Dr. Conca reported in early 2021 that mining the sea-floor just might be feasible and advisable. From almost any perspective, seabed mining of metals is better for the environment, social justice issues and economics. A large continuous supply of special economic metals is essential for any high tech future. Building electric vehicles and wind turbines take a lot of resources, more than we can provide now, particularly special metals like Co, Li, Te and Nd, as well as just base metals like Fe, Cu, Pb and Zn, and other rare earth elements. Even other materials like graphite. But their supply is generally an environmental and social nightmare. The waste from Li, graphite and high-purity-Si processing has destroyed whole villages and ecosystems in China, Indonesia and Bolivia, among others. America is still dealing with the acid mine drainage left from 120 years of mining. And like blood diamonds, half of the Co supplies come from inhumane child labor practices.
The reason this is so important is that many of the people who support the new energy technological revolution of non-fossil fuels and renewables, electric vehicles, conservation and efficiency, also care about the social issues that many of these technologies incorporate in their wake - corruption, environmental pollution, extreme poverty and child labor. Not the image sought by people at the shade-grown coffee shop surfing the internet for free-range eggs on their iPhones.
Just the carbon intensity alone of producing these metals has led to growing interest in low-carbon metal sources. Last year, Elon Musk promised “a giant contract” for nickel mined “efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.” And it has already sparked some significant changes. So new metal sources should consider their life-cycle carbon footprint, environmental pollution and social justice effects. Everyone agrees that recycling what metals we have is the best thing to do, but we’ll need dozens of times the amount of critical metals we have now, even if we recycle 100%.
We need 3 billion fully electric vehicles worldwide and 10 trillion kWh/yr more by 2040 to have any chance of achieving our climate goals. Recycling and conservation of metals won’t make a dent in this. Enter mining the seafloor for manganese nodules. Geologists have long known that the ocean floor is chock full of metals – REEs, Cu, Ni, Ag, Au, Pt and even diamonds. Manganese nodules are polymetallic rock concretions that lie loosely on the sea floor or buried shallowly in the sediment. These nodules occur in most oceans, even in some lakes, and are abundant on the abyssal plains of the deep ocean between 4,000 and 6,000 meters (13,000 and 20,000 ft). The nodules can be harvested from the sea floor bottom easily.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is the largest of the most economic zones, about the size of Europe, extending from the west coast of Mexico to Hawaii. The total mass of manganese nodules there is over 21 billion tons. Other important areas include the Peru Basin, the Penrhyn Basin near the Cook Islands, and the central Indian Ocean.
These areas are overseen by the United Nations International Seabed Authority (ISA).
[An outstanding article. Read on...]
[For the historical background of sea floor mining, see: https://i2mportal.com/category.php?id=230#page=1
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