Geologists hunt for mineral treasure under sea Some tout ocean mining as the next gold rush, but as Don Butler writes, critics say the process will do 'massive' damage to underwater ecosystems. Don Butler, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Saturday, February 25, 2006
For the past two decades, Canadian geologist Steve Scott has been telling mining companies there's enough mineral wealth on the ocean floor to supply the world's runaway demand for gold, silver, copper and zinc indefinitely. Mostly, they ignored him.
But that may be about to change. A private Australian-led company, Nautilus Minerals Inc., and its partner, Canadian gold mining giant Placer Dome Inc., have just completed the world's first successful commercial drilling exploration for sea floor gold and copper deposits off the coast of Papua New Guinea, 1,600 metres below the ocean's surface.
Though it will take weeks to analyse the 15 tonnes of ore recovered from the sea bed, Nautilus president and chief executive David Heydon says visual inspections of the haul are "very encouraging," adding: "You can underline 'very'."
His optimism is based on more than just visual evidence. Samples previously collected in the area had astonishingly high grades, with copper concentrations 10 to 15 times higher than in South American mines.
"The grades that we're looking at," says Mr. Heydon, "are grades that people mined 100 years ago. If you want to see grades like this, you have to go to the geological museums."
If analysis confirms the high grade of the new ore samples -- and if Nautilus is able to secure a mining licence from the government of Papua New Guinea -- Mr. Heydon believes the company could kick-start a global deep ocean mining industry within five years.
"This is like the first offshore oil and gas well drilled 40 years ago," he says. "We have a lot of companies watching us extremely closely. This is the future, and the future's started."
It all means that the next great gold rush could take place at the bottom of the world's oceans, which cover 70 per cent of the Earth's surface.
Mr. Scott, director of the University of Toronto's Scotiabank Marine Geology Research Laboratory, co-discovered the Nautilus site with an Australian colleague, Ray Binns, during a scientific mission in 1991. That prompted Nautilus to undertake systematic exploration, leading to the discovery of more ore deposits in the same general area. "One they named Binns and one they named Scott," smiles Mr. Scott, "which was nice of them."
He couldn't be more delighted by Nautilus's progress. "I've been almost like a Pied Piper," he says cheerily. "Finally, somebody's listening."
He agrees this is ground-shaking stuff.
"We've only explored somewhere between five and 10 per cent of the ocean to the same level of intensity as we've explored the land," he says. "So there's huge opportunities to find things."
Environmentalists, however, are anything but thrilled.
Beatrice Olivastri, chief executive of Friend of the Earth, calls it a "new assault." They're gearing up for what could become a new environmental battleground.
"I think the challenge is going to be whether we should do this or not," says Ms. Olivastri. "If they take the genie out of the bottle, there'll be a range of players, from the leaders to the laggards, when it comes to environmental performance. I'm not persuaded that we're ready to manage that."
No one really understands the risks that deep ocean mining poses to the ecosystem, she says. "If we've learned anything through he extractive industry processes to date, it's that having an understanding of the ecosystem before they begin the process is critical. I honestly don't think we have that."
"There certainly isn't enough science on what the potential impacts would be of sea bed mining," agrees Catherine Coumans of MiningWatch Canada, an Ottawa-based advocacy group. Before anything happens, a thorough independent scientific review is needed, she says.
Mr. Heydon, who calls such objections "a knee-jerk reaction," denies that deep ocean mining poses significant environmental risk. "This is surgical mining. Our footprint is very, very small.
"We understand fully that this will get extreme focus from all groups. We would be extremely naive to proceed without making sure we had everything done that should be done."
Deep ocean mining's best prospects are along the "rim of fire," a geologically active zone in the Pacific Ocean that extends from New Zealand to Japan.
The area is rich in polymetallic sulphides, sea floor ore bodies created when superheated water discharges dissolved minerals through vents in the ocean bottom. As the water cools, the minerals solidify, forming chimney-like towers known as black smokers. When they collapse, they form ore deposits that can contain high concentrations of precious and base metals.
At present, about 150 active hydrothermal vent systems have been identified worldwide. Extinct black smokers surround these active vents, and it's those that would be targeted by deep sea miners.
Nautilus holds exploration licences covering 15,000 square kilometres in the Manus basin in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters. Another firm, Neptune Minerals, has prospecting licences for 55,000 square kilometres of ocean floor in territorial waters off the north coast of New Zealand.
Resource companies have been mining for the sea's riches since oil companies first began offshore production in the 1960s. Off the coast of southern Africa, mining companies have been recovering diamonds from coastal waters since the 1960s, though these are found in relatively shallow water -- 200 metres or less.
