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The Metals Company subsidiary lifts over 3000T of nodules to sea surface

136 points by bill38 4y ago

metalliqaz 4y ago
Why is the text on that website 3x larger than all the rest of the text on my PC? Who looks at that formatting, nods, and says "yup, ship it!"
devindotcom 4y ago
Not that I have a better solution, but won't this suck up and kill seabottom creatures and denude their habitat?
- eloff 4y ago
  Doesn’t surface mining also do that?
  - SECProto 4y ago
    > Doesn’t surface mining also do that? No, surface mining doesn't "suck up and kill seabottom creatures". :) More sympathetically: yes, surface mining can have habitat loss issues (i.e. land use changes), but the bigger issue erosion and sediment control, the management of which is a major component of any modern mine in a well regulated country. Maybe there are ways to mitigate subsea sediment migration, but they definitely haven't been studied to nearly the same extent as surface issues and mitigations
    - eloff 4y ago
      The sediment migration was part of what was being studied here, so maybe they will mitigate it somewhat. I’m not super optimistic given our mining record on land. Still the deep ocean is mostly a desert, and it’s massive, so I think we can afford to damage it a little. The alternative is land mining, which is also damaging.
- bglazer 4y ago
  Not only that, it also creates an enormous amount of underwater noise which distresses whales and dolphins. Further, it creates plumes of silt and tailings. All of this in a very poorly understood ecosystem. We have no idea what consequences this activity will have.
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    No sound from a machine can come close to 235dB naval sonar pulses. Cetaceans voices can reach 180dB, 40dB more than a jet taking off. A machine may be annoying to cetaceans but it isn't going to kill them. Silt and tailing plumes made by mining aren't going to come close to the silt dumped into the ocean by rivers or disturbed by submarine landslides. I say forge ahead and make corrections as we learn more.
    - JonChesterfield 4y ago
      The ocean was always a desert, right? No animals ever known to live there, even before we set about industrial scale mining in the name of ecology, so no harm done.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  These deep sea species tend to be very slow growing. It could take centuries for a mined section to recover.
- sp332 4y ago
  Yes, but the alternative is having fewer batteries.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    No, the alternative is manufacturers paying a dollar more for a battery made using more careful mining processes. Obviously that's a no go, because then I can't sell $3 "one time use" lithium ion battery packs as a "quick charge on the go" and literally throw away a reusable product.
- hanniabu 4y ago
  But the alternative is less profit, think about the economy!
- billbrown 4y ago
  It's taking place in 4000m deep abyssal zones. Aside from these nodules, there's barely any flora there and even less fauna. They've got a research vessel trailing them measuring all of the effects, which the researchers will publish in scientific journals.[1] I think of it as sifting economic value from seafloor cat litter. [1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...
  - goodsoul 4y ago
    [flagged]
themgt 4y ago
Just found this article with some research from earlier polymetallic nodule mining finding significantly decreased carbon sequestration in the mined areas. Won't be great news if mining the "Planet’s Largest Deposit of Battery Metals" winds up worsening global warming. https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/environment/exploring-effects-of-deep-sea-mining-polymetallic-nodule-extraction-may-cause-long-term-reduction-of-carbon-flow-throughput https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/environment/explorin...
- devindotcom 4y ago
  Ceramics.org vs Metals.co, how surreal.
- elil17 4y ago
  This study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652620338671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) looked at what the actual impact of that carbon release would be. Even if deep sea mining completely destroyed the ability of the sea floor to sequester carbon and it took 100 years to recover, it would only release 0.025 gigatons of CO2. In contrast, if we wanted to get the same metals from the land, it would release 0.065 gigatons of CO2. While there's a good bit of uncertainty in these estimates. Regardless, the impact is dwarfed by the savings from more efficient smelting processes enabled by deep sea nodules, which could save about 1 gigaton of carbon.
  - culi 4y ago
    That's releasing, but what about the impact of the ability to sequester more CO2? Most of soil sequestration estimates are based on some really shaky soil science,[^0] but the oceans are known to be a much more effective means of sequestering carbon [^0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-revolution-climate-change/619611/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-rev...
    - elil17 4y ago
