Can Deep Sea Mining Meet the World’s Critical Mineral Demand?

Found over 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, polymetallic nodules may hold the key to powering the future. In this episode, Dr. Mark Luther, Director of the Ocean Monitoring and Prediction Lab at USF and President Elect of the International Marine Mineral Society, joins us to explore how deep seabed mining could help meet global demand for critical minerals like cobalt, manganese, and iron.

• What is deep seabed mining, and how does it compare to land-based mining?
• What kinds of minerals are harvested—and why is cobalt so vital for battery safety and energy transition?
• How are these resources collected from the seafloor, and what are the environmental risks, including sediment plumes and disruption of deep-sea ecosystems?

Dr. Luther shares insights on how close we are to commercial operations, including updates from the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), and why the Cook Islands could potentially meet all global battery mineral needs for the next 30 years. He also explains the ongoing development of the international mining code, the role of the International Seabed Authority, and how the U.S might  be signaling new deep sea mining ambitions through recent executive orders.

What investments and policies should the U.S. prioritize now to stay competitive in deep sea mineral access? And can we mine the ocean responsibly without repeating the mistakes of land-based extraction?

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🌐USF College of Marine Science
🌐USF Center for Maritime and Port Studies
🌐International Marine Mineral Society

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Transcript

Unknown: 1:40

I Luther and thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Good to be here. So, I'm sure most of us are familiar with what traditional land based mining is, but could you help us understand what deep seabed mining is a deep seabed mining, actually compri. rises several different minerals, the most prolific or most. abundant of these minerals are called polymetallic nodules. They're just little round balls that sit on the bottom of the ocean, just sitting there on the surface. They're various sizes, depending on where they form, from about the size of a Swedish meatball up to the size of a cantaloupe, and they form over 10s of millions of years, from just the minerals that are concentrated in the deep ocean waters that slowly precipitate out over time to form these things. And so for those we don't even like to call it mining. It's more extraction, because all you basically have to do is go pick them up, and the devices that are being designed to harvest them are based on potato harvesters. They look like combines, and you see pictures in the Midwest wheat fields that just crawl around on the bottom and rake these things up and put them in baskets or shoot them up a vacuum. That was gonna be my question. Is it like a vacuum that just kind of crawls along the bottom of the ocean floor? There's several different designs. Some are more vacuum based. Others like, I say, the particular group that we're working with has designed one that, again, is just a big rake. It rakes them up and sticks them in a basket, and the basket, when it's full, gets pulled to the surface. But there's other types of deep sea minerals as well that are being exploited, or at least There were the ones that they first explored for exploitation. Polymetallic crusts are basically made out of the same materials, but it's a hard crust that forms on the slopes of sea mounts and mid ocean ridges that actually do have to be like Jack hammered up off of the bottom, and massive sulfide crusts are similar in that they're more akin to traditional surface mining, where there's some sort of a device that digs them up off the bottom. They're not typically buried. They're still sitting right at the surface of the deep ocean floor, but they have to be physically extracted. That makes sense. So it sounds like there are three different main types of deep sea mining, if I'm if I'm correct, what types of minerals would come out of the like, what types of minerals are we mining from the ocean floor or one of these crevices or mountain ranges, if you will? They're all we consider critical minerals. The most valuable one is cobalt, but there's also nickel, copper, manganese, iron. They originally discovered back in the late 1800s they called them found in the eastern Pacific Ocean were primarily comprised of iron and manganese. But the ones that are the most valuable right now are the ones that are really high concentrations of cobalt, because Cobalt is fairly scarce in land based minerals, but it's it's fairly abundant in these deep sea mineral deposits. Cobalt is very important today in a lot of our electric vehicle technology, our cell phones, things like that too. So Correct, that's the primary usage of them right now is that Cobalt is the most expensive piece of or component of an electric battery, whether it's for a cell phone or an electric vehicle or the Tesla wall in your garage or whatever, for solar systems. And if you try to make a cheaper battery, it's usually because you skimp on the cobalt. And if you skimp on the cobalt, those are the batteries that blow up. So in fact, there was a young man, his father is a good friend of mine, that was killed in St Petersburg a few years ago when a vape pen that had a cheap, low cobalt battery and it blew up in his face and it killed him and set the house on fire. So, and there was a case just a few months ago in New York City, where an E bike shop in Manhattan, a bike erupted in flames and burned down an apartment building killed several people. So yeah, be very wary of cheap, cheap electric batteries, because the only way to make them cheaper is to skimp on the cobalt. Yeah, that, you know, very real, real concern there, and kind of building on that, how much of the global demand for critical minerals like cobalt or