DEEP-SEA MINING: THE DEBATE

The world's long overdue, stuttering shift to renewable energy is hindered by its Achilles' heel: it demands astounding amounts of natural resources.

It will need billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, and other metals to produce enough electric cars to replace their counterparts that run on fossil fuels and fast following the latest 2035 measures by the EU and USA.

Mining firms, automobile manufacturers, and governments are combing the globe for new mine locations or enlarging those that already exist to fulfill the rising demand, from the Chilean deserts to the Indonesian rain forests.

The ocean bottom could be the richest supply of all, yet it is unexplored. According to the US Geological Survey, there are 21 billion tons of polymetallic nodules in one area of the Pacific, which contain more cemetals – such nickel and cobalt – than there are dryland deposits worldwide.

The possibility of deep-sea mining has led to a furious outcry. Environmental organizations, scientists, and even some firms in the market for battery metals worry about the potential chaos of seabed mining.

The seas provide a major source of food, a considerable portion of the world's biodiversity, and the planet's largest carbon sink. Nobody is certain how such a rare intrusion might impact the ocean, the many life forms that inhabit the deep ocean, or marine life higher up in the water column.

The European Parliament has joined dozens of groups in asking for at least a temporary halt on deep-sea mining, along with governments including Germany, Chile, Spain, and many Pacific island states.

Several banks have said they won't provide loans to projects involving ocean mining. Businesses including BMW, Microsoft, Google, Volvo, and Volkswagen have vowed not to purchase deep-sea metals until the effects on the environment are better known.

For millions of years, the nodules have grown in near-total stillness and complete darkness. Each one began as a piece of something else, such as a small fossil, a piece of basalt, or a shark tooth that floated down to the ocean's deepest plains.

They steadily accumulated watery nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese particles as geologic time dragged on. Trillions now lie partially buried deep in the ocean bottom.

The Mineral Resources of the Sea, written in 1965 by John Mero, a geologist, generously claimed that the nodules contained enough manganese, cobalt, nickel, and other metals to meet the industrial requirements of the whole planet for thousands of years.

He said that mining the nodules "could assist in eliminating one of the traditional reasons of strife between states, supply of raw materials for growing populations.”

Of course, it might also have the reverse effect, igniting pointless disputes about who owns what parts of the ocean floor.

In 1972, it looked entirely realistic when billionaire Howard Hughes revealed that he was deploying a custom-built ship into the Pacific to seek for nodules.

Nevertheless, none of the real sea miners were able to develop a method that could complete the task at a reasonable cost, and the dynamism of the emerging sector was lost for a while.

The development of maritime technology at the start of the 21st century made sea mining once more conceivable.

Ships may float over precisely selected locations on the ocean bottom with the help of sophisticated motors and GPS. Remotely controlled underwater vehicles improved and descended farther. At this point, the nodules seemed to be within reach, just as expanding countries like China were insatiably hungry for metals.

Meanwhile, the Metals Corporation is one of the very active new players pursuing polymetallic nodules. And today all the projects have an additional environmental basis in addition to a new potential market due to the increasing demand for electric cars.

Ambitious investors have started pounding on the door of the International Seabed Authority (Jamaica, Kingston) with would-be new miners.

The ISA is responsible for both coordinating and safeguarding the economic exploitation of the ocean’s bottom.

The majority of the world's countries joined the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in the 1980s, with the notable exception of the United States.

The treaty founded the ISA, which presently has 167 member countries, among many other things. The group was tasked with creating regulations for the deep-sea mining sector, which do not yet exist.

So far, the Seabed Authority has authorized 22 businesses and governments to explore substantial portions of the seafloor under the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans.

Most are targeting nodules lying around 3 miles below in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a region of the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii totaling 450,000 square kilometers. There is a gap in the mining ban: the two-year trigger. The Seabed Authority has two years to create comprehensive rules in accordance with the treaty's Paragraph 15 if any Member States officially inform it that the state intends to begin sea mining in international seas. The treaty states that the ISA "must nevertheless evaluate and provisionally approve such plan of work."

