Nauru’s seabed is tempting for the mining industry – Gwynne Dyer

A month ago it seemed just another story in which the combination of an unscrupulous mining company and the desperation of poor people causes devastating damage to the environment, while the control institutions, slow and distant, prove unable to carry out their calculation. . Instead, it turned out that the story is more complicated, with a positive side.

The mining company in question is called DeepGreen, but it is transforming into a larger entity simply called The Metals Company. The poor people, on the other hand, are the eleven thousand inhabitants of Nauru, a small independent island in the western Pacific with no means of subsistence.

The slow and distant institution, finally, is the Jamaican International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body created in 1994 under the United Nations Law of the Sea to regulate seabed activities in areas which are beyond the remit of national laws (i.e. a large part of the planet).

The submarine nodules
In principle, the main function of the ISA is to control the mining activity on the seabed, but until now the institution has limited itself to issuing permits for exploration operations. Nobody wanted to start a real extraction process, and the process was so slow that today, 27 years after the founding of the ISA, the rules that should govern deep-sea extraction have not even been defined.

But the advent of innovative technologies, from phones and computers to batteries for electric vehicles and energy conservation, has created huge demand for cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese and rare earth minerals that abound in some areas of the seabed. in the form of “polymetallic nodules” the size of a potato.

And so DeepGreen has started a collaboration with the president of Nauru, Lionel Aingimea, whose country has exclusive control over 75,000 square kilometers of seabed in the North Pacific area of ​​Clarion-Clipperton (between Hawaii and Mexico). On June 30, DeepGreen communicated to ISA its intention to begin mining in the area within the next two years.

The secret of this strategy is that if the ISA does not complete its “mining code” within two years of the request (which progresses extremely slowly), the country in question will have the right to proceed with the mining activity respecting the rules in force, substantially non-existent.

It is difficult not to be in solidarity with Nauru. The area of ​​the island is comparable to that of Manhattan up to 42nd Street, and 80 percent of the land was exploited for the extraction of phosphates by the colonial powers during the twentieth century. Almost half of the population has type 2 diabetes. 70 percent of the population is obese. There are no more valuable resources on the island.

DeepGreen, which is based in Vancouver, Canada, inspires less compassion. The company is all about making a ton of money, but CEO Gerard Barron knows how to sweeten the pill. “The world is experiencing a big push towards moving away from fossil fuels. What do we need for this process? To build many batteries “.

Barron calls polymetallic nodules “batteries in a rock”, but things aren’t that simple. The nodules must be sucked out of a slurry of seafloor sediments using gigantic underwater machinery at depths of up to 6,000 meters, then separated by sediment and seawater (which is pumped back to the bottom).

Abyssal plains
“We plan to filter just five centimeters of underwater sediment and re-deposit 90 percent of it on the seabed,” Barron says. “We believe that most of the sediment will reposition itself within hours or at most days, in a radius ranging from tens to thousands of meters from the place of origin.”

“The sediment in the abyssal plain contains fifteen times less CO2 than what is found on Earth, and there are no known phenomena that could cause carbon to be released into the atmosphere from four kilometers deep,” he adds. In short, Barron is not the classic ruthless and insensitive mining entrepreneur.

But why is Barron in such a hurry? Maybe because DeepGreen is putting Metals on the Nasdaq stock index and needs to show “progress” on potential investments? In any case, the initiative of DeepGreen and Nauru has sparked a strong negative reaction. This means that mining is unlikely to start before the next five years, which is likely to become ten.

More than 450 marine science and policy experts from 44 countries responded to the initiative by signing a statement calling for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea mining. Larger Nauru countries found in the region, such as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji, have proposed a precautionary break for mining.

Large companies potentially interested in seabed metals such as BMW group, Volvo and Samsung Sdi (the latter both manufacturers of batteries) have stated that they will not accept seafloor minerals in their production chain until their environmental sustainability will be demonstrated.

Sooner or later we may be forced to extract minerals from the seabed, because the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy will require a large dose of these metals. But there is still a lot of room for improvement in the recycling business, and if that is not enough we will still have to evaluate the environmental costs of operations on the seabed compared to those on Earth.

A moratorium is certainly the right way to go. DeepGreen has inadvertently realized this possibility.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)