Deep-sea mining and the critical minerals paradox

This year’s World Ocean Day on 8 June was celebrated against a backdrop of accelerating interest in deep-sea mining. This progress is driving significant debate. On one hand, the scale of these reserves dwarf those remaining on land, with many of these minerals critical to the energy transition. However, others argue that we do not fully understand the environmental consequences of extracting them. How can these two sides be balanced? Can mining support the energy transition without harming the oceans?

Underpinning the green transition

Critical minerals are essential to the production of batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), and other green technologies. Predicted future demand cannot be met from mining land reservices alone. However, the oceans contain reserves of minerals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, and several rare earth minerals that are many times larger than those on land.

This has led to growing deep-sea mining activity, encouraged by the US government simplifying permitting processes as part of its wider efforts to safeguard the supply of critical minerals. For example, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently certified The Metals Company (TMC)’s exploration licence application for an area in the Pacific covering approximately 122 000 km² of seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). The company estimates that this holds around 1.02 billion t of polymetallic nodules containing nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper.

Moreover, comparisons of seabed mining to existing land mining operations have shown dramatically lower lifecycle carbon emissions. According to TMC, a comparison for nickel shows 6.2 kg CO2 per kg nickel for seabed mining versus typically between 20 and 100 for land-mining operations.

Exploring the unknown

At the same time, many scientists argue that our environmental understanding of deep-sea ecosystems is not robust or detailed enough to move forward with mining in a sustainable manner. For example, one research paper estimated that the CCZ contains between 6000 and 8000 species, but that scientists have only named 436 of these. Essentially, most of what lives there has never been described, and how it will be impacted by deep-sea mining is unclear.

The challenge for industry and regulators alike is in ensuring that environmental science keeps pace with mining progress, enabling the industry to sustainably unlock the necessary resources for the green transition.

Balancing extraction with the environment

There are encouraging signs. Companies are investing heavily in environmental impact assessments, water stewardship, and technologies designed to minimise environmental disturbance, from real-time monitoring and sensors to sound insulation and rigs that sit directly on the seabed, rather than requiring anchoring.

Environmental protection can be built into how fieldwork gets done. For instance, operators are investing in seabed box corers, which are designed to go in clean and come out clean, keeping disturbance at the sample site to a minimum. It does not stop at the moment of extraction: sediment plume behaviour can be modelled beforehand and tracked in real-time, so teams actually know where disturbed material is going and can respond. Digital twins bring monitoring information together, pulling in environmental data continuously during operations rather than after the fact, using it to guide activities.

Thanks to technological innovation, strategic partnerships, and the need for critical minerals, the seabed mining industry is increasingly becoming commercially viable. The race to secure resources for the green transition means that deep-sea mining projects could be live by 2027. The opportunity now is for the industry to use its central role in the energy transition to establish a new benchmark for what responsible extraction looks like to ensure that regulators, the public and customers are satisfied that marine ecosystems will be protected well into the future.

Author note

Ilya Epikhin, Principal and Amer Hage Chahine, Partner, Arthur D. Little.

Read the article online at: https://www.globalminingreview.com/mining/11062026/deep-sea-mining-and-the-critical-minerals-paradox/