I’m not convinced. planet-tracker says that refinement method, not ore source, determines carbon intensity. But deep sea nodules are richer than ore on land, which means they use less energy per unit of refined product. This is born out by the actual planet-tracker report: they themselves show that the highest estimates for sea-based carbon intensity are lower than all but the lowest estimates for land-based carbon intensity. Sea-based mining only looks bad if you compare the worst assumptions about sea-based mining with the best assumptions about land-based mining.
Planet-tracker also raises the concern that sea-based mining could theoretically disturb carbon which is sequestered on the ocean floor. However, there isn’t much circulation between the top of the ocean and the depth at which sea-based mining would occur, so this effect may be minimal or non-existent.
Additionally, the study neglects to consider how increased availability of critical metals could accelerate green technology adoption. Even if sea-based mining was somewhat worse for the environment on a kg co2/kg metal basis, it could be beneficial if it made EV batteries more economical.
I’m not saying that we should give companies unfettered access to the ocean floor. But planet-tracker’s call for a moratorium on deep sea mining is counterproductive.
The best course of action is to allow for a limited amount of mining in the Clarion Clipperton Zone so that scientists can study the resulting sediment plums. Advocates should be pushing the International Seabed Authority and governments to fund more research, not trying to block mining altogether.
Your third paragraph, assumes that ocean ores would only be used for carbon negative products, which unless we want to lie to each other we know it’s not true and we will use them to make the frame of the iPhone or the trim of a Tesla, or some random shape in the name of art. Then we’ll be “oh, dang, that didn’t fix anything AND it added MORE carbon not only in the atmosphere but to the ocean”
you can make this assumption if you believe refined metals are fungible.
If making refined metals cheaper, it will also mean more of it available for green tech (that currently might be too expensive to produce to replace fossil fuels). On the other hand, more available metal ores do not make fossil fuels more economical (also an assumption, but i think this is fairly true).
Therefore, on the whole, this would make green tech more competitive with fossil fuel tech.
Please. The International Seabed Authority has been almost entirely captured by the same mining interests that are trying to perversely argue that only by destroying the last effective carbon sink on the planet can can we save the planet. After all, the only reason we had to kill almost every whale in the world in the nineteenth century was because we needed all that oil for lamps forever, since there was no prospect of a better lighting technology ever being developed. We will manage to find or replace these metals without hoovering the deep ocean.
We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources" that are already exposed or naturally exposed. And some of those mienral resources are ones that can create benefits to the planet, such as carbon dioxide removal. One example is a process using hyperaccumulator plants to draw up nickels from the soil, known as phytomining.
Full disclosure, I have been working for the last two years developing this technology, but combining enhanced weathering of olivine for carbon dioxide removal, with nickel phytomining in order to solve two problems at once. Leaving stealth finally after two years, look out next week for an announcement... Will post here.
> We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources"
I look forward to hearing how your new technology multiplies current global production of the myriad of metals to the historically unprecedented levels required to enable a transition to renewable energy technologies. If it can’t then you’ll need to define “need” in your statement more carefully.
I can definitely clarify that further, but to restate it, there are new sources and new technologies that can allow us to meet the requirements for the transition.
For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries).
And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products.
There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite.
With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional).
For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel.
The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet.
Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective...
And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils.
This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.
Good math, the nickel per hectare target in the field and in the literature through cultivars is around 400 kilograms per hectare (.400 tonnes per Ha).
We are using natural serpentine soils that have previously been farmed and are idle now due to low productivity and the natural presence of metals like nickel, and which is the native habitat of these plants.
However, to keep your wheat analogy, we currently farm 220 million hectares of wheat globally. If you divide run the back of the napkin math on that, you would produce 88 million tonne of nickel per year.
We don't need that scale, because the total global nickel production per year is around 3 million tonnes, meaning you would need "only" around 7.5 million hectares to yield that. However, nickel demand is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years, meaning we would need 15 million hectares, which is somewhere around the land footprint of oats and rye today, and half that of cotton, rapeseed, or sunflowers.
What do you think of developing electrochemistry to e.g. recover silicon, magnesium, and iron from the very common olivine?
Yeah, the other two aren't used much today, but they seem to be superior in specific strength to steel, and mostly not used because they're expensive today (and because silicon is brittle).
Similarly, sea salt has many elements of interest; there's a lot of sodium but afterwards a good variety. Desalination plants already concentrate these up.
A serious concern is how mining operations won't really be observed as much when they're working at the bottom of the sea. Blowing up a mountain may be subject to witnesses - at least satellite imagery for very rural areas. On the other hand, who can observe the actions of deep sea mining? There won't always be an enormous oil slick to let the public know that someone has been reckless down below.
> On the other hand, who can observe the actions of deep sea mining?
