Deep-sea mining could soon mitigate the global shortage of battery metals
Taking nickel from rainforests destroys 30 times more life than taking it from the deep sea, writes the weekly The Economist
Spurred by the threat of climate change, rich countries are embarking on a major electrification project.
Britain, France and Norway, among others, plan to ban the sale of new internal combustion cars over the next decade. Even where bans are not expected, electric car sales are growing rapidly. Electricity grids are also changing, as wind turbines and solar panels replace fossil fuel power plants. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that in the next five years the world will add as much renewable energy as it has produced in the last 20 years.
RUSH TO THE BATTERIES
All of that means batteries, and lots of them, both to propel cars and to store energy from intermittent renewable power plants. The demand for the minerals that batteries are made from is on the rise. Nickel, in particular, is in short supply. The element is used in the cathodes of high performance electric car batteries to increase capacity and reduce weight. The IEA calculates that, to meet its decarbonization goals, the world will need to produce 48 million tons of this element each year by 2040, about 19 times more than it can do today. All for a total of 300-400 million tons of metal between now and then.
DEMAND SATISFIED LARGELY BY INDONESIA'S RAINFORESTS
Most of the growth in demand over the past five years has been met by Indonesia , which has cleared rainforests for the underlying ore. In 2017, the country produced just 17 percent of the world's nickel, according to metal research firm Cru. Today it produces 54%, equal to 1.6 million tons a year, and the number is constantly growing. Cru estimates that the country will account for 85% of global production growth between now and 2027. However, this is unlikely to be enough to meet growing global demand. Furthermore, as Indonesian nickel production increases, it is expected to replace palm oil production as the main cause of deforestation in the country.
EVEN IN THE SEABED THERE ARE INTERESTING ELEMENTS FOR BATTERY MANUFACTURERS
But there is an alternative. An area of the Pacific Ocean seafloor called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (ccz) is dotted with trillions of potato-sized nodules of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, all of which are of interest to battery makers. Collectively, the nodules contain about 340 million tons of nickel, more than three times the United States Geological Survey's estimate of the world's terrestrial reserves. The companies have been meaning to mine them for several years. With an international bureaucratic deadline set to expire on July 9, that prospect seems more likely than ever.
WHAT THE METALS COMPANY (TMC) INTENDED TO DO
This date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru, on behalf of a mining firm it sponsors called The Metals Company (TMC), notified the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a UN appendix , of wanting to extract a part of the CCNL to which it had been granted access. This triggered the obligation for the ISA to produce rules governing the commercial exploitation of the deposits. If those rules aren't ready by July 9 – and it appears they won't be – then the ISA is required by law to "consider and provisionally approve" the TMC's request. (The company itself says it hopes to wait until rules are agreed).
THE PLAN FOR SUBMARINE EXTRACTION
Tmc's plan is as simple as it gets for undersea mining. Its first target is an area of the NCC called nori-d, which covers around 2.5 million hectares of seabed (an area about 20% of Wales). Gerard Barron, head of the TMC, estimates that there are about 3.8 million tons of nickel in the area. Since the nodules are simply found on the ocean floor, the company plans to send a large robot to the seabed to collect them. The collected nodules will then be sucked up to a surface support vessel through a high-tech hose, similar to those used in the oil and gas industry.
The support vessel will wash off the sediments and offload the nodules onto a second vessel which will bring them back ashore for processing. The excess sediments, meanwhile, will be released into the sea at a depth of around 1,500 metres, far below most oceanic life. Tmc is not the only company interested. A Belgian company, Global Sea Mineral Resources, a subsidiary of Deme, a dredging giant, is also interested and has been testing a seabed robot and lift system similar to Tmc's. Three Chinese firms – Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals – are also in the running, though they are believed to be further behind technologically.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF NICKEL EXTRACTION FROM THE SEABED
As with land-based mining, mining nickel from the seabed will damage the surrounding ecosystem. TMC's robot will destroy all organisms on the seabed and the creatures that live on the nodules it collects. It will also kick up mounds of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (although MIT research shows that these mounds tend not to rise more than two meters from the seafloor). Adrian Glover, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, points out that because life first evolved in the oceans and only later moved onto land, most of the planet's genetic diversity is still found underwater. Although the bottom of the deep oceans is dark and low in nutrients, it is still home to thousands of unique species. Most are microbes, but there are also worms, sponges and other invertebrates. The diversity of life is "very high," says Dr. Glover.
MORE RESPECTFUL THAN EXTRACTED IN INDONESIA
However, in several respects, seabed mining is more environmentally friendly than mining in Indonesia. The harsh deep sea environment means that highly diverse life is not very abundant. A paper published in Nature in 2016 found that a given square meter of ccz supports one to two living organisms, weighing up to a couple of grams. One square meter of Indonesian rainforest, on the other hand, contains about 30,000 grams of plant biomass alone, and much more if primates, birds, reptiles and insects are also considered.
But it is not enough to weigh the biomass of each ecosystem. The amount of nickel that can be produced per hectare is also important. The 2.5 million hectares that TMC hopes to exploit should produce about 3.8 million tons of nickel, or about 1.5 tons per hectare.
Getting concrete numbers for land-based mining is difficult, because the companies that practice them are less transparent than those hoping to exploit the seabed. But a report by the Pulitzer Centre, a non-profit media organization, suggests that every hectare of rainforest in Sulawesi, the Indonesian island at the heart of the country's nickel industry, will produce about 675 tons of nickel. (One reason land-based deposits produce so much nickel, despite the ore's inferior quality, is that the ore extends far below the surface, while the nodules exist only on the sea floor.)
All this makes a very rough comparison possible. For every ton of ccz nickel extracted, about 13 kilograms of biomass would be lost. Each ton extracted in Sulawesi would destroy about 450 kg of plants, as well as an unspecified amount of animal biomass.
OTHER FACTORS IN FAVOR OF SEABED EXTRACTION
There are other environmental arguments in favor of seabed mining. The nodules contain much higher concentrations of metal than deposits on land, meaning less energy is required to process them. Peter Tom Jones, director of the ku Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Materials in Belgium, believes that processing nodules into useful metals will produce about 40% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than earth minerals.
And since the nodules have to be hauled away for processing anyway, companies like TMC can be encouraged to choose locations where energy is supplied with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, on the other hand, is uneconomical if it is not worked close to the mines from which it was mined. This almost always means using electricity generated by burning coal or even diesel generators.
Cru analyst Alex Laugharne believes that Indonesian nickel production emits about 60 tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of nickel. An audit of tmc plans conducted by Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, a London-based company, found that every tonne of nickel harvested from the seabed would produce about six tonnes of CO2.
BECAUSE WE WILL CONTINUE MINING FROM THE RAINFORESTS
In any case, metal harvested from the seabed is unlikely to fully replace that mined from rainforests. Battery production is growing so rapidly that nickel will likely be mined wherever it can be found. But if oceanic nodules can be brought to market at affordable prices, the volume of metal available could begin to ease the pressure on Indonesia's forests. These arguments are unlikely to remain theoretical for long. Tmc's Barron intends to start commercial production of nickel and other metals from the seabed by the end of next year.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by Epr Comunicazione)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/estrazione-in-acque-profonde-potrebbe-presto-mitigare-la-carenza-mondiale-di-metalli-per-batterie/ on Sat, 08 Jul 2023 05:29:36 +0000.