      Oceans are great at sequestering carbon, but that's via dissolved CO2 and ecosystems near the surface (which are not impacted by deep sea mining). The seabed ecosystem plays an ancillary role. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any proposals to sequester carbon in seabed ecosystems. I'm certainly not qualified to analyze the accuracy of a soil science study or the field as a whole. As someone not in that specialty, the figure that jumps out at me is the 40x difference between the impact from ecosystem damage vs. other impacts. Generally that tells me that the potential for ecosystem impacts to nix the climate benefits of deep sea mining is low - it would require that soil science be so wrong that they missed over 90% of the carbon content of the seabed.
georgeecollins 4y ago
I couldn't figure out from this article what a "nodule collection system" is? A submarine, a robot, a big bucket? That's the part I am really curious about if anyone knows.
- jpm_sd 4y ago
  There's a thumbnail in the article that links to a bigger photo of the "collector vehicle". It appears to be a Giant Roomba. https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f4344afd-acde-49aa-af79-5064f934c5fc https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f4344afd-acde...
- billbrown 4y ago
  YouTube channel has good videos.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7N_BtWn6wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7N_BtWn6wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydMJToa2iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydMJToa2iU
spqr0a1 4y ago
Unfortunately this sort of mining has long-term impacts on deep sea ecology. It causes substantial loss of species diversity and activity even 26 years later, with this paper estimating recovery will take at least 50 years for a small test patch. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5922 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5922
- elil17 4y ago
  Things are a little more complicated than that. 1. Surface mining also has environmental consequences which have to be weighed against the costs of deep sea mining. An area impacted by surface mining can recover in just a decade, but it takes intensive environmental restoration efforts on the part of humans (https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/05/mine-remediation.html https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/05/mine-remediation.html). If similar techniques could be developed for deep sea applications, it could reduce the impact of deep sea mining. 2. Researchers are developing robots with advanced propulsion systems which could dramatically reduce the disturbance to sea-floor sediment by mimicking the ways that rays move. (https://interestingengineering.com/culture/new-autonomous-sustainable-robots-could-mine-the-deep-sea https://interestingengineering.com/culture/new-autonomous-su...) Of course, this is still an active area of research, and it would probably take regulation to force deep sea mining companies to adopt these measures. 3. Nodules are much easier to process, reducing the carbon footprint of deep sea mining vs. surface mining by up to 80% for some metals. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652620338671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) This study even tries to account for the secondary effects of mining such as the different impacts that surface and deep sea mining have on carbon sequestered in the ecosystem. 4. Surface mining is more harmful to humans than deep sea mining is because it can leach dangerous chemicals into fresh water supplies. (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/mining-and-water-quality https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...) The effects of deep-sea mining on ocean ecology are much less well understood than the effects of surface mining. While I do think there's good reason to be optimistic about the benefits of deep-sea mining, especially if it can displace surface mining, we shouldn't assume we understand what will happen. I hope the industry continuous to be forced by regulators to move forward cautiously and allow time for environmental studies to take place. edit: These people are trying to build a deep sea miner that doesn't destroy the seafloor: https://impossiblemetals.com/ https://impossiblemetals.com/
janee 4y ago
Article aside, the interface shown top left in the control room pic looks quite polished. Couldn't make out what the program is called...was expecting a more win xp looking UI haha
- oxyboy 4y ago
  Disturbing that the wall of monitors seems to be blocking the exit out of that control room or it’s some really tight crawl space!
grapescheesee 4y ago
I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become. I find it fascinating to watch how ingenious we are, but equally or more terrifying. The ocean is our single life sustaining force.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Darkphibre 4y ago
  I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources. And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.
  - vwoolf 4y ago
    A large part of the reason Phoenix (the greater metro area) is as large as it is is because most of California restricts new housing construction so severely. I'd not live here if it weren't so much more affordable than California. The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.
    - aporetics 4y ago