It should be trivial to observe drilling and excavation vessels loitering, and ore carriers leaving the site.
Not to mention that mining claims will have to be registered somewhere. (And if you don't, someone else will observe you excavating, and register their own claim on your site, and start digging alongside you. You may get a postcard and a thank-you note for the prospecting legwork you've done for your competitor.)
Mining has an incredible footprint of manpower and machinery. You can't keep it secret.
Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded. Eventually, the ecology will go back to normal. Meanwhile, a monstrosity like Los Angeles will remain a massive concrete eye sore for centuries.
> Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded.
New pits opened within the last two decades probably .. but possibly in ways that can be dodged.
Older pits nearing the end of 50 or 70 year life spans .. unlikey.
These are often "sold" to cut out companies that have no real assets to speak of and soon go bankrupt .. leaving the former owners in the clear.
Eg:
Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, Faro Mine is now the site of one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation projects in Canada. The 25 square kilometre mine site located in south-central Yukon on traditional territory of KaskaNations was abandoned in 1998 and has since been in care and maintenance.
In 2022, we were contracted by Public Services and Procurement Canada on behalf of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to lead the team developing the remediation plan design and quality assurance support services.
ie. Private resource extraction and profits .. public (tax payer | indigenous communities) bears the cost of cleanup and toxins.
It's the same with offshore rigs in marine environs being abandoned for the public purse to deal with.
In theory it shouldn't be happening and bonds should have been held in escrow, in practice many western countries (New Zealand, Australia, elsewhere .. ) are seeing projects ending with no remediation.
Missed the edit window, apologies for the additional peer addendum.
There are hundreds of thousands of examples of abandoned mines in dire need of reclaimation, btw ... in one state of one single country:
Extensive mining has occurred in Western Australia since the mid-1800s resulting in tens of thousands of abandoned mine features across the Western Australia.
There's a program to very slowly deal with as many as possible using money taxed from current and future minesites .. but this is underfunded and overwhelmed.
It's a similar story in South Africa, other African states, China, Mongolia, Russia, former USSR satellites, Canada, USofA, etc.
Dunno whether S&P (peer link) still do abandoned mine GIS data .. we did before we sold that to them.
No, it won't. Remediation of these areas usually involve planting back a fraction of the biodiversity that was there before, and usually cloned from the same genetic stock, making the new plants more of a monoculture and susceptible to disease and less adaptable to environmental changes.
That's the plants.
In the meantime, all the animals were pushed out of that large area (I've never seen a small mine), and then either killed their neighbors in the (assumed) adjacent ecosystem, or were killed by them. Great.
Next you'll be telling us the remediated areas are actually better than what it was before (and in my anecdotal experience some mining companies not only say exactly this, but commission studies to prove it).
They might be better. This is opposed to say, any metropolitan area on earth, where there is no attempt to restore prior conditions at all. I think your argument is essentially an ad-hominem that asserts without evidence that mining companies are evil. I find this a bigotted point of view.
My point is that the permanent disturbance of urbanization should be much more concerning than temporary disturbances.
The climate impact of mining (for commodities other than fossil fuels) isn't trivial, but it's not a big deal in the greater scheme of things.
About 4-7% of global emissions are from mining (which doesn't include petroleum extraction), but the vast majority of that is fugitive methane emissions from coal mining. Excluding that, only 1% of global emissions are from mining [1].
Most of those emissions are from operating mining machinery, and these are addressable in the same way that emissions in other sectors are addressable - electrifying machinery, using zero emission sources for that electricity.
I am always surprised when I find others don't just assume that undersea mining is more impactful.
To me this fact feels like a given considering that is such a complex operation and the sea is such a delicate environment.
Of course its great to have data to back up what we know... but I'm always surprised that we have to go so far out of our way to back up what should be intuitive.
Well, obviously nobody is going to mine undersea for the sake of mining undersea. If someone is going to go to the bother there must be some advantage that compensates for the difficulty. Maybe the ores are richer, or you don't have to dig as deep.
The ore is sitting right there, in coalesced lumps, on the floor for core green energy metals, and there's a general acceptance that the orders of magnitude involved over the next 3 decades require getting them.
I don't mind the discussion on it the past couple days, god knows wherever I get information from isn't the one blessed source, but I am worried about HN's instinctual "from first principles" reactions to undersea mining. Made me wince a little bit when I saw the post you're replying to say "I am always surprised when I find others don't just assume that undersea mining is more impactful."
I really appreciated you gently pointing out there's other smart humans on this and they likely have considered things like the environment.
Yep and it’s one of the rare parts of the earth that has been relatively undisturbed, so bringing industrial operations there is obviously (if you’re paying attention) going to have unforeseen adverse effects. The entire planet’s biological origin started there and it’s a region we don’t yet thoroughly understand. Mass scraping of the surface for cobalt and nickel nodules is the very definition of fuck around and find out.
