from the 228-metre-long former drill ship the Hidden Gem, the nodule collector was dropped to nearly 2,500 metres, marking the first time the vehicle was successfully tested, driving over a kilometre at “ultra-deep-water temperatures and pressures.”

Later this year, the company plans to take its trials to the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, where it will test the collector and a four-kilometre-long riser hose — both a conduit for the mined nodules and an umbilical linking undersea operations with power and controls beamed down from a surface ship.

When operational, a full-size treaded vehicle is expected to travel across the sea floor blasting the sediment with water jets to dislodge the nodules and pull them into its interior. The company says 90 per cent of the sediment sucked up with the nodules will be separated inside the collector and ejected behind the machine in a plume before settling back onto the sea floor.

From there, nodules will be sent up the riser tubes to within a few hundred metres of the surface, where they’ll be scrubbed of the remaining sediment, shipped to a port and offloaded for processing.

Having made landfall, the “battery in a rock,” as the company puts it, is expected to provide vast quantities ofmineralsto power an EV revolution.

Its vision, the company says, is to avoid the worst effects of land-based mining while making up for a global shortfall in metals as the world moves to decarbonize.

According to animpact reportreleased in May, the company is looking to begin small-scale commercial production by 2024.

Describing the abyssal plain as a “vast marine desert,” CEO Gerard Barron said there are enough metals in just two of the company’s contract areas to power 280 million electric vehicles, roughly equivalent to the entire fleet of U.S. passenger vehicles.

The wealth created from that mining, said Barron, would partially flow to the island nations of Tonga, Kiribati and Nauru. But for many leaders across the Pacific and beyond, the push to mine the ocean’s floor is nothing short of “reckless.”
A ‘wasteland’ no more

Despite the company’s claims, many scientists and environmental groups have raised concerns deep-sea mining could endanger some of the ecosystems least known to scientists.

Half a century ago, when the ISA was in its infancy, the oceans’ abyssal plains were considered to be a “wasteland” of barren ecosystem where life barely existed, said Catherine Coumans, deep-sea mining campaigner at the NGO watchdog MiningWatch.

“We now know that nothing could be further from the truth,” she said.

Astudy published in 2020suggested the only reason the nodules remain on the seafloor surface — and therefore continue to grow — is because of a “symbiosis” where star fish, sea cucumbers, mollusks and the elephant-eyed (dumbo) octopus forage in their nooks and crannies.Another studylooking at sea creatures living on the abyssal plains found their density more than doubled in fields of dense nodules.

“These nodules are a habitat,” said Coumans. “They have fauna on them that are linked to the rest of the ecosystem up the water column to the surface. There’s really nothing like it on Earth.”

A Parapagurus sp. crab makes its way across a spectacular and unexpectedly densely packed field of ferromanganese nodules blanketing the sea floor of Gosnold Seamount, explored during the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition. 

Credit: U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA Ocean Exploration

As the largest habitat on the planet, the deep sea is full of undocumented life that could prove an immense resource for everything from medicine to humanity’s understanding of the world’s carbon cycle, say experts.

Land-based hydrothermal vents like those found inYellowstone National Parkin the U.S. have already revolutionized the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests critical to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Four decades after their discovery, Tunnicliffe and 15 other experts found hydrothermal vents are much more than a highlight reel of extreme forms of life.

The vents, found the2016 study, spew vast amounts of energy entering the deep sea, creating methane, iron, hydrogen and sulphide plumes that form essential building blocks for plankton higher up in the water column.

And in a direct sink against the release of a powerful greenhouse gas, life surrounding the vents was estimated to consume up to 80 per cent of released methane — preventing it from bubbling to the surface and entering the atmosphere.

On land, Coumans and her colleagues work with local communities on the ground to document harm committed by Canadian mining companies across the world.

But no non-profit has the resources to conduct oversight thousands of metres underwater.

“We do such a bloody bad job of regulating our own [land-based] mining industry,” said Tunnicliffe. “Why should we expect it to be any different in the deep sea in a place where we can’t see what’s happening?”

There is already some evidence that mining the sea floor could have long-term negative effects on life there.

One German Study that began in the late 1980s simulated a deep-sea mining operation south of the Galapagos Islands with an eight-metre-wide plough-harrow.

