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

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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)