Sustainability 92% The Metals Company
Of the sediment that is disturbed by The Metals Company’s mining process will remain at the bottom of the sea.
able to lift the resource without touching it, a fundamental departure from what has gone on.” By the end of this year, environmental studies permitting, The Metals Company plans to have a vessel in the Atlantic carrying out trials with the system. In mid-2022, trials are set to take place in the CCZ, and the environmental impacts observed. It then hopes to launch its application to move from an exploration to a production licence in the middle of 2023, before beginning initial small-scale commercial production in 2024.
This also depends on whether the regulations have caught up with the industry by then. In international waters, deep-sea minerals like polymetallic nodules are governed by the International Seabed Authority, a UN body headquartered in Jamaica that is made up of 167 member states plus the EU. Before the pandemic, the hope was that a set of technical and environmental standards known as the Mining Code – which has been in development for over two decades – would have been adopted in 2020. While it has been delayed, Barron is confident the code will have been written into law by the time The Metals Company is ready to start production.
“We want to have minimal contact with the seabed – almost no contact if possible – and that can only be done with small swimming vehicles.”
Benjamin ‘Pietro’ Filardo
The future of ocean mining? Benjamin ‘Pietro’ Filardo is another advocate of polymetallic nodule exploration, who believes the resource can be harvested with even less impact on the environment than The Metals Company plans to make. His company, Pliant Energy Systems, is developing a robotic platform that uses slowly undulating fins instead of rapidly spinning propellers. “Rather than creating jets of fast-moving water for propulsion, our thruster moves large volumes of water slowly,” he explains.
When deployed in large swarms, the autonomous robots Pliant ultimately hopes to develop would work like bees, in comparison with the ‘giant shovel’ approach of the tracked crawlers many mining companies plan to use. “We want to have minimal contact with the seabed – almost no contact if possible – and that can only be done with small swimming vehicles,” he says.
Another advantage of this approach, according to Filardo, is that it’s less risky than using just one large vehicle. “If one robot in the swarm fails, it really doesn’t matter; if one component in the crawler fails, the whole mining operation stops,” he says. Pliant
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also proposes sending the nodules to the ocean’s surface in packets using buoyancy, which it anticipates would be less energy-intensive than a riser system. “Each packet of nodules will require a significant initial energy input, but once it has positive buoyancy, it’s an energy-free ride all the way up to the surface,” Filardo explains.
Reach out and seize the future Pliant’s technology is at a much earlier stage than The Metals Company’s. It has a prototype robot and will begin rapid development of their next-generation system in the summer of 2021 with the aims of improving speed and efficiency, and developing autonomy. But Filardo is realistic about just how much money will be required to get a system like this operating on a large scale. “Developing the AI for this swarm of mining robots won’t be a trivial task,” he says. “And only the prospect of a reward as great as a successful nodule mining operation is likely to fund such a sophisticated programme.” To this end, he has set up the North Atlantic Consortium for Responsible Ocean Mining (NACROM) to raise awareness about, and potentially funding for, the systems he believes are required to achieve nodule mining with minimal environmental harm to the marine ecosystem. However, he’s only too aware that it’s an industry that could get shut down before it even starts because of growing environmental opposition. “If the public puts enough pressure on the politicians, they may stop it from happening,” he says. “Politicians have other things to think about – Covid, pensions, taxes, unemployment. Few have the bandwidth to delve deeply enough into this issue to come around to our way of thinking, which is that – if done right – nodule mining could be crucial to our planet’s future health, rather than a danger to it.”
Another challenge Pliant will face is convincing mining companies to adopt its technology. “They’re already too far down the road with the way they’re doing things,” Filardo acknowledges. “I think their perspective is they need to continue as they started until they’re mining and earning revenues. Then they’ll look more seriously at alternative methods.” In the meantime, the ocean floor remains far more accessible than anything beyond the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, as Filardo stresses, it’s the ideal place to use advanced robotics technology, doing things people can’t easily do in places people can’t easily go. “There may be ten thousand quadrillion [dollars’] worth of metals on Psyche, an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, but it’s out of reach,” he concludes. “Asteroid mining is still sci-fi. But mining nodules from the ocean depths with swarming robots? That’s a technological achievement within reach.” ●
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
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