copper could deep seabed mining realistically meet compared to the land resources? The estimates are that almost all of our needs for these critical minerals could be met by deep sea mineral deposits. Land based mining is never going to go away, but if it was at scale the way we think that it can be. And I say we, I'm also president elect of the International marine mineral society, although I'm speaking on my own behalf and not on the behalf of the society, it's estimated that the Cook Islands alone could supply all of our critical battery needs for the next 30 years. Oh, wow. And the bigger issue is that the land based sources of these minerals are one they're harder to get to because you got to dig off a lot of overburden to get to them. They're typically lower in concentration in a lot of these minerals, particularly cobalt, and they're typically in places that are politically unstable and controlled by perhaps unfriendly nations. The deep sea mineral deposits, particularly in the Cook Islands, are about 10 to 100 times the concentration of cobalt as these land based minerals as well. So those are there are many considerations, but yeah, that makes sense, and at this time, there are no commercial scale deep sea mining operations that are currently going on. With that in mind, how close are we to a commercial deep sea mining operations, and then what steps would need to take place in order for that to happen, there have been some test mining or test collection operations in the eastern Pacific Belgium company called GSR, the division of a big marine construction company Demi. They designed a commercial scale collector vehicle, and they run it around part of the what's called the Clarion Clipperton zone, and have collected nodules in fairly large quantities that could be scaled up tomorrow if we had the environmental regulatory structures in place. They collected a lot of data on what the actual impacts of these deep sea mineral extraction activities are, and it was much less than than had been feared. There's still obviously going to be destruction of deep sea ecosystem habitat, but the far field effects were much, much lower than and had been feared. One of those biggest effects is you're stirring up sediment in the proposed so called mining code, or the environmental regulations that will govern future scalable deep sea mineral extraction, there's equal square kilometers left undisturbed for every square kilometer that you are disturbing or extracting. And the fear was that the sediment stirred up by those collection activities would drift over the preserved areas and smother the ecosystems there. That didn't happen, the sediments settled out of the water column much more quickly than some of the theoretical considerations had thought was possible. So that's what I was going to ask. Because I know you had mentioned one of the ways to vacuum up, for lack of a better term, these polymetallic modules. There seems to be a plume that comes off the back end of that too, so that, you know, they'll pull up the module nodules, and then all of that debris will create, like a debris field, if you will, correct and in fact, a lot of the originally proposed technologies were based on deep sea oil field technologies, deep sea oil and gas operations, and they typically use what's called a riser. It's basically just a big tube that goes all the way down to the bottom, and they pump fluid up the riser, the fluid carries the nodules with it, but it also carries a lot of sediment with it. Then when it gets to the surface, to the collector vessel or the control vessel, then you got to separate all that sediment from the nodules. The nodules are fairly fragile, so they get cracked up as they're bouncing around the inside of this big metal tube as well. So then you've got to dispose of all that sediment that you sucked up from 5000 meters depth. Four to 5000 meters is where these things are typically found, and that was one of the biggest pollution things that were possible is that plume. They're talking about jetting it down maybe a few 100 meters and releasing it into the water column, and from there, the ocean currents could carry it for miles and miles in any direction, depending on how strong the currents are. And that's kind of how I got involved in this, because I measure and model ocean currents and and what those currents are transporting, be it sediment or biological matter or whatever. So that brings me kind of my next question, is there like a an equivalent to an oil spill that could happen with deep sea mining, not in the terms of of large scale environmental impacts? You know, we worked a lot on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there are still lingering effects from that almost 15 years later. Now, actually, we just had the 15th anniversary. It was August or April, 20, and oil is very toxic. These sediments are not typically toxic. The only real environmental damage is that they'll blanket other ecosystems and perhaps smother it. And so there's, I say, there's not a lot of toxicity in the mineral collection itself. There's some of these nodules have very low levels of radioactivity, but they've been able to determine that it's not a real concern. The radioactivity is low enough that you can shield it easily and it's not going to cook anybody. So that's that's the biggest problem is the what happens with these sediment plumes, and in addition to the direct impacts of the collector vehicles on ecosystems, because there's not a lot of life down there, but there is some, and people say that we haven't studied it enough. Well, we're hosting the 53rd annual underwater minerals conference in St Pete Beach this fall, and so we've been looking at for at least 53 years. And in fact, we've skipped a few years. So it's more like 60 years that people have been looking really hard at this stuff, but the technology to really understand these deep sea marine ecosystems has not really existed until fairly recently, and so that's that's part of the big hold up is making sure that we really understand what's going on down there with the biota, And how can we mitigate the damage to those deep sea ecosystems and extract these minerals in as minimally destructive a way as possible? Absolutely. I know a lot of land based mining operations are very toxic. Have a lot of, you know, horrible effects for not only the flora and fauna, but the people in the area too. So that absolutely makes sense. I know you had mentioned that there was a mining code of ethics. Who establishes that and where? Who enforces that, if you will? Well, there couple of different bodies depending on where the minerals are being extracted, if it's in what we typically call in. National waters, or the area beyond national jurisdiction, it's the part of the deep sea, the deep ocean, that's outside of any individual nation's control. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the seas, UNCLOS, as we call it, every coastal nation has a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone around their continental shells or their borders. And where that 200 mile limit starts depends on the geology and geomorphology of the ocean bottom around a nation, but it's typically 200 nautical miles from the edge of the what we ever define as the shoreline. And that can be contentious, because different nations EEZ overlap each other, and so there has to be treaties to determine where you draw that line. But a vast portion of the ocean is outside of any individual country's jurisdiction, and that's and international maritime law. That's just known as the area, for short. And under the UN Convention on the Law The Seas was established the International Seabed Authority, which is headquartered in Jamaica, for some reason, I'm now a representative of the International marine mineral society. To that body, I haven't had a meeting yet. I just was moved into this role, but they have established a mining code. They've been at this for 20 years, and they still haven't established a definitive mining code. They have a draft version of it. It's on their website. If you just look up the International Seabed Authority, it's all there, but it hasn't been formally adopted yet, and certain nations keep dragging their feet on it. They they're either small nations, small island nations, typically that have fairly large eezs and are opposed to any disturbance of the deep sea floor, or there's certain larger nations, China is, is the main one. China has, has snapped up a lot of the licensed areas. Isa has, has granted licenses to different nations to explore their deep sea mineral deposits in the the area. And China has taken up the vast Well, a large portion of those, it's, I think they have, oh, eight to 10 licenses out of 33 that have been granted. I have to look up the exact number. It needs to pop off the top of my head. But if, if this code of conduct was a formally published and ratified, if you will. Would that open the door to commercial scale deep sea mining? Do you think? Yes, there's several other developments that are going on that may make that whole thing moot. There was a provision in the isas charter that said that they had to establish this mining code by a certain date. Well, that date has passed, and the country of Nauru, who has partnered with the company called the metals company, a Canadian based company, they're one of the most advanced in all of this. They have invoked a clause that says you have to issue exploitation licenses because you're past that deadline that was in your charter, so you're in violation. So they're basically saying you've lost your right to regulate us. We're going to do whatever we want. And secondary to that, the metals company has set up a US subsidiary. The US has never signed on to the UN Convention on the Law of the seas, so we're not even represented at the ISA. We're not eligible to get a license from the ISA to explore any of these areas beyond national jurisdiction ourselves. But there's an obscure at least it was obscure until a few weeks ago. US law passed in the early 1980s it basically said the US has sovereignty over the areas beyond national jurisdiction that have not already been claimed by someone else, and basically we can do what we want in those areas. And so the metals company has invoked that and is basically proposing to thumb their nose at the ISA and go after some of these mineral deposits that they are already licensed by the ISA to explore. That was going to be one of my questions. I know in April, at the end of April of. An executive order was signed stating unleashing America's offshore critical minerals and resources. I was going to ask, did you think this order hinted that we might join the ISA? But from what you're saying, like it might be a moot point. Every president since George H W Bush has signed on to the UN Convention of the law of the seas, but the US Senate has never acquiesced to that. I forget the exact language. They don't call it ratifying the treaty, but basically saying that, yes, the President is allowed to sign that treaty, and it's in our own national interest to sign this treaty because it establishes formally the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone, and even extensions to that, if you have extended continental shells, as Russia has tried to claim in the in the Arctic. But there are certain members of the Senate who are ultra nationalist in their their political bet and feel that signing on to this, UNCLOS would give up our sovereignty over the seas, and have always blocked it. And it only takes one or two senators to block something like that in this in under the rules of the Senate. So that has gone on since Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, back when I was in college and grad school. So under this, this US law, though, the US is basically claiming that, or these US based companies are claiming that we can just go ahead and do what we want in these areas where there isn't already some license block from the