      Interesting, but that’s just a proximal cause. The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what? Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Oh, I thought this type of mining didn't even exist and was just a cover for that nuclear submarine retrieval
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  It used to be and actually helped to spark the industry because the Intel folks paid for studies and the like to cover their tracks which actually helped contribute to opening up the field!
opwieurposiu 4y ago
It is crazy that there are trillions of dollars worth of these nodules laying around just waiting for someone to pick them up. Congrats to the team that made this work.
- 09bjb 4y ago
  Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.
  - politician 4y ago
    How do you feel about asteroid mining?
    - Arrath 4y ago
      A matter of time until someone (whether negligently or maliciously) screws up the orbital insertion of a packet of minerals or a whole-ass asteroid. "Oops"
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        And it will undoubtedly happen because an american company, after lobbying for fewer regulations, will fail to do the right or necessary thing like "testing their systems" or "being fail safe"
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        Ideally, not that much material would be returned to Earth from asteroids, and certainly not "whole-ass" asteroids themselves. They would be kept far from an Earth-crossing orbit and mined in some safe orbit for their valuable minerals, and then a lot of those would probably be used in space, such as on the Moon, for constructing manufacturing facilities there. Ultimately, we should be trying to move a lot of our "dirty" industries offworld, to places where no one cares much about keeping pristine and where nothing lives. But yeah, The Expanse showed what happens when 1 jerk plays around with asteroid orbits...
Thoreandan 4y ago
Hadn't heard of this, found concerns about the environmental impact & the CEO's previous company Nautilus Minerals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule (2021-Jun) https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-stretches-meaning-of-green-11624554045 https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-...
Darkphibre 4y ago
The metric of "hauling 40 Tesla Model S vehicles up every sixty minutes." is a strange one. A '93 Honda Accord would be divisible to the minute (60/hr). Or even 52lbs/second... Though I suppose those don't sound as flashy. Alternatively, I'd be curious how many tesla batteries in raw materials that equated to per hour.
jez 4y ago
I enjoyed this 3-minute video from The Metals Company YouTube channel a bit better than this press announcement for learning about what this company is and what they're trying to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4azYzQY9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4azYzQY9k
cstross 4y ago
Just as a reminder, the idea of mining deep sea manganese nodules was developed by Howard Hughes' Glomar subsidiary in the 1970s as a cover story for the CIA's Project AZORIAN, a project to build a "deep sea mining ship" (the Hughes Glomar Explorer) that would deploy a sub-surface barge (the HMB-1) with a giant grapple to raise the sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine K-129. As such the scheme had to be "sufficiently plausible bullshit" to withstand scrutiny, while not necessarily needing to be economically feasible. (No, I'm not making this up.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
- yardie 4y ago
  I had science books in middle school that when showing an example of manganese (for the chemical elements section), they included a shot of the Glomar Explorer mining it from the sea floor. That's how thorough the plausibility was to make it into public school textbooks.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    Huh... my textbook in GCSE geography class (early-to-mid-00s) had an illustration of an ROV-style undersea robot harvesting manganese nodules. I wasn't sure how that approach would scale...
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  According to a book on project Azorian whose name I forgot claimed that the CIA hype on deep sea mining was so strong that some universities opened deep sea mining programs and recruited quite few students who were very surprised to discover that they spent years of study as part of the CIA cover story.
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    They did the same for modern art. https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ With similar results.
Mizza 4y ago
What happened to the common heritage of all mankind?[1] How come these fuckers can go and grab them for themselves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_heritage_of_humanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_heritage_of_humanity
- thehappypm 4y ago
  They have a permit issued by an international body
  - pauljurczak 4y ago
    > international body Where some nations are more equal than the others...
  - a_bonobo 4y ago
