Seafloor Mining Will Make Rich Countries Richer

Greetings, all! Thank you as always for continuing to read along, even when I ramble on about moon mining. I thought this would be a great opportunity to dive deeper into the more likely scenario we are facing, one of seafloor mining. So, let’s dive!

            I had never heard of the International Seabed Authority prior to this year. It is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1994, intended to oversee the equitable division of natural resources in international waters. On the surface it’s a worthwhile mission statement that blends environmental responsibility and social justice. But in practice, it appears as though environmental safeguards will be ignored while rich, exploitative countries continue to oppress, marginalize, and disadvantage poor, exploited countries. We’ll get to that shortly.

            First, a quick rundown of the science. There are four known major manganese nodule deposits in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, totaling more than 14.5 million square kilometers (roughly 1.5 times the surface area of Europe) (https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/). These nodules range in size from a baseball to a soccer ball and contain manganese, iron, nickel, titanium, copper, and cobalt.

Manganese nodules can form through chemical precipitation and diagenetic growth. Similar to cloud formation where water vapor condenses upon a nucleus (a bit of dust, dirt, smoke, or salt), metals can precipitate out of sea water and condense around a nucleus (such as a bit of shell, tooth, or bone), growing into a metal-rich nodule. Limestone is another example of chemical precipitation, but calcium carbonate, rather than metal, is the resulting precipitate. In contrast, diagenetic growth occurs when metals dissolved in the pore spaces between sediment clasts condense around a nucleus on the ocean floor, rather than precipitating out of the water column.

There are billions of tonnes of ore contained in these deposits. The fact that these nodules lie in international waters complicates mining and production. Power has always been distributed unevenly geographically and throughout time. As we shift away from oil—a source of economic, political, and energetic power that has historically been sought by the U.S., Europe, and other countries wealthy enough to wage war for the fossil fuel—we will now see that future power lies in metals. If the world is going to run on electricity, the countries that mine the most metal and produce the most batteries will continuing dominating the global arena.

Enter the International Seabed Authority. As it turns out, the Metals Company, a private organization out of Australia, has already been granted permission to begin exploratory mining and data collection, without clearly building a pathway for smaller, poorer island countries to economically benefit from the extraction (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-15/deepsea-mining-pacific-ocean-nauru-metals/101438478). It is possible that Nauru, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, and other interested developing nations may come to benefit from a partnership with the Metals Company, but it seems likely that yet again, colonialism will win. The remnants of the British Empire will probably continue to disproportionally rake in the dough as they rake the ocean floor free of nodules and sea life simultaneously.

And we will gladly give them our dollars. Or mine the ocean ourselves! Americans will always choose cars over marine life. I am 100% in support of the electric buses and electric chargers in Weaverville, and I applaud the Office of Education, Chamber of Commerce, and all partners who made it possible. But everything comes at a cost.

In this county, it takes more than a year to get a CEQA license for a 10,000 square foot cannabis garden. The quantity of environmental analyses required to get a truly accurate picture of potential impacts to the ocean and the creatures therein would take upwards of five years, minimum. Seafloor dwelling organisms like worms, clams, and sea cucumbers will get killed in the direct area of extraction. Sediment clouds could bury benthic organisms further away, or worse yet, shade out plankton closer to the surface. Once the base of the food chain is gone, the ocean will die.

But of course, everyone who understands the climate crisis knows the ocean is getting hotter and more acidic. Moon mining or seafloor nodule extraction, all for the luxury of private vehicles.

What a wild ride.