ISA. Compounded on that is that we have extensive EEZ areas in the Pacific Ocean, around Guam and Midway and American Samoa and places like that that are potentially chock full of these minerals as well. So we just had a conversation with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management last week about how we might encourage or accelerate exploration of those zones. Right now, there are no US regulatory structures in place that would incentivize any commercial operators to go and explore these areas, because there's no guarantee that if they find big deposits of these things, that they'll have rights to them. It's like the gold rush, and people can jump your claim because there's there's no way to actually establish an exclusive claim to whatever you might find. So there's rule making underway right now, basically an extension of what's called the Outer Continental Shelf act that established the rights for oil and gas drilling within our EEZ to if you find oil and gas deposits, then they're yours. You can stake claim to them. And so they're trying to get that extended to also cover deep sea mineral deposits. I'm not up on the latest caveats there, but, but that's my understanding of it, at least. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. If you don't you want to waste the resources if the resources that you find aren't even going to be yours. With that said, what key policies or investments do you think that the US should prioritize right now to avoid falling behind in deep sea mineral access or innovation, one of the major provisions of the presidential executive order from a few weeks ago states that we should support friendly nations that have extensive deposits already identified within their exclusive economic zones, read Cook Islands, and we're working with the I've been working with the Cook Islands government for about six years now to try to help them develop their own mining code to their own regulatory structures, and they're, pretty much have done that, and they're simply waiting for funding to make sure that all the baseline environmental data are collected as specified in those regulations. Right now, they have granted three licenses to private companies to explore portions of their nodule deposits. Again, they have extensive fields of these polymetallic nodules just laying there on the bottom. It's not the other things where you have to go down and jack hammer it up. It's the nodules that you just rake up and all three of. The companies that have licenses from the Cook Island seabed minerals authority, it's, it's their national counterpart to the International Seabed Authority. They've been relying on those companies to collect, to collect all that baseline environmental data that is required. Well, these companies are all funded by venture capitalists that are looking at, you know, market pressures and and various things. They're investing a lot of money now for something that might not yield a profit for three to five years into the future. So they just don't have the money that it takes. It's very expensive to collect this kind of baseline data. So we're working with the Cook Islands to try to encourage US federal government agencies to invest money to collect this data that then would allow them to issue the licenses to begin extraction activities, exploitation activities of these minerals that would ultimately benefit the US, because these companies are all proposing to refine These minerals in the US, for US interests. So it's a strategically important issue, because most of the land based sources, as I said earlier, of these minerals, are controlled by China and other nations, not by the US. Yeah, absolutely. And it seems too since the areas outside of countries, exclusive economic zones, their eezs. That's kind of everyone's water, if you will. It's everyone's ocean out there. So having cooperation between other countries would seem pretty critical, I would think, and especially if it's within their EEZ so with that, that brings me to my last question, what do you see as the most pressing policy or research question for the next five to 10 years in this space? Whether that's environmental, you know, economic, you know, take that anywhere. And in terms of research, just collecting the data, it's, it's very difficult to collect data at 5000 meters, that's three three and a half miles below the surface of the ocean. And we can do it. We know how to do it. It just is expensive, particularly the biological data, is it requires sending remotely operated vehicles down that can crawl around on the bottom and pick up samples and and then put sensors that are anchored to the bottom. That's sort of my specialty, that can sit there for, you know, six months to a year at a time, collect data, and then you go back and retrieve it. Then you've got to analyze all of that data. So those are the biggest issues right now. As I said, they've tested these collector vehicles. So the technology exists to bring the nodules up from the bottom at scale, but again, it just requires more of an investment in the technology. But they have tested these vehicles. They work again. The sediment plumes are are an issue, but not as big an issue as originally thought. So that's where we are right now is, is somebody needs to come up with a big pile of money for us to go out and collect all this data, and then we can or countries like the Cook Islands can begin issuing exploration or exploitation permits. Well, thank you so much for this discussion. Today was very informative, and if people wanted to know more about you and your work, where could they find you? Could go to the international marine minerals Society website. It's just I, M, M, S, O, c.org, or our lab at the University of South Florida is just marine.usf.edu my particular lab is cmps.marine.usf.edu, awesome. And we'll be sure to include those links in the show notes. Dr Luther, it was wonderful speaking with you today, and thank you so much. Thank you. Great to be here. You