Twenty-six years after the large-scale disturbance, researchers found animal life and food web activity inside the plough tracks had been nearly cut in half.

Filter and suspension feeders were especially hard hit.

The ecosystem, as well as the total carbon cycled through a food web of large sea creatures, mollusks and fish, is still recovering more than a quarter-century later, concluded the researchers.

“The biggest concern most of us biologists have is that we don’t quite have a grasp on the connectivity — what happens from the sea floor to whatever we’re doing on the surface; regulating our climate; and regulating our food supplies,” said Tunnicliffe, who is among 622 scientists calling for amoratorium on deep-sea mining

.

A new Relicanthus species, collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, lives on sponge stalks attached to nodules. 

Craig Smith, Diva Amon, ABYSSLINE Project/NOAA

Those concerns extend to seamounts, where some rise to within 500 metres of the surface, said Tunnicliffe.

“It’s covered with corals and sponges and all the associated organisms, and it’s a great place for fish to congregate and whale migration routes,” she said.

A spokesperson for The Metals Company declined a request to comment on the potential environmental impacts of its deep-sea operations, instead pointing to two studies funded by the company and its predecessor DeepGreen Metals.

One study concludedmining metallic nodulesputs 94 per cent less sequestered carbon at risk than land-based mining.

The other found metal production from nodules “may produce less waste of lower severities” compared to land-based mining.

“Nodule exploitation would damage abyssal habitats and may impact midwater-column organisms,” notes the January 2022 study, “but in the absence of nodule exploitation, terrestrial mining’s environmental and social impacts would intensify.”

The caveat, noted the researchers, the disruption of sediment still has “uncertain impacts.”

Both studies are co-authored by Erika Ilves, chief strategy officer for The Metals Company.

Rising opposition

The prospect of opening the deep sea to mining has united strong opposition around the world.

At a global conservation summit last September in Marseille, France, 81 nations voted in favour of their own moratorium on deep-sea mining, despite some of those countries holding ISA contracts. Only 18 voted against the motion.

But while many nations have come out in favour of a moratorium on deep-sea mining, Coumans said the Canadian government has, until now, been “sitting on the fence.”

“These are Canadian companies that are in the forefront of this,” she said.

In 2020, MiningWatch, together with 18 other non-governmental organizations and First Nations,sent a letterto six federal ministers to express their concerns with deep-sea mining.

To date, Coumans says they have yet to see an official response, despite multiple promises from civil servants.

“We were told that the war in Ukraine, that sort of derailed that,” she said.

In an interview, Glacier Media pressed Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson to reveal where the Canadian government stands on deep-sea mining.

Wilkinson said his government “would be very hesitant” to be involved in or support deep-sea mining. When asked whether Canada’s ISA delegates will be voting in favour of any new ISA regulations advancing deep-sea mining, Wilkinson said it’s an “active conversation” and that the federal government has not yet made a decision.

“It’s certainly something we recognize,” he said. “The clock is ticking and we need to come forward with a position.”

Does a decarbonizing world really need deep-sea metals?

In recent years, many large multinationals have been forced to take a stand against revelations of abuses in land-based mines in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Described by some as a human rights disaster, thousands of young children are oftendrugged to suppress their hungerand sent to work in cobalt mines used to feed electric car batteries, cellphones and computers.

Raphael Deberdt, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Anthropology, has spent several years tracking how large companies have responded to calls to responsibly source minerals for the battery industry.

Deberdt says that while the risks of land-based and deep-sea mining are different, the customer perception that a cellphone or car maker is backing a harmful practice can be equally damaging to the company.

Google, the BMW Group, Samsung, Volkswagen and Volvo are among a dozen multinational companies who have recentlybacked a call to place a moratorium on deep-sea mininguntil more is understood about its consequences.

“They’ve looked into deep-sea mining and determined the impacts are too high,” he said.

But none of those companies have contact with the ISA, and Deberdt suspects they’ll have little to no impact on the outcome of the regulatory process.

“I don’t think that the ISA actually really cares if Google signs the moratorium,” he said.

