The Next Frontier on Earth - Mining the Deep Sea

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Deep Sea Mining

Date posted: 04/11/17

Stefanie Heerwig reports in this well-referenced article that as we continue consuming metals and rare earths at the same rate as today, we could run out of existing resources within 20 years, according to an estimate of current resources and reserves worldwide. Rare earths are the basis for state-of-the-art renewable technology like solar panels. And replacing oil, gas and coal with existing renewable energy technology would require the extraction of rare earths to increase by 700% over the next 25 years, according to the latest MIT research. Given this pressing demand and following the commodity price boom between 2009-2013, companies have been venturing ever deeper to extract those minerals that are more difficult to develop on the surface. We are talking about deep sea mining. Already more than 60 years ago, John Mero, a professor of mineral technology at Berkley, was aware of the enormous potential of deep sea mining. In his book, The Mineral Resources of the Sea, he wrote that the extraction of some of these reserves could serve to remove one of the historic causes of war between nations, supplies of raw materials for expanding populations. Currently, there are more or less three main types of deep sea mineral deposits with a high economic potential, namely seafloor massive sulphide deposits located in Papua New Guinea, polymetallic manganese nodules in the Cook Islands and ferromanganese cobalt-rich crusts in the Republic of Marshall Islands. While none of these deposits has been mined yet, exploration activities have been ongoing. And while all of these deposits are similar in the respect that they are under the sea, they are completely different in nature. For instance, the so-called polymetallic manganese nodules, are like potato-sized rocks found at a depth of more than 3 miles beneath the sea surface. Next to manganese they contain a variety of rare-earths such as thallium, used in optics, electronics and magnet-based machines.