Battle Over Deep-Sea Mining Takes on New Urgency as Trial Run Winds Down
A Canadian company is testing mining equipment in the Pacific Ocean in its quest for metals needed for electric vehicles. Environmentalists oppose the mining, which could begin in 2024.
Source: New York Times | By Eric Lipton
Nov. 3, 2022
Mining companies and environmentalists have long been at loggerheads over proposed projects in the Pacific that would provide new sources of metals for electric vehicles but threaten pristine underwater ecosystems.
Now the clash is taking on new urgency as a two-month test mission by a Canadian company comes to an end and international regulators debate whether to allow full-scale mining as early as 2024.
The pressing timetable has generated protests, including before the test ship launched from Rotterdam this year. More recently, officials from around the world — including Chile, Costa Rica, the Federated States of Micronesia, France, Germany, New Zealand and Spain — have called for a moratorium or a delay.
“There should not be any mining until and unless we can ensure the effective protection of the marine environment,” said Georgina Guillén-Grillo, who serves as Costa Rica’s delegate to the International Seabed Authority, an agency affiliated with the United Nations that has jurisdiction over deep-sea mining and is now meeting in Jamaica to hammer out proposed environmental requirements and decide next steps.
The test is being conducted by the Metals Company, a Vancouver-based firm, in the remote seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. A 130-person crew has been working around the clock since late September on a retrofitted oil-drilling ship, extracting what will be a total of 3,600 tons of rocks loaded with manganese, nickel and cobalt from 2.7 miles beneath the ocean’s surface.
The $250 million expedition, which also includes a companion ship with dozens of marine scientists equipped with underwater audio, video and water-quality-monitoring devices, is meant to evaluate the environmental impact of mining in waters so unknown that many plants and animals are not classified by science.
It is also the company’s first full-scale trial in the Pacific Ocean of its mining equipment. The machinery sucks up the rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, like a vacuum cleaner and feeds them through a series of riser pipes to the surface.
Anthony O’Sullivan, the company’s chief development officer, said that while the scientists’ work was not yet finished, mud and silt disturbed by the mining had not dispersed in ways that some feared could harm marine life.
“The seafloor plume is hugging the seafloor,” he said.
Still, the company’s own consultants acknowledged it was too early to draw any conclusions.
“There is really a lot of data to analyze before you can make an assessment of environmental impacts,” Thomas L. Johnson of DHI Group, hired by the Metals Company to study the sediment plume, said in a telephone interview from the expedition site.
The test mission has experienced some mishaps, including electrical wiring failures related to deep-sea pressures and the dumping of rock fragments and sediment-laden wastewater from the ship, according to documentation reviewed by The New York Times. A spokesman for the Metals Company said the discharge resulted from a surge in water flowing through a sediment-scrubbing device and “was not deemed to be a significant hazard or risk to the environment.” The test is scheduled to conclude by the middle of this month.
Matthew Gianni, a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said small amounts of dispersed sediment and the simple removal of the rocks — which are a habitat for many seabed organisms — may be enough to disrupt life.
“If you don’t even know species that are out there and how they react to this sediment, then you can’t make any assertion of what the biological impact of plumes will be,” he said. “Put the evidence on the table. Submit it to independent scientists to scrutinize and see if their assertions hold up. Until then, we cannot even talk about moving ahead on large-scale mining.”
The agency, with a staff of about 50, did not send a full-time employee on the expedition, and instead sent a trainee, a Metals Company official said. A Seabed Authority spokeswoman said the agency had tracked the project closely, sent staff to inspect the ships before they left and would do a follow-up visit when they returned “to verify that all offshore operations have been conducted in full compliance with relevant regulatory requirements.”
The test is taking place about 1,100 miles southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico, using remotely operated vehicles because the water is so deep and the pressure so intense it is generally too complicated to send workers. Marine historians say it is probably the largest ever collection of seabed nodules from the mineral-rich area, which is known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
The Metals Company initially plans to collect 1.3 million wet tons of the potato-size nodules a year and eventually ramp up to about 11.3 million tons. The excavation effort would last about two decades and generate as much as $31 billion in profits, according to company projections.
The metals in the seabed areas it controls, the company says, is enough to power 280 million electric vehicles, equivalent to the entire fleet of cars in the United States.
The company controls three of the 22 exploratory contractors granted authority by the agency to search for metals and gather environmental data, with the licenses covering approximately 580,000 square miles of the ocean floor. The company has announced it intends to submit an application next year to begin full-scale mining, which requires separate approval.
The Metals Company’s partners include Allseas Group, a Swiss-based offshore oil-industry contractor, Maersk, a Danish shipping company, and Glencore, a Swiss mining company, which has a deal to buy copper and nickel extracted from the nodules.
More than a decade ago, the Metals Company, through a corporate entity whose assets it now owns, recruited the tiny Pacific island of Nauru as a sponsor for mining in areas that were set aside by the Seabed Authority for poor or developing nations. The test mining is taking place in one of those areas.
The Times reported in August that the firm’s executives received key information from the Seabed Authority beginning in 2007, giving a major edge to their mining ambitions. The agency provided data identifying some of the most valuable seabed tracts, and then set aside the prized sites for the company’s future use, according to interviews and hundreds of pages of emails, letters and other internal documents. The company and the agency said there was nothing improper about the arrangement.
More recently, Nauru, on behalf of the Metals Company, invoked a provision that would compel the Seabed Authority to settle on environmental rules by next July. If the agency misses the deadline, the company can submit an application to begin mining, even without the regulations in place.
A growing number of Seabed Authority member states have pressed the agency’s governing body to block the maneuver and slow down the march toward full-scale mining.
“Current knowledge and available science is insufficient to approve deep-seabed mining until further notice,” the German government said in a statement this week as the Seabed Authority meetings started in Kingston, Jamaica.
Ms. Guillén-Grillo, the delegate from Costa Rica, has argued that the authority is not likely to finish its work by July 2023, and therefore should delay consideration of a mining application by the Metals Company.
“The authority has a big workload ahead,” she said. “We are dealing with the common heritage of mankind.”
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Eric Lipton is a Washington-based investigative reporter. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant. @EricLiptonNYT
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 4, 2022, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Deep-Sea Mining Trial Nears End, and Debate Swells. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