In a March 2021open letterto BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung SDI, The Metals Company says it’s taking a “precautionary approach” to deep-sea mining. It urged the big brands to hold their criticism until they see the “full data.”

“Will Volvo customers really prefer rainforest metals in their EVs once they realize their dire impacts on freshwater ecosystems, Indigenous peoples, charismatic megafauna and carbon-storing forests?” questions the letter.

The company says it’s currently studying the impact removing the nodules will have on life and says it’s working to mitigate the effect of sediment plumes left behind by its robots and riser pipes.

In the long term, both Coumans and Deberdt say deep-sea mining companies are failing to properly consider a rising movement to recycle batteries.

Coumans points to Redwood Materials, a $1 billion plant in Nevada set up by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel and other metals from old batteries. The facility is expected to re-purpose up to 100 gigawatt-hours of cathode material and enough anode foil for a million electric vehicles a year by 2025.

In ablog postlast September, Straubel said that by 2030, production output is expected to climb to produce enough batteries to power nearly half of the United State’s annual vehicle production.

Companies like Redwood Materials are looking to recycle batteries in a closed-loop system the company hopes will supply nearly half of annual vehicle production in the U.S.

 Credit: Redwood Materials/Twitter

Others are looking to create new battery technologies that use less metals to start with.

At IBM, the company says it has developed abattery free of heavy metals. And start-up Form Energy out of Somerville, Mass., has raised at least $360 million to develop anelectric grid batterypowered by three of the most abundant materials on the planet — iron, water and air.

“There’s an understanding that we can’t mine our way out of the climate change problem. We can’t save the planet by destroying the planet further,” said Coumans.

The hype around deep-sea mining has also been fed by rising geopolitical concerns that Western nations could be left without the metals they need to supply a boom in renewable energy.

Russia is home to thelargest nickel producer in the worldand two of the top fivecobalt mining companiesare Chinese. If relations between Western nations and those countries continue to sour, some worry key mineral supply chains could be disrupted.

“So there we are, stuck with a world that cannot do any kind of diplomacy to try and help share our land wealth. So instead, what do we do?” said Tunnicliffe. “We all dive into another environment and try to ransack that one as well.”

With so much at stake, the appetite to mine the deep appears to be turning, says Kristina Gjerde, a lawyer and senior high seas advisor to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Experts say the ISA is rushing to solve a number ofunanswered questions, including how an international payment regime would funnel money to countries not involved in the mining.

Another obstacle to adopting new regulations could come in December when a select group of ISA members will meet in a small hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, where the ISA secretariat will need to get a consensus to move forward, says Gjerde.

Opposing countries could also push back by adopting a resolution in the UN General Assembly calling on the independent regulatory body to halt the work.

“It could operate sort of like the whaling moratorium, where governments decided to transition from exploitation to conservation,” said the lawyer. “Nothing is inevitable. And governments now have the opportunity to make that critical choice.”

Sitting before a giant aquarium at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon last week, French President Emmanuel Macron signalled he would be among the first major Western leaders to make that choice.

“We have to… create the legal framework to stop the high-seas mining,” Macron told Gjerde and other experts gathered there.”We need to promote our scientists and explorers to better know the high seas…”

“We need to better understand in order to better protect.”

(This article first appeared in Business in Vancouver)

The Metals Company reigniting race to mine the ocean floor

PART ONE

Stefan Labbé - Business in Vancouver | July 5, 2022 | MINING.COM

(Image courtesy of DeepGreen.)

LONG READ 

In 1983, Verena Tunnicliffe was floating about 250 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island when a call came over the radio — geologists on a nearby sister ship had dredged up something strange from the sea floor.


“We got all these strange smelly worms,” Tunnicliffe remembers them saying. “Would you like them?”

The deep-sea researcher was the only one with a submarine, and a year later, her exploration team had raised enough money to go back.

When Tunnicliffe finally descended over 2,000 metres to a patch of ocean floor, everything was dark, save for the light on the submersible.

Below them, two tectonic plates diverged, allowing cold sea water to seep through the Earth’s crust. Super-heated by molten lava, the water shoots back into the ocean as a 400-degree-Celsius hot soup of nutrients and chemicals.

The crew crept along the bottom in an exercise Tunnicliffe describes as “trying to explore the Rocky Mountains with a flashlight.”