Yes, it would make things worse, especially if it comes right after. You wouldn't think "well chemo was already terrible so smoking probably won't make it worse".
You may be right, but it is not obvious (in the case of the sea floor), especially because industrial fishing is so devastating. "Worse" is not enough information, for example if it is "slightly worse" at a point were it's under the variability of the destructing action of fishing. The benefit for the energy transition is to take into account too.
It's worth investigating, in any case. I'm not advocating for taking action before getting the results of such study, though! It is important to be careful.
The only crushing argument that I would admit at this point is: "industrial fishing should not exist in the first place".
Why so much focus on climate? Sure, it affects humanity directly, but we're not the only species on Earth.
What about the ecological impact of deep sea mining? What about the cascade through connected ecosystems, which we know so little about? Yes, it eventually will indirectly affect humanity too.
This kind of anthropocentrism is exactly the problem. We should be equally concerned about the fauna and flora with which we share our planet.
Is there a possibility here that mining could actually have a positive impact on biodiversity?
I've read that creating artificial habitats can positively impact local fish and coral populations. Is it possible that the mining could be done in such a way that it would intentionally create these habitats as a side effect?
Is 'deep-sea mining' a euphemism for 'releasing methane hydrates'? Because that amounts to, releasing sequestered carbon with a potential to exceed the world's oil supplies by 6X. And a lot of it will be incidental methane, which is worse than simple CO2 by some multiple?
We're going to need exponentially more metals of all varieties to build all the green tech to save the environment, and they have to come from somewhere. If deep sea mining makes economic sense then let's do it!
Now, if deep sea mining only makes economic sense because misguided policy prevents land based mining for the same materials, then sure let's revise the policy instead.
But we need to de-carbonize. If there's any industry that should get a pass on carbon emissions it's mining for industrial metals.
In my country, the party that proclaims the end of the world due to climate change (note how it is no longer just „global warming“) shut off the last remaining nuclear power plants, increasing lignite consumption.
Holding conflicting POVs at the same time is not a challenge for these people.
They aren't conflicting points of view... because these people don't care about the climate at all. If they did, they'd be all for:
- transitioning dirty fuels to natural gas
- transitioning natural gas to electric
- nuclear power
- economic growth (green solutions are expensive and only rich people care about the environment)
- dense cities
But as you point out, they cherry-pick only some of these.
The reason is simple... they believe in one or both of two things:
- getting elected
- anti-humanism
The medieval Christian belief in an inherently wicked humanity (original sin) has been replaced by a modern anti-development, there-should-be-fewer-of-us mindset.
There is no “save the environment”. Simply can't be done.
150 species go extinct every day. There's no “saving the environment” that accounts for even a tiny fraction of that relentless genocide.
The only effective strategies to in any way ameliorate our environmental impacts are deeply unpalatable to the vast majority of people: less people, less consumption.
Yes and in the meantime sea creatures that rely on sight will starve, and the ocean will absorb more heat from the sun. This will further speed up its destruction while causing more catastrophic weather events on the surface.
Calm down with the hyperbole. Catastrophic weather events, my lord.
Concern for the planet and climate is a worthy cause and ought not to be discredited by obvious nonsense like this. Extreme reactionary climate conservatism is ultimately self-defeating, much like it's less sexy social conservatism cousin.
Sea floor mining will happen at 200m - 6500m deep. The recently granted exploration license for the Clarion-Clipperton zone is at 4000-5500m deep. There's very little life that deep, and certainly no sunlight to get absorbed by murkier water.
But as there's no way to prevent sediment from polluting large areas of the sea, the depth at which mining occurs is irrelevant. And companies will mine at whatever depths make money.
Still, it's nice to just dismiss it as hyperbole instead of thinking we need to take serious action to prevent further damage to our planet.
Planet-tracker also raises the concern that sea-based mining could theoretically disturb carbon which is sequestered on the ocean floor. However, there isn’t much circulation between the top of the ocean and the depth at which sea-based mining would occur, so this effect may be minimal or non-existent.
Additionally, the study neglects to consider how increased availability of critical metals could accelerate green technology adoption. Even if sea-based mining was somewhat worse for the environment on a kg co2/kg metal basis, it could be beneficial if it made EV batteries more economical.
I’m not saying that we should give companies unfettered access to the ocean floor. But planet-tracker’s call for a moratorium on deep sea mining is counterproductive.
The best course of action is to allow for a limited amount of mining in the Clarion Clipperton Zone so that scientists can study the resulting sediment plums. Advocates should be pushing the International Seabed Authority and governments to fund more research, not trying to block mining altogether.