    Fun fact: the people in that international body (The International Seabed Authority) are very close to the mining industry https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-19/gold-rush-in-the-deep-sea-raises-questions-about-international-seabed-authority https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-19/gold-rush-... >Mining firms have found an ally in Lodge, a 62-year-old British lawyer first elected as secretary-general in 2016 after serving at the ISA since it began operations, according to former authority staffers, activists and scientists. >“I am disturbed by the fact that popular perception of deep seabed mining is increasingly subject to wildly inaccurate and distorted scenarios portrayed by some sections of the media and interest groups,” Lodge said in a 2018 speech to a business group in Hamburg, Germany. “Suggestions that deep seabed mining will inevitably cause large-scale irreversible damage and ecosystem collapse appear to be grossly exaggerated and lack any basis in fact.”
- billbrown 4y ago
  It's covered in many of the documents on the project page[1], specifically the just-released Social Impact Assessment scoping document.[2] There are 168 members of the ISA, including Nauru which sponsors TMC's exploration license. Once the project reaches commercial operation, royalties will be distributed to ISA for division amongst the members or funding related international programs. Maybe look into it even a little before spewing bile? [1] https://metals.co/nori/ https://metals.co/nori/ [2] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...
AceJohnny2 4y ago
An opposite take of the validity of deep sea mining was covered on Real Engineering's youtube channel a couple months ago: https://youtu.be/73mXXJpEjRI https://youtu.be/73mXXJpEjRI
Guthur 4y ago
Lol, this is going to be so much better for the environment, right?
zeristor 4y ago
In the 80s on UK’s Channel 4, there was a series of four films, Oceanus Ecumenicus, that talked about mining ocean floor nodules, Ocean Thermal Energy (OTEC), Saudi Arabia mining silver from the bottom of the Red Sea, I can’t remember what the fourth one was but since the series was sponsored by British Gas I could make a guess. I’d love to see that again, but it doesn’t seem to have found it’s way to YouTube yet.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pugworthy 4y ago
If this was 1974, it would be "..much of it packed into a Soviet submarine..." It's crazy how as a child in that era, I totally bought into the Glomar Explorer being this amazing thing. And 45-50 years later, here we are.
geuis 4y ago
I want to add a comment so people can watch this video about poor folks doing sea mining in Indonesia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA&t=657s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA&t=657s I'm not posting this as a critique of the parent link, just as additional data about this topic. Summary: In many Indonesian islands, there used to be large deposits of tin. Those have mostly been mined out, and sea floor mining has taken over. There are approved commercial companies that do it, but the video shows poor folks who are doing offshore seafloor mining "illegally" in very unsafe conditions. In either case, the practice rips up the sea bed and causes ecology problems. * I quote "illegally" because the system largely sounds like it's powered by bribes to get the right certifications.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  Tin mining brought Indonesia and Malaya an enormous amount of wealth. Unevenly of course, and also much to the parent Anglo-American companies. Look at the scale of this tin mining dredge: https://tt5perak.com/ https://tt5perak.com/ The last preserved, originally one of hundreds. BTW your link is to a very late moment in that video.
lattalayta 4y ago
for more information, there was a podcast episode on the daily about this practice https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/podcasts/the-daily/electric-cars-sea-mining-pacific-ocean.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/podcasts/the-daily/electr...
BasilPH 4y ago
The perspective of the photograph makes me think the collector is the size of a small house. Is this true, or just an optical illusion?
- navane 4y ago
  this is true
pfdietz 4y ago
I want to remind everyone that the reason one might mine manganese nodules is not for the manganese, it's for the lower concentration elements like cobalt and copper. Manganese is very cheap; South Africa has enormous quantities.
pauljurczak 4y ago
I would like to know the average element ratio in the mined nodules. Is it really what they were hoping for?
- billbrown 4y ago
  It's broken down on page 16 in Table 1 in the scoping document (probably quoted elsewhere as well). [1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unethical_ban 4y ago
3000 Teslas!
mojomark 4y ago
If anyone is wondering how people can just destroy natural commons with no recourse, one need only look to the ISA headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica (1.). Sure, they've fully investigated the irreversable ecological repercussions and have taken zero kickbacks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority
- humaniania 4y ago
  Every computer simulation that they created said it would be fine.
- goodsoul 4y ago
  [flagged]
stuaxo 4y ago
This sounds like a disaster for the ecosystem in the sea and especially on the sea bed.
- goodsoul 4y ago
  [dead]
rcgorton 4y ago
rcgorton 4y ago