First came white mats of bacteria. Then, out of the darkness, huge mounds of “gorgeous” white tube worms emerged, the metre-and-a-half-long creatures topped with red plumes. Inside, the scientist would later learn they had no guts, but a body filled with vent-fed bacteria that feed the worms.

And in a potential window onto the origin of life on a hot, young Earth, a bacteria found at the B.C. vents was later discovered to survive temperatures of 121 C — the hottest upper limit for life.

“Just covered, dripping with animals,” Tunnicliffe said, pointing to at least 12 distinct species found there and not seen anywhere else on Earth.

A year later, Tunnicliffe would find vents at an enormous scale, hydrothermal openings that form chimneys up to 45 metres tall known as “black smokers.”

In the decades that followed, over 800 extinct and active chimneys would be discovered. The deep-sea scientist would have 10 undersea creatures named after her, and go on to be awarded the Order of Canada for her pioneering work.

Soaring up to the height of buildings, the underwater vents and their chimneys can often contain ore-grade metal deposits of gold, copper and silver — making them an attractive potential source of wealth if only someone could figure out how to mine them.
A vast array of life congregates around ‘black smokers,’ which spew water super-heated to 380 Celsius and form part of the Endeavour Hot Vents, the first such sites to be protected in the world. – Photo by Verena Tunnicliffe

By 2003, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents would be the first marine protected area in Canada, and the first “hot vents” protected from human exploitation in the world.

But in other stretches of deep ocean, a battle that had been quietly brewing for decades was about to enter a new phase of heightened tensions, raising the prospect of a race for some of the ocean’s deepest known riches.

At the centre of the controversy sits The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based mining firm looking to harvest the minerals required to wean the world of fossil fuels and on to a more sustainable path.

The U.S. Geological Survey found this year that deep-ocean mines could provide up to 45% of all the world’s critical metal needs by 2065.

But for scientists like Tunnicliffe, a race to the bottom of one of the planet’s least explored realms comes with huge risks, both to its poorly understood ecosystems and their link to an ocean carbon pump that’s thought to scrub 30 per cent of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere every year.

“We’re talking about a group of organisms that have changed the way we understand life on this planet, all the way back to the origin of life, how life works in highly extreme settings where we never thought any life could live,” said Tunnicliffe.

“It’s fuelled our search for life on other planets.”

Three pots of deep-sea treasure and a Russian sub

The first sign that the ocean floor could hold minerals useful to humanity date back over 150 years to the HMS Challenger expedition, a voyage many now cast as the foundation of modern oceanography.

The expedition would be the first to probe the Mariana Trench with bathymetric soundings and verify the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the longest mountain range in the world and the separation line where two crustal plates diverge, expanding the Atlantic’s sea floor.

But it was on March 7, 1873, when crew from the expedition dredged on deck “several peculiar black oval bodies which were composed of almost pure manganese oxide” that humanity got its first look at what wealth lay deep out of sight.

The metallic masses start with a core — a sunken shark tooth, tiny fossil or piece of basalt rock. Over tens of millions of years, minerals precipitate out of the surrounding sea water, forming one metallic layer after another.

Often growing to the size of a potato, the nodules are rich in nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese — all metals highly sought after by battery makers and other technology manufacturers.

Drop down 4,000 metres below parts of the Pacific Ocean, and they can be found scattered across the surface of abyssal plains, flat stretches of relatively unexplored ocean that cover roughly half the surface of the Earth.

But like the precious metals found near some hydrothermal vents, in the past, it was either too expensive or the technology didn’t exist to pull the nodules from the deep.

A polymetallic nodule is captured on a seamount deep in the North Atlantic Ocean during the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition. 

Credit: U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA Ocean Exploration

It would take more than 90 years before the idea of mining the metallic nodules would once again capture the public’s attention.

In 1965, mining engineer John L. Mero published the influential book “The Mineral Resources of the Sea,” sparking wide interest in the nodules at the time when they were thought to be an infinite resource growing faster than they could be harvested.

A year later, Malta’s ambassador to the United Nations, Arvid Pardo, made an impassioned plea to the General Assembly calling on coastal states to end the expansion of exclusive economic zones and regulate the ocean floor, not only for “those who possess the required technology,” but “in the interest of mankind.”

