"How Much Further Can Mining Go?", 22 November 2023

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The common denominator in all ocean mining, especially in the deepest ocean, is that the environmental impacts will be mostly invisible. [...].

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[...] “We totally buy into recycling, the circular economy, but to get there, we need this injection of materials so we can recycle them,” [The Metals Company] CEO Gerard Barron once told a Zoom audience. The unique nature of the resource, he continued, “means that we don’t generate any waste material, we don’t generate those nasty tailings that are such a problem for terrestrial mining.”

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Barron has promised his company will stop mining once enough metal has been produced to ensure all new batteries can be made from recycled stock. He goes even further: “We have a very high level of confidence that producing metals from nodules will make it possible to dramatically reduce all those environmental and social impacts associated with making metals,” he said. “However, our promise is, if our ongoing environmental baseline and impact studies of this area of the sea floor uncovers something that disproves this hypothesis, we’ll discontinue the development immediately. Instead, we’ll celebrate the fact that we have discovered something fundamentally new about the deep sea and its inhabitants.”

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Along with Tonga, TMC has entered into partnerships with Kiribati and Nauru—where each of these island nations effectively “sponsors” the company’s subsidiaries to mine the CCZ seabed territories they control in international waters. [...].

Meanwhile, Nauru’s sponsorship agreement with TMC restricts the country from ever nationalizing the TMC mining subsidiary or expropriating its assets, and it guarantees the transfer of mining earnings overseas. On closer analysis, this deep-sea mining revolution, with its unknown environmental impacts, dubious regulators, and power imbalance between companies and poor nations, looks not so different from business-as-usual mining on land. Yet, viewed through Barron’s green lens, even the deals with Nauru and Tonga are altruistic. “These nations who have contributed the least to climate change,” he said during the Zoom meeting, “can play such an important part in one of the solutions.” That solution looks increasingly like helping corporations focus on maximizing shareholder returns and enabling affluent consumers in rich countries to transition their gas vehicles to EVs.

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