Sustainability
Under the sea I
The deep-sea fl oor is home to billions of tonnes of polymetallic nodules, which contain metals that are key to manufacturing the low-carbon technologies needed to generate clean energy. Elly Earls speaks to Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company, and Benjamin ‘Pietro’ Filardo, founder and CEO of Pliant Energy Systems, about how these deposits can be collected with the greatest effi ciency and the lowest impact on the environment.
t’s often said that we, as a species, know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the depths of our oceans. But for both mining experts and marine researchers this can be a frustrating generalisation, as there are parts of the deep-sea floor that we’re very well informed about. Take the abyssal plains in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a geological submarine fracture zone of the Pacific Ocean. Lying unattached on the ocean floor are billions of tonnes of polymetallic nodules – potato-sized deposits containing rich concentrations of cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese – which were discovered in the 1870s. Scientists have been studying them since the 1960s and we now have high-resolution bathymetric survey data covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of ocean floor.
The Metals Company (formerly known as DeepGreen Metals) plans to collect and produce metals from these nodules – the resource that it alone has so far managed to define – across two of its three separate licence areas. According to the company, the nodules contain 1.6 billion tonnes worth of deposits; that’s enough to build at least 280 million 75KW electric vehicle batteries, a market that is growing exponentially as the planet drives, at speed, towards decarbonisation.
The metals found in polymetallic nodules are also key to manufacturing low-carbon technologies to generate clean energy, as well as the necessary infrastructure to transmit this power around the world. A World Bank report in 2020 found that the production of minerals like cobalt could increase by
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