“That’s where the idea came that whatever we find out there really belongs to everyone, and that it needs also to be fostered for the future generations,” said Tunnicliffe.

The question revolved around the idea that the ocean’s riches shouldn’t just belong to the wealthiest nations with the resources to exploit the sea floor. That set off a multi-decadal legal process to regulate mining under international waters.

But the pendulum would continue to swing and in the early 1970s, a commodity boom drove further interest in deep-sea mining. So when eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes announced he was building a giant ship to mine the ocean’s abyss, the story was plausible.

To the public, the expedition would be the first attempt to mine the deep sea’s metal nodules. In reality, it was an elaborate ruse.

In 1968, U.S. authorities had learned Soviet submarine K-129 had sunk in over 5,000 metres of water, roughly 2,500 kilometres northwest of Hawaii.

Working with Hughes and his new Glomar Explorer ship, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency planned to recover the submarine and its nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

In 1975, reporting by the Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times would reveal the outline of what some have described as “the most daring covert operation in history.”

Project Azorian was one of the most expensive covert operations in CIA history, involving the Howard Hughes-built Glomar Explorer recovery ship (above) and Soviet submarine K-129, pictured below circa 1968. – Photos via U.S. government; CIA

The story has shifted throughout the years, some suggesting most of the submarine was recovered, others stating that it broke up as it was pulled from the depths to the ship’s moon pool.

Whatever the case, the extraordinary stories that emerged from what was declassified as Project Azorian in 2010, also helped set off a reckoning over who should have access to the deep — and in particular, the riches sitting on its abyssal floor.

A half-dozen competing international consortia would begin piloting deep-sea mining in the late 1970s. But by the early 1980s, commodity prices dropped and that work was shelved as companies cut back their research budgets. As German historian Ole Sparenberg put it, deep-sea mining was essentially “dead in the water.”

Concerns over the environment and equity for less wealthy nations eventually led the United Nations to draw up the International Seabed Authority — also known as the ISA or ‘the Enterprise’ — in 1982 under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and ratify its existence in a 1994 implementation agreement.

Today, the Jamaica-based body is made up of 167 member nations and the European Commission.

A custodian of the deep sea as a “common heritage for mankind,” the ISA’s dual mandate is to facilitate the extraction of mineral resources from the seabed, while at the same time protecting the deep-sea environment.

The prevailing sentiment at the time was that land-based mining was much more profitable, “and how are you gonna do this anyway?” said Tunnicliffe.

Even if the technology and financing were there to pull the metals from the deep, no regulations existed to allow for mining in international waters.

That is until an ambitious company from Vancouver, B.C., triggered a countdown that could open the floodgates for deep-sea mining and prompt a new age of resource exploitation.  Areas of the sea floor under exploration contracts with the International Seabed Authority. Image from ISA
Halfway through a two-year countdown

On an overcast day in June 2022, a handful of activists, scientists and artists dedicated to sea life unfurled an ocean-blue banner and took aim at The Metals Company, whose headquarters sits in a nondescript Vancouver office tower five blocks away.

“Imagine house-sized machines crawling along the seabed and indiscriminately vacuuming up the contents,” said Michelle Connolly, an ecologist who travelled 10 hours from Prince George to help lead the rally near the city’s seawall.

Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nauru Ocean Resources, The Metals Company has an exploratory licence covering four areas in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a nodule-rich area halfway between Hawaii and Mexico where the company is looking to explore nearly 75,000 square kilometres of sea bed.

That contract is among 31 the ISA has handed out since 2001, when the price of metals began to surge again.

Until 2010, the international body largely granted contracts to national agencies. But as the price of metals climbed and technology developed, several companies have looked to get in the race.

“If you remember, that was when people were going around knocking down copper statues and stealing copper wires,” said Tunnicliffe. “That’s what suddenly turned back to looking at the deep sea.”

Nineteen different companies have sought exploration contracts to probe abyssal plains for the polymetallic nodules.

Another seven contracts have been granted to companies looking to mine hydrothermal mineral deposits around hot vents.

