Overview
By 2050, the world's demand for precious metals will rise 500 percent to an astounding three billion tons of graphite, lithium, copper, and cobalt. As countries such as the United States transition to green energy, the demand for metals to deploy wind, solar, and geothermal energy will be steep. To curb emissions and stay below a 2-degree Celsius rise, the
renewable energy transition will be mineral intensive. A typical electric vehicle battery pack requires 8kg lithium, 35kg nickel, 20kg manganese, and 14kg of cobalt.
Additionally, a charging station for EVs (electric vehicles) needs a large amount of copper, and solar panels require excessive amounts of zinc. By 2050, an eightfold increase in renewable energy investments will be needed to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon technologies. Current mining practices for these metals come at an environmental cost, health risk, and human rights issues. At current production rates, terrestrial mining will be 30-40 percent short of the rate of demand in 2050. Today, the mining industry is posed with some large questions regarding sustainable mining, recycling metals, and producing metals at an unprecedented rate. Is there another way we can produce precious metals without destroying the local environment?
Scattered Across the Ocean Floor
Scientists have known about manganese nodules and precious metals being scattered across the ocean floor since the late 1800s. Progress in mining these metals has only begun in the last 30 years due to technological advancements and economic demand. Manganese nodules are polymetallic rock concentrations that lie loosely on the sea floor and are abundant on the abyssal plains of the deep ocean. These plains are in different areas of the ocean but tend to be between 13,000 ft (about 3.96 km) to 200,000 ft (about 60.96 km) deep. The Clarion- Clipperton Zone is one of the largest areas of the several known economic zones and spans from the west coast of Mexico to the edge of Hawaii, covering an area of about 4.4 million square kilometers (about half the area of Canada).
These metal ores are extremely pure and contain almost 100 percent usable minerals. Metal ores on land rarely have metal yields over 20 percent making the ocean ores far more concentrated. An estimated 21.1 billion dry tons of polymetallic nodules exist in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), which eclipses the total of those found in global terrestrial sites. If deep ocean mining follows in the footsteps of petroleum, we can expect 30-45 percent of the demand for critical metals will come from deep ocean mines by 2065.
What is holding companies, organizations, and governments back from deep ocean mining? The big question that still needs to be answered is, are the advantages in carbon, pollution, and social justice more important than the ecosystem damage to the ocean floor? How invasive is ocean mining compared to on-land mining? These are all questions that are being tested, raised, and researched daily.
At What Cost?
With a fraction of the carbon footprint, no dependence on child labor, and a potential for large profit margins why aren’t deep sea mining projects more popular? There seems to always be a “catch,” deep sea mining has the possibility of causing mass habitat destruction and since the science behind deep sea life is limited so are the known effects of the mining process. One of the largest arguments against deep sea mining is the effects of sediment disruption and the sediment plumes formed by the collection of nodules. Collecting nodules on a commercial level is believed to disrupt CO2 sequestration processes and could negatively impact marine ecosystems. Currently, deep sea mining proposals are expected to produce two distinct types of sediment plumes in the ocean: “collector plumes” that come from the vehicles on the sea floor and possibly “midwater plumes” that are discharged through pipes that descend 1,000 meters (about 3280.84 ft) or more into the oceans aphotic zone, where sunlight rarely penetrates.
2018年,一項由麻省理工學院學生impacts of deep sea nodule mining found that sediment released from midwater plumes mixed rapidly with surrounding ocean water due to the turbulence of the release. These findings are not what scientists originally speculated, it was assumed that the sediment would form large aggregates and settle quickly. In a commercial operation where the nodules are cleaned on a ship and the unwanted sediment is discarded, the natural dilution process of the ocean plays a crucial role in how impactful the sediment plumes can be.
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Keywords: Deep Sea Mining, Energy Transition, Carbon Footprint, Polymetallic Nodules, ARC Advisory Group.