The only serious previous attempt at deep ocean mining came in the 1960s and 1970s. Companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on technologies to find and recover manganese nodules, fist-sized lumps containing nickel and other minerals that are scattered across the Pacific Ocean's abyssal plains at depths of 5,000 metres or more.
By the 1980s, though, the effort had been abandoned, doomed by a glut of nickel and the high cost of commercializing the recovery technology. But Mr. Scott says the technology needed for the sea floor mining envisaged by Nautilus would be much simpler to assemble.
For one thing, the manganese nodules were at much greater depth and were thinly scattered over hundreds of square kilometres. Sulphide minerals are concentrated in volcanic deposits covering a few hundred square metres.
While there's no machine yet that could actually mine the sea floor metals, Mr. Scott has "no doubt at all" that one could be built.
"It will be robotic. In Canada, we're really good at robotics. We have a robotic submersible that we scientists use that will dive to 5,000 metres. The oil industry services oil wells in 1,500 metres of water. Doing things in the deep sea is not a problem."
Mr. Heydon agrees.
"If we were starting this process 40 years ago, there'd be huge technical risk. But there's 40 years of offshore oil and gas expertise out there in waters of this depth or deeper. That lowers our risk profile dramatically."
In many ways, says Mr. Scott, mining sulphide ore from the sea floor would be easier than mining on land. There's no need for shafts or tunnels, which cost between $2,500 and $7,500 per metre, or things such as roads or power lines. Those costs must be amortized over the life of the mine, which means that only large mines, with large deposits, are economically viable.
By contrast, ocean mining leaves behind no costly infrastructure. "Your infrastructure you'll reuse," says Mr. Scott, "so you don't need to have one big deposit. You can have a bunch of little ones." Nor do you have to penetrate through rock on the ocean bottom.
"These things are bumps on the sea floor," he says, "so you just recover the bump."
Mr. Scott recalls a comment Mr. Heydon made at a prospecting conference in Toronto last year. "He said in land mining, all the companies are looking for elephants. But he said elephant turds are good enough for us, as long as there's enough of them."
Mr. Scott argues that undersea mining would also be less harmful to the environment than mining on land. Unlike terrestrial mines, there would be little waste rock. Because oceans are alkaline, another major problem with land-based mining, acid mine drainage -- toxic sulphuric acid created when water comes into contact with iron sulphide -- wouldn't be an issue.
Mr. Scott agrees that questions about sea floor mining's impact on living organisms are legitimate and need to be addressed. But he says the creatures living around the dead black smokers "are probably the same creatures that are living in the sediment 100 metres away.
"The analogy I use is when you build a highway," he says. "How many hundreds of thousands of things get killed in the soil? But you don't worry about it, because the same things live in the fields on either side of the highway."
But Ms. Coumans says environmental baselines haven't been done for the ocean floor, so nobody really knows what impact undersea mining would have on the ecosystem.
"Science has been showing there's actually amazing amounts of life, even at huge depths," she says.
Based on research done on submarine tailings disposal -- the piping of land-based mining waste into the sea -- Ms. Coumans says there's reason to fear that sea floor mining would increase the turbidity, or cloudiness, of nearby waters.
"You're basically stirring up the sea bottom. It's actually a huge, huge problem. There's whole ecosystems that can be wiped out simply because you're cutting off the natural flow of nutrients."
Experience with submarine tailings disposal also suggests that deep sea mining might wipe out benthic organisms, the creatures that live on the sea floor, an important link in ocean ecosystems.
If, as suggested, ocean floor mining produces less waste than land-based mining, "that is definitely good," Ms. Coumans concedes. "I would still want to see actual numbers on that. I'd have to see that reduced an awful lot."
But for Ms. Coumans, the fact that Nautilus's claim is in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters raises a red flag.
"Papua New Guinea is just dreadfully vulnerable to these kinds of experimental technologies, which can do massive, massive damage," she says. "We're talking basically about a very, very fragile economic state that is heavily dependent on its natural resources to stay afloat."
As a result, the government allows mining disposal practices that are banned in other parts of the world, she says, noting that three of the most destructive riverine disposal mines in the world are in Papua New Guinea -- including one owned by Nautilus' partner, Placer Dome.
Mr. Heydon, who plans to take his company public in April and move its headquarters to Vancouver, says land-based sources of minerals are running down while demand for them escalates. Thanks largely to the robust economies of China and India, prices for commodities such as copper and zinc have skyrocketed in the past two or three years.
"Where's the new production going to come from?" he asks. "We have to look at the other 70 per cent of the world."
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