And in a third target for submarine mining, the ISA has approved five exploration contracts for underwater mountain ranges known as seamounts, where underwater peaks and ridges are at times covered in crusts of cobalt, platinum, manganese and rare earth metals — a multi-million-year process of accretion deposited like a 30-centimetre-thick cap of black snow. A ‘goblet’ glass sponge up to a metre high rises above a metallic nodule field 2,570 metres below the surface near Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: NOAA

All of those contracts are exploratory and none of them include provisions to carry out industrial-scale mining, largely because the ISA has not yet written the rules of the road.

That changed in June 2021, when the small island nation of Nauru, acting as a sponsor of Nauru Ocean Resources, approached the ISA, requesting it establish a set of regulations that would govern how companies could mine the deep.

Through an obscure clause, which set off a two-year countdown under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ISA must finalize a set of regulations.

A final decision is expected to be released in July 2023, according to Tunnicliffe, who in the past, led a mining working group at the ISA, providing expert scientific advice to help draft anticipated regulations around deep-sea mining.

Applications to commercially mine the seabed will still have to be approved on a case-by-case basis, with each one requiring an environmental review process, said the scientist.

“But at that point,” she said. “The inevitability is there.”Ecologist Michelle Connolly attends a rally against deep-sea mining in Vancouver, B.C., five blocks from The Metals Company’s offices. Credit: Stefan Labbe/Glacier Media.

Researchers call for science-based policies given impacts of mining on salmon, trout
Staff Writer | July 6, 2022 | 
Migrating sockeye salmon approach their spawning grounds on a tributary of the Copper River. (Image courtesy of the University of Alaska Fairbanks).

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and other institutions in the US and Canada are calling for more complete and transparent science to inform mining policy, particularly when it comes to the impact of metal and coal mines on salmon and trout in northwestern North America.


In an article published in the journal Science Advances, the scientists comprehensively link, for the first time, mining policy to the current understanding of watershed ecology and salmonid biology.

“Our paper is not for or against mining, but it does describe current environmental challenges and gaps in the application of science to mining governance. We believe it will provide critically needed scientific clarity for this controversial topic,” lead author Chris Sergeant said in a media statement.

For the study, Sergeant and his co-authors integrated and reviewed information on hydrology, river ecology, aquatic toxicology, biology and mining policy. Their assessment maps more than 3,600 mines throughout Montana, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska. The size of the mines ranges from family-run placer sites to massive open-pit projects.

The research shows that, despite impact assessments intended to evaluate risk and inform mitigation, mines continue to harm salmonid-bearing watersheds through contaminants, stream channel burial and streamflow alteration. Silt suffocates eggs, and embryos may not survive contaminated groundwater. Heavy metals compromise a salmon’s sense of smell, which affects their ability to react to predators and find their way back from the ocean to spawn.

The scientists point out that even though not all mines pose the same level of risk, the review showed that the harm caused by mining can be severe and long-lasting.

“The extent of mining pressures on these watersheds underscores the importance of accurately assessing risk to water, fish and communities,” Sergeant said.
Breadth and length of mining impacts

The paper also describes how some mining policies do not account for the breadth and length of mining impacts on the environment or the increasing effects of climate change.

“The crux of the issue is that salmon use so much of the watershed during their life cycle. They move throughout watersheds, whereas the impact assessments of mining projects tend to be very locally focused, and they don’t sufficiently consider all of the compounding and downstream effects of mining,” co-author Megan McPhee said.

According to McPhee, some impact assessments don’t fully evaluate the infrastructure required to operate a mine, such as roads, electricity generation and water removal.

“Another thing is that most mines, after closure, have to be mitigated in perpetuity. That’s a problem because most corporations aren’t structured that way. Also, most mitigation strategies don’t take into account environmental change, including permafrost melting, and climate change-induced flooding,” she said.

Moving forward, the authors highlighted four key issues that will be foundational to modern, science-based risk assessment and mitigation, beginning with understanding stressor complexity and uncertainty. Stressors include impacts such as altered hydrology and temperature, habitat modification and loss, and pollutants.

Other key issues are accounting for the cumulative effects of mining activities across a mine’s life cycle, developing realistic mitigation strategies and recognizing the potential for climate change to magnify risk.