Sustainability
nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies. Over three billion tonnes of them will be needed to deploy the wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage, required for a future with no more than a 2°C temperature increase. The quantity of these metals in circulation also needs to increase significantly to make the circular economy possible, given the lack of available material for recycling.
The Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron argues that collecting these deposits from the ocean floor is far less impactful than many existing mining practices on land. “In Indonesia, the number one nickel-producing country, there is between 20–30kg of biomass per square metre. Whereas the CCZ is the biggest desert on planet Earth; it just happens to be 4,000m underwater,” he says. “If we had our time again and if we were to take a planetary perspective, we would carry out extractive industries in the parts of the planet where there is the least life, not the most life.”
Environmentalists, however, say we don’t have enough information to make that claim yet. In April, Greenpeace activists protested against The Metals Company’s current research study in the Pacific, holding banners reading ‘Stop Deep Sea Mining!’. They said that the deep ocean is one of the planet’s least understood and least explored ecosystems, which is home to significant biodiversity and acts as a vital carbon sink. Barron doesn’t entirely disagree. “I totally understand why environmentally-concerned people want to take a ‘wait a moment’ approach,” he says. “I did the same. But the window for combatting climate change is very narrow, and we must look to the data and science to provide us with the answers as to where the lowest-impact sources of these metals are found.”
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
The Metals Company is committing more than $75m to its environmental impact study. “We have to understand the impacts and how we can mitigate [them],” Barron says. “It’s only then that you can compare it against the known impacts of land mining and answer the question: which one do we want? There is no perfect solution. You can’t say we want to stop relying on fossil fuels and move to greener technologies unless you face the fact that you need to build a lot of batteries. And to build the batteries, we will need mountains of these metals.”
Minimise disturbance to the sea floor Another argument The Metals Company and others like it make is that the mining – or as they prefer to term it, collection – of these nodules can be done in a less invasive and more energy efficient way than traditional mining operations. “Polymetallic nodules lie around like golf balls on a driving range,” Barron explains. “Using our harvesting system, we can collect them while only disturbing the top 5cm of the sea floor.”
The system is a tracked vehicle that operates using the ‘Coanda effect’, directing a water jet in parallel with the sea floor to uplift the nodules, which will then be separated from most of the sediment at the sea floor. They’re then pumped up to the production vessel using a riser pipe. The Metals Company says that around 92% of the sediment that is disturbed will remain at the bottom of the sea and the remaining portion, which enters the riser, will be returned later at an ecologically optimal depth. This is currently being determined by a group of independent scientists. “We want to collect these nodules with the greatest efficiency and the lowest impact,” Barron says. “When you compare it with terrestrial mining – we’re
Pilant Energy Systems plans to send the nodules to the ocean’s surface in packets using buoyancy, which it believes would require less energy than a riser system.
500%
The potential increase in the production of minerals like cobalt, by 2050, to meet the growing demand for clean, sustainable energy technologies.
World Bank 25
Pilant Energy Systems
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