ocean resources (mining)

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seabed mining

The need for metals and minerals for construction, batteries and electronics is growing exponentially. As land-based resources run out, the mining industry is planning to turn to the seabed where polymetallic nodules, ferromanganese crusts and polymetallic sulphides have formed over millions of years in depths of up to 4-5,000 metres.

The nodules and crusts are rich in minerals, metals and rare earth minerals like manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, gold and zinc. While estimates as to the amounts and values of polymetallic seabed resources are hard to establish, it is thought that 500 billion metric tonnes of polymetallic nodules can be found on the seabed of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans; off the coast of Hawai’i, the Clarion Clipperton Zone alone is thought to contain several billion metric tonnes of nodules. The limited and conflict-related land-based sources of minerals like cobalt have encouraged a new push to mine the nodules of the deep seabed, seen by some as an attractive investment opportunity, for others an activity which should be stopped before deep sea ecosystems are destroyed for good.

See the Royal Society’s map of ocean resources

Polymetallic nodules are usually between 2 and 15 cm large, they contain manganese (29%), iron (6%), nickel (1.3%), copper (1.15%), cobalt (0.25%), trace metals and rare earths, and occur over extensive areas of abyssal plains at depths of 4 to 6,500 metres. They develop extremely slowly often around a shark tooth or a whale ear bone: it takes a million years to grow 20-25 mm.

Ferromanganese crusts, which are rich in cobalt, precipitate onto nearly all rock surfaces in the deep ocean that are free of sediment (mainly seamounts), gradually building layers 1-260 mm thick at a rate of 1-5 mm per million years. Crusts occur at depths of about 800—2,500 metres, mainly in the Pacific Ocean.
Polymetallic sulphides are an accumulation of minerals such as sulphur and metals (iron, zinc and copper). The heaps sometimes exceed 100 metres in diameter and tens of metres in height. Between 10 and 40,000 years are needed to form a deposit of 100 metres in diameter and 50 metres in height.

Regulation

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was established by UNCLOS to administer the resources of the Area, the seabed and ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction. It distributes 5-7 year licences to States Parties to UNCLOS to exploit resources in the Area, charging licence fees (US$500,000 per licence) which are meant to cover the costs of running the ISA, and will administer the future distribution of any revenue from exploitation. Further information on the ISA can be found on the ocean governance page.

The ISA has so far approved exploration contracts covering more than 1.3 million square kilometres of the seabed in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. These include 19 for polymetallic nodules, 7 for polymetallic sulphides and 5 for cobalt-rich crusts, as set out on the ISA website.

Impact

Environmental organizations are increasingly concerned about the negative impact of mining on marine ecosystems, these include:

destruction of seabed life and habitats;
creation of large underwater plumes of sediment (interfering with photosynthetic processes of phytoplankton and other marine life as well as introducing previously benign heavy metals into the food chain); and
creation of chemical, noise and light pollution arising from mining operations.

The effects of mining on the deep-sea ecosystems may last many decades. The 1989 DISCOL deep-sea disturbance experiment in the Peru Basin in which 78 plough tracks were made by an 8-metre wide metal frame fitted with ploughs and harrows in the nodule field south of the Galápagos Islands provides evidence of this impact. In 2015, 26 years later, a research vessel returned to the site to find the plough tracks clearly visible and devoid of life, showing clearly that the marine ecosystem had still not recovered from the decades-old intrusion.

Research

The European JPI-Oceans joint project ‘Ecological Aspects of Deep-Sea Mining’, also known as MiningImpact, is run by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel with 29 other marine science, research and educational institutions from 9 European nations and the ISA. The project is split into three phases:

The first phase, which ran from 2015 to 2017, investigated small-scale disturbances of the seafloor, aiming to assess the recovery of the DISCOL experimental area in the Peru Basin in terms of the ecosystem status, and the biogeochemical situation of the area by comparing disturbed with adjacent undisturbed sites.
The second phase, running from 2018 to 2022, is a comprehensive monitoring program devoted to the industrial test of the prototype nodule collector system of the Belgian contractor DEME-GSR. The test harvests nodules from the seabed in the Belgian and German contract areas of the Clarion Clipperton Zone and collects independent scientific information on the environmental impacts of this operation. The primary focus is on constraining and quantifying the temporal dynamics and characteristics of the suspended sediment plume, the spatial footprint of the deposited sediment blanket, and the induced effects on the abyssal ecosystem. The fifth expedition is now collecting the first data set on impacts on the deep-sea environment one and a half years after the test.

Information on phase 3 is not yet available.

According to the GEOMAR website, MiningImpact scientists are making concrete recommendations to inform the Mining Code of the International Seabed Authority and are active in discussing their results with a wide range of decision-makers to develop environmental standards and options for minimizing large-scale and long-lasting environmental damage. MiningImpact is thus already actively contributing to the environmental impact assessment of deep-sea mining called for by the German government in late 2022.

Nauru

The Pacific-island State Nauru is particularly active at the ISA.

According to the Metals Company website, the ISA granted a polymetallic nodule exploration contract in the Clarion Clipperton Zone to Nauru in 2011. Since then, in close partnership with Nauru and working with leading researchers and institutions, NORI (Nauru Ocean Resources, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Metals Company) has progressed with a comprehensive seabed-to-surface research program in one of its designated areas, NORI-D. Representing 22% of The Metals Company’s estimated resource in the CCZ, the NORI license area is ranked as having the largest undeveloped nickel deposit in the world.

Eager to push on with extraction, on 25 June 2021 the President of Nauru, H.E. Mr. Lionel Aingimea, requested the Council of the ISA to complete the adoption of the rules, regulations and procedures necessary to facilitate the approval of plans of work for exploitation in the Area pursuant to Section 1, paragraph 15 of the 1994 Agreement relating to the Implementation of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This basically means that the ISA needs to complete drafting the Mining Code within two years, with a deadline of 9 July 2023.

In the meantime, on 22 July 2022, Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), a subsidiary of The Metals Company, was granted a polymetallic nodule exploration contract concerning 4 areas in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), sponsored by the government of the Republic of Nauru. NORI are now able to conduct tests of mining components and their integration onboard its vessel Hidden Gem. and is requested to report on the result of the tests in the context of its annual report.

NORI’s website outlines their plans. With an exploitation contract application submission expected for the second half of 2023, by 2024 Project Zero will involve small-scale commercial production with Project One, involving larger-scale production expected to begin in 2025.

Calls for a moratorium

As the ISA pushes forward with its drafting of a mining code, calls for a moratorium on seabed mining are getting louder. The deep sea is still very much an area of the unknown but we do at least now know that it is teeming with life, in hydrothermal vent ecosystems more than 500 species have been identified, including tubeworms, mussels, crabs, squat lobsters, limpets, scaleworms, zoarcid fish and octopuses. It is becoming clear that each area, whether a submarine mountain or abyssal plain, maintains an ecosystem with species endemic to that particular area. It is not safe to work on the premise that if an area of the seabed is allocated to a mining project, any species destroyed there will still thrive elsewhere. Life forms destroyed may well be endemic and mining may destroy species before they are even identified. In order to evaluate the impact of seabed mining, supporters of a moratorium call for further research into deep seabed ecosystems. Indeed, experts are arguing that the obligations to protect the marine environment laid down in Part XII of UNCLOS should override any destructive extractive activities and that it is therefore our duty to pause seabed mining until the correct environmental protective strategies can be put in place.