MATERIALS OUTLOOK

Nickel, From Land And Sea

By Royce Lowe

Energy is being renewed around the world. As we all know, there is endless talk of the demise of the ICE auto. Wind turbines and solar panels are taking the place of fossil-fueled power plants. The International Energy Agency (IEA) thinks the world will add as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the past 20. Batteries, to keep EVs in a straight line and to store power, are, and will be, in great demand. As are the minerals from which the batteries are made. Nickel, in particular, is in short supply. It is used in the cathodes of high-quality car batteries to boost capacity and cut weight. The IEA has calculated that if the world is to meet its decarbonization goals, it will need to produce 6.3m tons of nickel per year by 2040, or around double 2022’s production.

The Economist recently shared data on getting at nickel on the seabed in Indonesia. Over the past five years, most of the growth in demand has been met by Indonesia. The country has been destroying rainforests to get at the ore under them. According to CRU, a metals research company, in 2017, the country produced just 17% of the world’s nickel. Today it produces around half, and that is increasing.

CRU thinks Indonesia will account for 85% of production growth between now and 2027. This may not even be enough to meet the rising demand.

So, what next? Where do we go for all this extra nickel requirement? Well, as usual, humans are always ready and prepared to take advantage of what nature left lying around, in this case, on the bottom of the seabed. Or a patch of Pacific Ocean seabed called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), which is home to trillions of potato-sized nodules of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper, all of which are of interest to battery makers. All these nodules hold an estimated 340m tons of nickel alone, or more than three times the United States Geological Survey’s estimate of the world’s land-based reserves. Companies have been keen to mine them for several years.

A company called The Metals Company (TMC) told the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an appendage of the United Nations, that it wanted to mine a part of the CCZ to which it had been granted access. TMC’s plan involves a patch of the CCZ called

NORI-D, which covers some 2.5m hectares of the ocean floor - an area roughly 20% bigger than Wales. TMC estimates there are some 3.8m tons of nickel there and plans to send a large robot to the seabed to suck up the nodules that will further be sucked to a support ship through a high-tech pipe, similar to ones used in the oil and gas industry. Mr. Gerard Barron, TMC’s boss, says his firm can break even on nodule collection at nickel prices as low as $6,000 per ton. The price is currently around $22,000 per ton.

The support ship will wash off any sediment, then transfer the nodules to a second ship which will take them back to shore for processing. There are several other companies interested in the area, a Belgian company, Global Sea Mineral Resources, and three Chinese companies, Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants, and China Minmetals.

The 2.5m hectares of seabed that TMC hopes to exploit are expected to yield some 3.8m tons of nickel, about 1.5 tons per hectare. Each hectare of rainforest on Sulawesi, the Indonesian island at the center of the country’s nickel industry, is estimated to yield 675 tons of nickel.

The nodules from the seabed contain much higher nickel concentrations than land deposits, meaning less energy is required to process them. It is estimated that nodule processing will produce around 40% less greenhouse-gas emissions than those from land ore. In any event, the nodules must be moved for processing, and companies such as TMC can be encouraged to choose places where energy comes with low emissions, in contrast to Indonesian nickel ore, which is only economical if processed where it is mined. This means using electricity from coal plants or from diesel generators. CRU figures that Indonesian nickel production emits

60 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of nickel. A ton of nickel harvested from the seabed would produce about six tons of carbon dioxide. There will be some environmental damage from seabed mining, but less than is found from normal mining.

Metal collected from the seabed is unlikely to entirely replace that mined from the rainforest. Battery production is growing at such a rate that nickel will probably be mined wherever it might be found. If the seabed nodules can be processed at an affordable rate, the volume of nickel available may start to ease the pressure on Indonesian forests. TMC’s Mr. Barron intends to produce nickel and other metals from the seabed by the end of 2024.

Indonesia, as mentioned, is already the world’s biggest producer of nickel and has plans to produce over 5m tonnes per year. By 2025 it could supply 60% of the world’s nickel.

The Outlook: Seabed mining will develop out of necessity and as a precursor to asteroid mining, with both requiring the capacity to operate in extremely harsh environments, from massive pressure to no atmosphere at all.

Author profile: Royce Lowe, Manufacturing Talk Radio, UK and EU International Correspondent, Contributing Writer, Manufacturing Outlook. n