If it fails to do so and according to an interpretation of this paragraph, mining must be permitted to continue even in the lack of complete restrictions.

Which desperate island jumped on the opportunity? Nauru. The president of Nauru officially informed the Seabed Authority that the nation and its wholly owned subsidiary, Nauru Ocean Resources (associated with the Metals Corporation), intended to start sea mining in the summer of 2022. The Metals Company's bold move could have made deep-sea mining possible for the first time.

In reality, not a lot is understood about the deep sea. It is quite challenging to collect data hundreds of miles from land and miles below the water's surface. A single day's labor may cost up to $80,000, and many scientists have only just lately had access to high-tech equipment like remotely controlled vehicles.

In 2022, a report by 31 marine scientists that evaluated many studies on deep-sea mining was released. The authors also spoke with 20 other scientists, industry managers, and policymakers.

They virtually all agreed that it would take at least another five years for the scientific community to "make suggestions based on facts" for regulating the sector.

The world's seas, which are already under a lot of stress from pollution, overfishing, and climate change are seriously at danger throughout every stage of the mining process. Unavoidably, some harm will result from a big piece of machinery a tank style traversing across the ocean bottom while yanking millions of nodules from the beds where they have been for millennia.

Several other creatures, including corals, sponges, nematodes, and many more, either dwell on the nodules themselves or find protection there. They are surrounded by floating animals such as ghostly white Dumbo octopuses, rippling squid worms, glass sponges, and anemones.

The collecting vehicles will also mix up silt and clay, which will rise up into the water and form plumes of sediment that might cover kilometers of water, persist for weeks or longer, and choke organisms higher up in the water column. These plumes might also include harmful materials like dissolved metals or other poisons that could endanger aquatic life.

The water that the nodules came in will need to be thrown back into the sea after being transported to a ship, perhaps causing another catastrophic sediment plume. Huge quantities are being discussed, in the order of 50,000 cubic meters per day.

The United Nations Environment Program 2022 study painted a bleak picture. The authors' conclusion is that deep-sea mining will be very harmful to ocean ecosystems, according to current scientific opinion.

A petition requesting a "hold" on sea mining until additional studies have been done has received the support of more than 700 marine scientific and policy specialists.

In the meantime, Global Sea Mineral Resources (Netherlands) announced it would enter cooperation with Transocean, a significant offshore oil-drilling company, after investing at least $100 million in developing its underwater mining equipment.

The sea-mining business is now developing the considerably bigger Patania III, which it expects will be the first of a fleet of fully operational mining robots that will arrive at the ocean bottom around 2028.

In the five years that will pass between now and then, the scientific knowledge required to create rules for properly mining the seafloor needs to be found and the rules made or the decision made over whether it should be done at all.

Or maybe it's time for alternatives, such as a decline in the use of personal vehicles or the acceleration in recycling of EV battery metals, to gather enough momentum to displace seabed mining.

Environmentalistsarefaintingwhenthedeepseaminersusetheirmarketingpitch: Let’ ssavetheplanetbyexploitingthedeep-seafloor!

Ocean Energy Potential

There are four types of renewable marine energy: tidal, wave, osmotic and thermal. Tidal energy, which takes advantage of tide-related variations in sea level, is the oldest and most advanced.

Tidal turbines typically use submerged turbines to take advantage of the current's speed. In addition to many projects being developed in Canada and off the coast of Normandy, two pilot farms have already been built in the United Kingdom.

Orbital Marine 02 – Tidal 2 MW Power -Scotland

In the open ocean or next to a dike, wave energy utilizes the energy of the waves. The device that harvests the energy is called a wave energy converter (WEC). In Norway, Scotland, the Netherlands, Spain, and France, there are already dozens of operative demonstrators in the sea.

The least developed systems are those that use osmotic energy (see special chapter) and marine thermal energy.

The first is rather promising and makes use of the salinity differential between freshwater and seawater, and the second of the temperature difference between deep and surface waters. In the intertropical zones, the latter is rather crucial.

