Will Deep-sea Mining Yield an Underwater Gold Rush?
While
different vent systems contain varying concentrations of precious minerals, the
deep sea contains enough mineable gold that there's nine pounds (four
kilograms) of it for every person on Earth, according to the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National
Ocean Service.
At today's gold prices, that's a volume worth more than $150
trillion.
Can an Industry Be Born?
But a fledgling deep-sea mining industry faces a host of
challenges before it can claim the precious minerals, from the need for new
mining technology and serious capital to the concerns of conservationists,
fishers, and coastal residents.
The roadblocks are coming into view in the coastal waters of
Papua New Guinea, where the seafloor contains copper, zinc, and gold deposits
worth hundreds of millions of dollars and where one company, Nautilus Minerals, hopes to launch the
world's first deep-sea mining operatio
Last
year, the Papua New Guinean government granted the Canadian firm a 20-year
license to mine a site 19 miles (30 kilometers) off their coast, in the
Bismarck Sea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The company plans to mine the
site, known as Solwara 1, by marrying existing technologies from the offshore
oil and gas industry with new underwater robotic technologies to extract an
estimated 1.3 million tons of minerals per year.
Samantha Smith, Nautilus's vice president for corporate social
responsibility, says that ocean floor mining is safer, cleaner, and more
environmentally friendly than its terrestrial counterpart.
"There are no mountains that need to be removed to get to
the ore body," she says. "There's a potential to have a lot less
waste ... No people need to be displaced. Shouldn't we as a society consider
such an option?"
But mining a mile below the sea's surface, where pressure is 160
times greater than on land and where temperatures swing from below freezing to
hundreds of degrees above boiling, is trickier and more expensive than mining
on terra firma.
Nautilus says it will employ three remote-controlled
construction tools that resemble giant underwater lawn mowers to cut the hard
mineral ore from the seafloor and pump it a mile up to a surface vessel.
That vessel would be equipped with machinery that removes excess
water and rock and returns it to the mining site via pipeline, an effort aimed
at avoiding contaminating surface waters with residual mineral particles. The
company would then ship the rock to a concentrator facility to remove the
mineral from the ore.
An Unknown Impact
At least that's the plan.
But the ocean floor is still a mysterious place, seldom visited
by humans, compounding the known difficulties of working at sea.
Scientists weren't even able to prove the existence of
underwater hydrothermal vents until 1977.
That year, an expedition of geologists, geochemists, and
geophysicists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Oregon State
University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and
the U.S. Geological Survey proved
their existence in the Galapagos rift with cameras and a manned dive in the
submersible Alvin.
The animal-rich landscape and huge temperature shifts came as a
surprise.
"When the first people went down there, and saw these things,
they had no idea," says Mike Coffin, a geophysicist and executive director
of the Institute for Marine and
Antarctic Studies at the
University of Tasmania in Australia. "The submersible had windows that could
melt at temperatures lower than what was coming out of the vent."
And, in contrast to the desert-like landscape that the
scientists expected, it turns out that hydrothermal vents are home to lots of
life: snails the size of tennis
balls, seven-foot-long (two-meter-long) tubeworms,
purple octopi, and all-white crabs and skates.
It turns out that, far from the sun's life-giving light, the
same minerals now eyed by the mining industry support lively communities.
Now some researchers fear that deep-sea mining could jeopardize
those communities by altering their habitats before the systems have been fully
explored and explained.
"We're still just grappling with this reality of
commercialization of the deep sea," says Cindy Van Dover, director of Duke University's Marine Lab.
"And scrambling to figure out what we need to know."
Van Dover was aboard the first manned biological exploration of
the hydrothermal vents in 1982 and was the only woman to pilot the submersibleAlvin.
Despite the strides that have been made in understanding the deep sea, she
says, it's still a young science.
When it comes to the impacts of mining on any deep-sea life,
"there's a particular type of research that needs to be done," she
says. "We haven't yet studied the ecosystem services and functions of the
deep sea to understand what we'd lose.
"We don't yet know what we need to know," Van Dover
says.
Conservationists also say they want to know more about the vent
ecosystems and how they will be mined.
"The whole world is new to the concept of deep-sea mining,"
says Helen Rosenbaum, coordinator of the Deep
Sea Mining Campaign, a small activist group in Australia that campaigns against
mining the Solwara 1 site.
"This is going to be the world's first exploitation of
these kinds of deep resources. The impacts are not known, and we need to apply
precautionary principles," she says. "If we knew what the impacts
were going to be, we could engage in a broad-based debate."
Rosenbaum says some communities in Papua New Guinea are raising
concerns about the sustainability of local livelihoods in the face of mining
and say they aren't receiving the information they need.
The Deep Sea Mining Campaign is especially concerned about the
impacts of toxic heavy metals from the mining activities on local communities
and fish. The group claims that the Environmental
Impact Statement for the Solwara
1 mine hasn't effectively modeled the chemistry of the metals that would be
stirred up by the mining process or the ocean currents that could transport
them closer to land.
"The Solwara 1 project is scheduled to be a three-year
project," Rosenbaum says. "The mining company thinks they'll be out
of there before there are problems with heavy metal uptake. We might not
see the effects for several years."
A report released in November 2012 by the Deep Sea Mining
Campaign ties exploratory pre-mining activities and equipment testing by
Nautilus to "cloudy water, dead tuna, and a lack of response of sharks to
the age-old tradition of shark calling."
Shark calling is a religious ritual in which Papau New Guineans
lure sharks from the deep and catch them by hand.
Another concern for Deep Sea Mining Campaign: Papua New Guinea's
government has a 30 percent equity share in the minerals as part of a seabed
lease agreement with Nautilus.
The company and government are currently involved in a lawsuit
over these finances, but the Deep Sea Mining Campaign says government
investment could compromise its regulatory efforts.
Mining for Dollars
Nautilus' Smith insists that the company has taken a careful and
transparent approach. "The biggest challenge the company faces," she
says, "is funding."
Fluctuations in commodity pricing, the high cost of working
underwater, and financial disagreements with the Papua New Guinean government
have been setbacks for Nautilus.
Last November, the company announced that it had suspended
construction of its mining equipment in order to preserve its financial
position. Smith says that Nautilus is still committed to finding a solution for
its work in Papua New Guinea, and that the company could still extract minerals
as early as 2014.
Other companies around the world are also exploring the
possibility of mining throughout the South Pacific.
The International
Seabed Authority, which regulates use of the seafloor in international waters
in accordance with the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea, has
granted 12 exploratory permits to various governments—including India, France,
Japan, Russia, China, Korea, and Germany—in roughly the last decade.
And as long as the promise of riches await, more firms and
governments will be looking to join the fray.
"It's economics that drive things," says the
University of Tasmania's Coffin. "Tech boundaries are being pushed, and
science just comes along behind it and tries to understand what the
consequences are. Ideally, it should be the other way around."
Post a Comment