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The march towards deep-sea mining is a slow and stately trudge through a complex international negotiation. The real progress isn’t made in flashy headlines or overhyped announcements, but in painstaking deliberations and incremental progress in the mining code and the environmental and financial regimes. In as much as 2024 was a fairly standard year in … Read More “Deep-sea Mining: What went down in 2024?” »
Next week, delegates from 169 countries, NGOs representing civil society, and other experts will gather in Kingston, Jamaica to continue the work of developing a set of rules governing how the minerals of the deep sea, which fall beyond the borders of any nation, can be exploited, ostensibly for the Good of Humankind. In many … Read More “Deep-sea mining meeting convenes once again to negotiate the future of our oceans.” »
The ocean is a gigantic places absolutely chock full of weirdos. Oliver touched on quite a few points I’ve made over the year, including the fact that deep-sea mining is absolutely not inevitable and that new battery chemistries could dramatically reduce the demand for these critical minerals over the next decade. Read more about deep-sea … Read More “John Oliver covers Deep-sea Mining on Last Week Tonight” »
Earlier this week, Congresswoman Miller of West Virginia introduced the Responsible Use of Seafloor Resources Act of 2024 bill into Congress. This bill is among the few significant pieces of new national legislation promoting deep-sea mining to be introduced in the modern era. The text is available here: A Bill to support international governance of … Read More “New Deep-sea Mining Bill Introduced in Congress” »
On Friday, I posted about the financial model used to project the potential profits from a hypothetical polymetallic nodule mining model in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. This model, originally commissioned in 2018 and updated in 2021/22, had some puzzling prices for manganese in particular. This model is extremely important. Beginning late this month, member states … Read More “Updated financial model for deep-sea mining makes more sense, fewer dollars” »
Note: please see the update to this post – Updated financial model for deep-sea mining makes more sense, fewer dollars This month, once again, the delegations from 169 countries will gather in Kingston, Jamaica to continue the negotiations on the Deep-sea Mining Code. At this point, I’ve written extensively about the potential environmental impacts of … Read More “Something is bothering me about the Economics of Deep-sea Mining” »
In a region once thought to be so ecologically uninteresting that it was viewed as a useful testbed for deep-sea mining equipment, NOAA researchers have detected what could be the world’s largest cold water coral reef. “For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment, but after more than 10 … Read More “The world’s largest cold water coral reef lies beside the first experimental deep-sea mining test site” »
This morning, the Norwegian parliament approved a bill that moves the country one step closer to commercial deep-sea mining in Norway’s waters. This bill opens up nearly 300,000 square kilometers for mining companies to to explore for lithium, scandium, cobalt, and other critical minerals. Importantly, this does not mean that Norway is about to strip … Read More “Norway moves one step closer to deep-sea mining” »
The International Seabed Authority is once again gathered in Kingston, Jamaica to continue negotiations on a set of rules and regulations to govern seafloor mining in the high seas, beyond any nation’s borders. At stake is access to vast fields of polymetallic nodules spread across the abyssal plains. These nodules are rich in nickel and … Read More “One Mining Code to Rule Them All: The poison pill at the heart of the Deep-Sea Mining negotiations.” »
Earlier this month, Mining.com published an article on the next steps in the development of deep-sea mining which featured a pretty surprising statement from the CEO of The Metals Company: “People think we are debating if this (deep sea mining) should happen or not, and that’s gone. It’s happening.” Gerard Barron/Mining.com One of the interesting … Read More “No, the deep-sea mining debate is not “gone”” »