These energies have little to no influence on the environment, and we can immediately observe their benefits.

Many are submerged, which is a significant advantage given the aesthetic arguments that wind energy sparked in the public.

The energy extracted from the swell and tidal currents are predictable, many centuries in advance. This makes it possible for network management to see exactly how much energy will be available.

Although these methods are not so new, it is still unknown how they will affect the ecosystem, especially how they will affect the bottom, even with a typically smaller surface impact.

Despite this, the current consensus among energy transition specialists may be summed up as follows: in 2050, marine energies could account for barely 1% of all renewable energy sources worldwide.

Why so low? On paper, these technologies seem to be highly appealing, but from an industrial standpoint, they are exceedingly challenging to scale up.

The maritime environment is quite aggressive. For instance, a wave energy prototype that was placed in the seas off Reunion Island in 2014 was destroyed immediately after installation by a hurricane.

Nowadays, it still appears very difficult to produce installations that are sufficiently reliable at a reasonable price.

However, let’s be open-minded and go through the different technologies as a few will be able to scale up and lead the pack in this sector.

Several innovators have been inspired by the possibility of converting wave energy into usable energy since it was first patented in 1799. By 1980, more than 1,000 patents had been registered, and the number has steadily increased since then.

To date, a wide range of techniques have been created to transform wave energy into electrical energy; roughly 53 distinct methods of wave energy were described in a reference in 2006.

We'll categorize them by operational concept to make things clearer.

Oscillating water column (OWC)

An OWC is a floating, hollow, or stationary (onshore) apparatus that compresses and decompresses air by using variations in wave action caused by changes in the water level within the chamber.

A turbine connected to the generator is forced to move the air by the pressure differential in the chamber. OWCs can also function as breakwater constructions if constructed close to the beach to protect the shoreline.

Oscillating bodies

The phrase ‘oscillating body’ refers to WECs that obtain their energy from wave-induced oscillations of submerged or floating structures, typically in surge or heave.

To capture energy from the vertical motion of the wave, heaving-type devices are often built as axisymmetric buoys that are either below or on the surface of the water.

The development of heaving type point absorbers is the primary focus of 74 wave energy firms that are recognized by the Marine Energy Centre in Europe.

Overtopping devices

These consist of a structure that has the potential to flap on the surface or use the water mass that overtops it to fall down into the structure, such as a plate with a bottom hinge or a reference base that is submerged.

Oscillating wave surge (OWS)

The OWS converters are composed of a structure that may flap, such a plate that is hinged to the bottom or submerged: 14 various OWS converters are now being developed globally. An example is AW-Energy’s ‘WaveRoller’.

Power Take-Off

To better understand these technologies, let’s consider the Power Take-Off (PTO). The PTO is the process by which kinetic energy that is transferred between the waves and the WEC is converted into an energy feed that can be transferred or stored.

The PTOs come in hydraulic, hydro, pneumatic, and direct-drive varieties.

As conventional electrical generators are designed for low torque and higher speed motion, the PTO presents a significant difficulty since the machines must operate at lower speeds and greater forces.

To conclude on tech matters: according to wave propagation, WECs are classified with three options; attenuator, terminator and quasi point absorber.

The quasi point is a characterized by asymmetric WECs that don’t need to be responsive to the direction of the wave, like point absorbers, but have fairly broad dimensions, comparable to wavelength like the terminators.

To avoid being too technical, the most effective operational system will combine an oscillating body coupled to a quasi-point absorber and with the best power take-off from a hydraulic drive.

An example is ‘Corpower’ from Sweden, with the smart originality that all is in composite fibers.

Since the reference base, which is designed to be stable, constantly tends to pass in waves and often does not have a sufficiently high response point of impedance, the (OWSC) power output is lower than that of bottom-fixed point absorbers.

I'm already hearing arguments from marine energy engineers on one of these projects who will not agree about my simplified – for specialists – explanations.

At the end of the day this is the state of the art today for this ever-promising renewable energy, but it’s so difficult to scale up until someone will come up with the solution… probably assisted by a bit of an AI!