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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.

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