136 points by bill38 4y ago

Why is the text on that website 3x larger than all the rest of the text on my PC? Who looks at that formatting, nods, and says "yup, ship it!"

devindotcom 4y ago

Not that I have a better solution, but won't this suck up and kill seabottom creatures and denude their habitat?

eloff 4y ago
Doesn’t surface mining also do that?
- SECProto 4y ago
  > Doesn’t surface mining also do that? No, surface mining doesn't "suck up and kill seabottom creatures". :) More sympathetically: yes, surface mining can have habitat loss issues (i.e. land use changes), but the bigger issue erosion and sediment control, the management of which is a major component of any modern mine in a well regulated country. Maybe there are ways to mitigate subsea sediment migration, but they definitely haven't been studied to nearly the same extent as surface issues and mitigations
  - eloff 4y ago
    The sediment migration was part of what was being studied here, so maybe they will mitigate it somewhat. I’m not super optimistic given our mining record on land. Still the deep ocean is mostly a desert, and it’s massive, so I think we can afford to damage it a little. The alternative is land mining, which is also damaging.
bglazer 4y ago
Not only that, it also creates an enormous amount of underwater noise which distresses whales and dolphins. Further, it creates plumes of silt and tailings. All of this in a very poorly understood ecosystem. We have no idea what consequences this activity will have.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  No sound from a machine can come close to 235dB naval sonar pulses. Cetaceans voices can reach 180dB, 40dB more than a jet taking off. A machine may be annoying to cetaceans but it isn't going to kill them. Silt and tailing plumes made by mining aren't going to come close to the silt dumped into the ocean by rivers or disturbed by submarine landslides. I say forge ahead and make corrections as we learn more.
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago
    The ocean was always a desert, right? No animals ever known to live there, even before we set about industrial scale mining in the name of ecology, so no harm done.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
These deep sea species tend to be very slow growing. It could take centuries for a mined section to recover.
sp332 4y ago
Yes, but the alternative is having fewer batteries.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  No, the alternative is manufacturers paying a dollar more for a battery made using more careful mining processes. Obviously that's a no go, because then I can't sell $3 "one time use" lithium ion battery packs as a "quick charge on the go" and literally throw away a reusable product.
hanniabu 4y ago
But the alternative is less profit, think about the economy!
billbrown 4y ago
It's taking place in 4000m deep abyssal zones. Aside from these nodules, there's barely any flora there and even less fauna. They've got a research vessel trailing them measuring all of the effects, which the researchers will publish in scientific journals.[1] I think of it as sifting economic value from seafloor cat litter. [1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...
- goodsoul 4y ago
  [flagged]

themgt 4y ago

Just found this article with some research from earlier polymetallic nodule mining finding significantly decreased carbon sequestration in the mined areas. Won't be great news if mining the "Planet’s Largest Deposit of Battery Metals" winds up worsening global warming. https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/environment/exploring-effects-of-deep-sea-mining-polymetallic-nodule-extraction-may-cause-long-term-reduction-of-carbon-flow-throughput https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/environment/explorin...

devindotcom 4y ago
Ceramics.org vs Metals.co, how surreal.
elil17 4y ago
This study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652620338671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) looked at what the actual impact of that carbon release would be. Even if deep sea mining completely destroyed the ability of the sea floor to sequester carbon and it took 100 years to recover, it would only release 0.025 gigatons of CO2. In contrast, if we wanted to get the same metals from the land, it would release 0.065 gigatons of CO2. While there's a good bit of uncertainty in these estimates. Regardless, the impact is dwarfed by the savings from more efficient smelting processes enabled by deep sea nodules, which could save about 1 gigaton of carbon.
- culi 4y ago
  That's releasing, but what about the impact of the ability to sequester more CO2? Most of soil sequestration estimates are based on some really shaky soil science,[^0] but the oceans are known to be a much more effective means of sequestering carbon [^0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-revolution-climate-change/619611/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-rev...
  - elil17 4y ago
    Oceans are great at sequestering carbon, but that's via dissolved CO2 and ecosystems near the surface (which are not impacted by deep sea mining). The seabed ecosystem plays an ancillary role. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any proposals to sequester carbon in seabed ecosystems. I'm certainly not qualified to analyze the accuracy of a soil science study or the field as a whole. As someone not in that specialty, the figure that jumps out at me is the 40x difference between the impact from ecosystem damage vs. other impacts. Generally that tells me that the potential for ecosystem impacts to nix the climate benefits of deep sea mining is low - it would require that soil science be so wrong that they missed over 90% of the carbon content of the seabed.

