Battery materials dot the ocean floor. Should we go get them?
To transform our world to address climate change, we need a lot of stuff: lithium for batteries, rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium for wind turbines, copper for, well, basically everything.
We're not exactly going to run out of any of these key materials: the planet has plenty of the resources we need to build clean energy infrastructure. But mining is a huge and complicated undertaking, so the question is whether we can access what we need quickly and cheaply enough. We won't run out of key ingredients for climate action, but mining comes with social and environmental ramifications.
Take copper, for example. Demand for the metal in energy technologies alone will add up to over a million tons every year by around 2050, and it's getting harder to find good spots to dig up more. Companies are resorting to mining sites with lower concentrations of copper because we've exhausted the accessible higher-concentration spots we know about.
Because of the impressive array of metals they contain, at least one company has likened each nodule to a battery in a rock. That's why over the past decade, companies have begun to explore the possibility of commercial mining operations in the deep sea, mostly in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
The ocean could be a new source for copper and other crucial materials. Seabed mining could happen in a few different ways, but the stars of the show are potato-sized lumps called polymetallic nodules. These nodules dot the ocean floor in some places, especially in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which lies between Hawaii and Mexico in the Pacific Ocean.
Nodules form naturally over millions of years as trace elements in seawater get deposited onto small objects nestled together on the ocean floor, like bone fragments or shark teeth, and slowly grow. They contain manganese, cobalt, copper, and nickel, which are all used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles today, as well as a bit of iron and titanium and trace amounts of rare-earth metals and lithium.
Because of the impressive array of metals they contain, at least one company has likened each nodule to a battery in a rock. That's why over the past decade, companies have begun to explore the possibility of commercial mining operations in the deep sea, mostly in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
But not everyone is on board with this use of the ocean, because a lot of life is found in and around these nodule fields, from corals and sea cucumbers, to worms and dumbo octopuses, not to mention all the tiny creatures we haven't discovered yet. Scientists have also raised questions about what will happen when the mining operations kick up sediment: plumes could disturb wildlife or even the natural carbon storage beneath the seabed.
Governing international waters is a complicated business. For deep-sea mining, there's a UN group in charge, called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which was founded in 1994 and is based in Jamaica. The ISA has been developing a mining code for commercial operations, but some companies want to get things going already.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07, @01:36PM (5 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian [wikipedia.org]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining [bbc.co.uk]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 07, @02:44PM (4 children)
[...]
In other words, they popularized it and then unintentionally sabotaged it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday April 08, @03:41AM (3 children)
I was in school when this originally dropped, and did a report on this project. I also built a little "nodule hunter" robot out of an RC car and a cat litter scoop.
My lesson learned at the time was "Never run a cat litter scoop through a sandbox at a playground". The "robot" picked up my little charcoal briquette just fine, but it also picked up WAY more "nodules" than I expected. Apparently, cats are quite fond of sandboxes. :( Ick.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday April 08, @03:58AM
I would suggest that little kids are fond of sandboxes too. But their nodules tend to be bigger.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 08, @04:03AM (1 child)
That's pretty clever. Certainly would be less environmentally damaging than dredging a bunch of ocean floor.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday April 09, @04:50PM
Have a look at https://deme-gsr.com/what/patania-ii/ [deme-gsr.com] It's not far off from dredging. They pressure wash the sea floor and scoop up the mineral lumps left behind. I don't have data to support this, but my intuition is this will mechanically destroy any benthic organisms that can't get out of the way, liberate any toxic compounds that have settled in the mud, and pull the literal bottom out of the food web down there. I hope I'm wrong.
I grok the last thing they need is a non-expert like me telling them how to do their jobs; That said, I very much hope some areas are being set aside for the future.
(Score: 3, Touché) by MIRV888 on Friday April 07, @04:18PM (2 children)
The three elemental metals that are naturally ferromagnetic are iron, cobalt, and nickel.
I'm getting a patent on an undersea magnet that picks up magnetic things.
I'll be back in a minute.
I'm gonna be rich.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07, @05:08PM (1 child)
Hah... good luck, I'm filing a similar patent, but will include "via an app" in my application. I'm going to be richer! INNOVATION!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07, @07:09PM
Please make sure to file that patent under your name, "Anonymous Coward" -- that way I can claim my share of the royalties!
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 08, @02:55AM (7 children)
We destroyed the land and air and now about to destroy the sea; in the name of saving the planet, no less.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday April 08, @04:08AM (6 children)
I looked out my window and there was land and air. So no destruction, sorry.
And what do polymetallic nodules have to do with energy, clean or otherwise? Are we going to burn them for power?
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 08, @04:20AM (5 children)
I know you are trolling, but I'll reply anyway.
The US cut all the trees on it's territory. Every single one except some sequoias and such on high altitudes.
SF would be build off those trees and burn every 25 years so it could be built again. Many times.
Yes, you still have land and air but simply because others did not do what the US did; yet. Note that they have to if they want the same or better income and they will.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 08, @04:23AM (3 children)
Forgot to mention. We just poisoned all the ground water by fracking. The next war will be over water as we don't have any any more. Guess with whom.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday April 08, @07:05AM (2 children)
The only place that the US could conceivably get water from that might be cheaper than desalination would be Canada. Are you really going to go to war with Canada for water?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday April 10, @04:17AM (1 child)
Yes, that's what I did indeed imply.
The project of moving water from Canada is 50 years old at least but so far Canadians were able to resist it.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nijhuis/pipe-dreams-the-forgotten-project-that-could-have-saved-amer [buzzfeednews.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday April 11, @07:51AM
Would it not be easier to just break that Great Lakes agreement that stops their water being used outside their watershed?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday April 08, @05:49AM
In a reply, you wrote in addition
You do realize neither is true, right? For example, Wikipedia is of the opinion [wikipedia.org] that the US originally had 4 million square km of forest, about 30% of it had been chopped at the worst point (to 2.8 million sq km), and now it's up to about 3.3 million sq km. Doesn't sound even close to "cut all the trees" to me.
And fracking only covers a small part of the US, even if it somehow thoroughly poisoned the ground water where it is practiced (which incidentally it does not), the great majority of the US wouldn't be affected because fracking doesn't happen there.
I bet China would compare very unfavorably right now to the entire developed world of 1970 which is the high point of pollution throughout the developed world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday April 08, @03:01AM (1 child)
I am not a tree hugger save-the-whales nutter. I'm a resource-consuming omnivore and grok that the stuff I consume has to come from somewhere.
That said, deep sea mineral nodules are in their highest concentrations around hydrothermal vents. You can't swing a dead cat around a hydrothermal vent without discovering a new species previously unknown to science.
Could we please take a moment to stop and consider which vents it makes sense to protect before we start bulldozing the others? It would be nice if we could also take a wee sliver of the profit from the ones we raze to fund studying the survivors. Heck, it's probably worth it to study the ones we destroy too, just to understand how those ecosystems recover (if at all).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 09, @05:29AM