I dunno, is it cost-effective yet?
From the brainiacs at IEEE Spectrum, January 6:
The three-year voyage of the HMS Challenger was one of the greatest scientific expeditions in an era with quite a few of them. The former warship departed England in 1872 with a complement of 237 on a mission to collect marine specimens and also to map and sample huge swaths of the seafloor.
The ship traveled 125,936 kilometers, and the mission succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its backers. It discovered 4,700 new marine species, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Mariana Trench. Its bathymetric data, collected laboriously with a weighted line, was used to make the seafloor maps that guided the route of an early transatlantic telegraph cable. But the crew’s most puzzling discovery was made on 18 February 1873, while dredging an abyssal plain near the Canary Islands. The dredging apparatus came up loaded with potato-size nodules; subsequent analysis found them to be rich in manganese, nickel, and iron. It was the first of many such hauls by the Challenger crew, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, where the dredges sometimes yielded a briny jumble of the dark-gray nodules, shark’s teeth, and, oddly, whale ear bones.
Quite soon, we’re all going to find out whether existing technology can be used to harvest those nodules and recover their valuable metals at costs competitive with more traditional mining techniques. And the timing is hardly coincidental. Over the next decade, a great shift to electric vehicles is expected to drive up demand for cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese—all key metals in lithium-ion batteries, and all present in minable quantities in seafloor nodules. Later this year, as David Schneider notes in “Deep-sea Mining Stirs Up Muddy Questions,” a Canadian firm called the Metals Company (formerly DeepGreen Metals) plans to begin testing a nodule-collecting system comprising a seafloor robotic collector vehicle connected to a mammoth surface support ship.
It has been a long and twisty road from the initial discoveries by the Challenger. Nearly 90 years would go by before somebody would propose collecting the nodules on a mass scale. In the December 1960 issue of Scientific American, the mining engineer John L. Mero argued his case and triggered a substantial spending spree as oceanographic research institutes sought, successfully, to verify his claims.
A patch of Pacific seabed could supply key metals for batteries for 250 million electric vehicles
Still, it would be another half century before a startup, Nautilus Minerals, would try to make a go of large-scale deep-seabed mining. Nautilus’s idea wasn’t to collect nodules, though, but rather to cut and drill into crusty deposits near deep-sea thermal vents, where valuable metals and minerals have been deposited over many millennia. But after raising some US $686 million, building three large undersea drilling robots, and securing a license to mine the seabed off Papua New Guinea, Nautilus went bankrupt in November 2019. When it ceased operations, it hadn’t mined any metal ore at all....
....MUCH MORE, including many more first-rate links.
Some of our previous posts on going deep (there are many):
January 2021
"With valuable metals on the ocean floor, speculators are circling"
January 2021
"Norway eyeing deep-sea metal mining future instead of oil"
April 2021
Wannabe Seabed Miner DeepGreen Has Entered Into An Agreement To Come Public Via SPAC (SOAC)
I know the FT's natural resources editor is not very impressed with either the economics of seabed mining or the PR techniques employed when some corporates said nein to the idea of said mining....
July 2021
"Why Nauru Is Pushing the World Toward Deep-Sea Mining"