georgeecollins 4y ago

I couldn't figure out from this article what a "nodule collection system" is? A submarine, a robot, a big bucket? That's the part I am really curious about if anyone knows.

jpm_sd 4y ago
There's a thumbnail in the article that links to a bigger photo of the "collector vehicle". It appears to be a Giant Roomba. https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f4344afd-acde-49aa-af79-5064f934c5fc https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f4344afd-acde...
billbrown 4y ago
YouTube channel has good videos.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7N_BtWn6wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7N_BtWn6wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydMJToa2iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydMJToa2iU

spqr0a1 4y ago

Unfortunately this sort of mining has long-term impacts on deep sea ecology. It causes substantial loss of species diversity and activity even 26 years later, with this paper estimating recovery will take at least 50 years for a small test patch. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5922 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5922

elil17 4y ago
Things are a little more complicated than that. 1. Surface mining also has environmental consequences which have to be weighed against the costs of deep sea mining. An area impacted by surface mining can recover in just a decade, but it takes intensive environmental restoration efforts on the part of humans (https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/05/mine-remediation.html https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/05/mine-remediation.html). If similar techniques could be developed for deep sea applications, it could reduce the impact of deep sea mining. 2. Researchers are developing robots with advanced propulsion systems which could dramatically reduce the disturbance to sea-floor sediment by mimicking the ways that rays move. (https://interestingengineering.com/culture/new-autonomous-sustainable-robots-could-mine-the-deep-sea https://interestingengineering.com/culture/new-autonomous-su...) Of course, this is still an active area of research, and it would probably take regulation to force deep sea mining companies to adopt these measures. 3. Nodules are much easier to process, reducing the carbon footprint of deep sea mining vs. surface mining by up to 80% for some metals. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652620338671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) This study even tries to account for the secondary effects of mining such as the different impacts that surface and deep sea mining have on carbon sequestered in the ecosystem. 4. Surface mining is more harmful to humans than deep sea mining is because it can leach dangerous chemicals into fresh water supplies. (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/mining-and-water-quality https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...) The effects of deep-sea mining on ocean ecology are much less well understood than the effects of surface mining. While I do think there's good reason to be optimistic about the benefits of deep-sea mining, especially if it can displace surface mining, we shouldn't assume we understand what will happen. I hope the industry continuous to be forced by regulators to move forward cautiously and allow time for environmental studies to take place. edit: These people are trying to build a deep sea miner that doesn't destroy the seafloor: https://impossiblemetals.com/ https://impossiblemetals.com/

janee 4y ago

Article aside, the interface shown top left in the control room pic looks quite polished. Couldn't make out what the program is called...was expecting a more win xp looking UI haha

oxyboy 4y ago
Disturbing that the wall of monitors seems to be blocking the exit out of that control room or it’s some really tight crawl space!

grapescheesee 4y ago

I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become. I find it fascinating to watch how ingenious we are, but equally or more terrifying. The ocean is our single life sustaining force.

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Darkphibre 4y ago
I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources. And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.
- vwoolf 4y ago
  A large part of the reason Phoenix (the greater metro area) is as large as it is is because most of California restricts new housing construction so severely. I'd not live here if it weren't so much more affordable than California. The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.
  - aporetics 4y ago
    Interesting, but that’s just a proximal cause. The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what? Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

Oh, I thought this type of mining didn't even exist and was just a cover for that nuclear submarine retrieval

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
It used to be and actually helped to spark the industry because the Intel folks paid for studies and the like to cover their tracks which actually helped contribute to opening up the field!

opwieurposiu 4y ago

It is crazy that there are trillions of dollars worth of these nodules laying around just waiting for someone to pick them up. Congrats to the team that made this work.

09bjb 4y ago
Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.
- politician 4y ago
  How do you feel about asteroid mining?
  - Arrath 4y ago
    A matter of time until someone (whether negligently or maliciously) screws up the orbital insertion of a packet of minerals or a whole-ass asteroid. "Oops"
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      And it will undoubtedly happen because an american company, after lobbying for fewer regulations, will fail to do the right or necessary thing like "testing their systems" or "being fail safe"
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Ideally, not that much material would be returned to Earth from asteroids, and certainly not "whole-ass" asteroids themselves. They would be kept far from an Earth-crossing orbit and mined in some safe orbit for their valuable minerals, and then a lot of those would probably be used in space, such as on the Moon, for constructing manufacturing facilities there. Ultimately, we should be trying to move a lot of our "dirty" industries offworld, to places where no one cares much about keeping pristine and where nothing lives. But yeah, The Expanse showed what happens when 1 jerk plays around with asteroid orbits...

Thoreandan 4y ago

Hadn't heard of this, found concerns about the environmental impact & the CEO's previous company Nautilus Minerals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule (2021-Jun) https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-stretches-meaning-of-green-11624554045 https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-...

Darkphibre 4y ago

The metric of "hauling 40 Tesla Model S vehicles up every sixty minutes." is a strange one. A '93 Honda Accord would be divisible to the minute (60/hr). Or even 52lbs/second... Though I suppose those don't sound as flashy. Alternatively, I'd be curious how many tesla batteries in raw materials that equated to per hour.

jez 4y ago

I enjoyed this 3-minute video from The Metals Company YouTube channel a bit better than this press announcement for learning about what this company is and what they're trying to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4azYzQY9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4azYzQY9k

cstross 4y ago

Just as a reminder, the idea of mining deep sea manganese nodules was developed by Howard Hughes' Glomar subsidiary in the 1970s as a cover story for the CIA's Project AZORIAN, a project to build a "deep sea mining ship" (the Hughes Glomar Explorer) that would deploy a sub-surface barge (the HMB-1) with a giant grapple to raise the sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine K-129. As such the scheme had to be "sufficiently plausible bullshit" to withstand scrutiny, while not necessarily needing to be economically feasible. (No, I'm not making this up.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

yardie 4y ago
I had science books in middle school that when showing an example of manganese (for the chemical elements section), they included a shot of the Glomar Explorer mining it from the sea floor. That's how thorough the plausibility was to make it into public school textbooks.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  Huh... my textbook in GCSE geography class (early-to-mid-00s) had an illustration of an ROV-style undersea robot harvesting manganese nodules. I wasn't sure how that approach would scale...
oldgradstudent 4y ago
According to a book on project Azorian whose name I forgot claimed that the CIA hype on deep sea mining was so strong that some universities opened deep sea mining programs and recruited quite few students who were very surprised to discover that they spent years of study as part of the CIA cover story.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  They did the same for modern art. https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ With similar results.

Mizza 4y ago

What happened to the common heritage of all mankind?[1] How come these fuckers can go and grab them for themselves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_heritage_of_humanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_heritage_of_humanity

thehappypm 4y ago
They have a permit issued by an international body
- pauljurczak 4y ago
  > international body Where some nations are more equal than the others...
- a_bonobo 4y ago
  Fun fact: the people in that international body (The International Seabed Authority) are very close to the mining industry https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-19/gold-rush-in-the-deep-sea-raises-questions-about-international-seabed-authority https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-19/gold-rush-... >Mining firms have found an ally in Lodge, a 62-year-old British lawyer first elected as secretary-general in 2016 after serving at the ISA since it began operations, according to former authority staffers, activists and scientists. >“I am disturbed by the fact that popular perception of deep seabed mining is increasingly subject to wildly inaccurate and distorted scenarios portrayed by some sections of the media and interest groups,” Lodge said in a 2018 speech to a business group in Hamburg, Germany. “Suggestions that deep seabed mining will inevitably cause large-scale irreversible damage and ecosystem collapse appear to be grossly exaggerated and lack any basis in fact.”
billbrown 4y ago
It's covered in many of the documents on the project page[1], specifically the just-released Social Impact Assessment scoping document.[2] There are 168 members of the ISA, including Nauru which sponsors TMC's exploration license. Once the project reaches commercial operation, royalties will be distributed to ISA for division amongst the members or funding related international programs. Maybe look into it even a little before spewing bile? [1] https://metals.co/nori/ https://metals.co/nori/ [2] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...

AceJohnny2 4y ago

An opposite take of the validity of deep sea mining was covered on Real Engineering's youtube channel a couple months ago: https://youtu.be/73mXXJpEjRI https://youtu.be/73mXXJpEjRI

Guthur 4y ago

Lol, this is going to be so much better for the environment, right?

zeristor 4y ago

In the 80s on UK’s Channel 4, there was a series of four films, Oceanus Ecumenicus, that talked about mining ocean floor nodules, Ocean Thermal Energy (OTEC), Saudi Arabia mining silver from the bottom of the Red Sea, I can’t remember what the fourth one was but since the series was sponsored by British Gas I could make a guess. I’d love to see that again, but it doesn’t seem to have found it’s way to YouTube yet.

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pugworthy 4y ago

If this was 1974, it would be "..much of it packed into a Soviet submarine..." It's crazy how as a child in that era, I totally bought into the Glomar Explorer being this amazing thing. And 45-50 years later, here we are.

geuis 4y ago

I want to add a comment so people can watch this video about poor folks doing sea mining in Indonesia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA&t=657s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA&t=657s I'm not posting this as a critique of the parent link, just as additional data about this topic. Summary: In many Indonesian islands, there used to be large deposits of tin. Those have mostly been mined out, and sea floor mining has taken over. There are approved commercial companies that do it, but the video shows poor folks who are doing offshore seafloor mining "illegally" in very unsafe conditions. In either case, the practice rips up the sea bed and causes ecology problems. * I quote "illegally" because the system largely sounds like it's powered by bribes to get the right certifications.

emmelaich 4y ago
Tin mining brought Indonesia and Malaya an enormous amount of wealth. Unevenly of course, and also much to the parent Anglo-American companies. Look at the scale of this tin mining dredge: https://tt5perak.com/ https://tt5perak.com/ The last preserved, originally one of hundreds. BTW your link is to a very late moment in that video.

lattalayta 4y ago

for more information, there was a podcast episode on the daily about this practice https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/podcasts/the-daily/electric-cars-sea-mining-pacific-ocean.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/podcasts/the-daily/electr...

BasilPH 4y ago

The perspective of the photograph makes me think the collector is the size of a small house. Is this true, or just an optical illusion?

navane 4y ago
this is true

pfdietz 4y ago

I want to remind everyone that the reason one might mine manganese nodules is not for the manganese, it's for the lower concentration elements like cobalt and copper. Manganese is very cheap; South Africa has enormous quantities.

pauljurczak 4y ago

I would like to know the average element ratio in the mined nodules. Is it really what they were hoping for?

billbrown 4y ago
It's broken down on page 16 in Table 1 in the scoping document (probably quoted elsewhere as well). [1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scoping-Dec_2022.pdf https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...

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unethical_ban 4y ago

3000 Teslas!

mojomark 4y ago

If anyone is wondering how people can just destroy natural commons with no recourse, one need only look to the ISA headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica (1.). Sure, they've fully investigated the irreversable ecological repercussions and have taken zero kickbacks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority

humaniania 4y ago
Every computer simulation that they created said it would be fine.
goodsoul 4y ago
[flagged]

stuaxo 4y ago

This sounds like a disaster for the ecosystem in the sea and especially on the sea bed.

goodsoul 4y ago
[dead]

rcgorton 4y ago