The Metals Company subsidiary lifts over 3000T of nodules to sea surface | Hacker News Reader

The Metals Company subsidiary lifts over 3000T of nodules to sea surface

investors.metals.co

136 pointsbill38132 comments

Just as a reminder, the idea of mining deep sea manganese nodules was developed by Howard Hughes' Glomar subsidiary in the 1970s as a cover story for the CIA's Project AZORIAN, a project to build a "deep sea mining ship" (the Hughes Glomar Explorer) that would deploy a sub-surface barge (the HMB-1) with a giant grapple to raise the sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine K-129.

As such the scheme had to be "sufficiently plausible bullshit" to withstand scrutiny, while not necessarily needing to be economically feasible.

(No, I'm not making this up.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

I had science books in middle school that when showing an example of manganese (for the chemical elements section), they included a shot of the Glomar Explorer mining it from the sea floor. That's how thorough the plausibility was to make it into public school textbooks.

Huh... my textbook in GCSE geography class (early-to-mid-00s) had an illustration of an ROV-style undersea robot harvesting manganese nodules. I wasn't sure how that approach would scale...

According to a book on project Azorian whose name I forgot claimed that the CIA hype on deep sea mining was so strong that some universities opened deep sea mining programs and recruited quite few students who were very surprised to discover that they spent years of study as part of the CIA cover story.

They did the same for modern art.

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

With similar results.

Did they reverse-psy-op the date of the post?

For context, above commenter wrote a wonderful James Bond pastiche novel inspired by Project Azorian, because how couldn't he:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14150.The_Jennifer_Morgu...

I'm not the only SF writer to have gone there, either: Harry Turtledove published one just this year!

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Miles-Down-Harry-Turtledove-ebo...

When you're going to reply "And there was that Laundry reference too," and then notice that cstross was the "above commenter"...

I came to this thread to post a laundry reference, but cstross beat me to it. Can't complain :)

Last year I read a pretty good sf short story about deep-sea polymetallic nodule mining and went out and bought $34 of warrants on TMC, now worth $1.69. Ah well, I guess reading sf is not due diligence.

I cannot for the life of me remember what the story was though -- I don't think it was Arula Ratnakar's "Submergence". Hmmm. Maybe it was "The Little Shepherdess"?

Wait what is TMC? Is this like futures trading, but with less liquidity?

Abbreviation for “The Metals Company” which is the subject of the article

Something's good-ideaness is independent of both its current equity-price and its financials.

A great investment is a good idea (rare) that also happens to be undervalued (relative to the market) and possess strong financials (ability to fund itself in the current macro climate).

On the other hand, now TMC at $1.69 seems like a good deal

TMC will be dead in a matter of months. They have no money left, and this press release looks like a desperate attempt to recreate some hype and get some retail traders to give them some spare change. FED rates going up, vapor ware companies going down.

> Project Azorian (also called "Jennifer" by the press after its Top Secret Security Compartment)

Ahhhh, hence The Jennifer Morgue.

Makes you wonder what companies are being used for cover stories today?

At least one cryptography/security company is probably a front for a three letter agency. It used to be Crypto AG, but their cover was blown by Snowden.

SpaceX's "going to Mars" plans are just a cover for a vehicle that can allow the USA to utterly dominate Low Earth Orbit. Best part is that Elon thinks it's real.

It’s a pretty in the open quid pro quo. Musk gets Mars and US gets LEO.

I still think the "Going to Mars" plans are a stepping stone to mining the asteroids. The old book "Future Cities" from 1979 that I read as a kid (I'm 49 and I assume Musk and the other current billionaires did too) seems to be fuelling quite a few projects these days :) https://vdocument.in/the-usborne-book-of-the-future-558468df...

I was mostly joking, but you must admit the symmetry of fake sea floor mining and fake asteroid mining is beautiful.

What an amazing book.

I'd be amazed if some of the VPN providers aren't compromised

"compromised" means the check bounced?

I'd be surprised if some of the VPN providers aren't top-to-bottom three-letter-agency owned and operated.

True, and most Tor exit nodes are probably controlled either by hackers or security agencies.

I personally think that any VPN based in a 14-eyes country is suspect and basically shouldn't be trusted.

Extremely cool. The Soviets didn't even know where their sub was but we knew because of all of our hydrophones.

My father spent time as a Marine stationed in Iceland to guard parts of SOSUS. They were heavily briefed and trained for encountering Spetsnaz.

This is where “I can neither confirm nor deny” comes from. It’s less widely known as the Glomar Response.

My father was an ME and EE and was one of the principle engineers on that project (of Clementine, the BIG claw that picked up the Russian Golf Class sub).

I used to drive him to and from the Redwood City shipyard as there wasn't a lot of parking there.

He also gave me 9 or 10 manganese nodules from the "test" mining run, which was the CIA cover story.

They look like fist sized black to gray cauliflower heads.

After the project was declassified he got a Presidential Commendation, which he framed and hung over the kitchen table.

That is amazingly cool.

>of Clementine, the BIG claw that picked up the Russian Golf Class sub

while this is partially true, you're leaving out the part where Clementine ultimately broke the sub, dropped the sub, leaving the US with no sub.

Not trying to cast aspersions on your dad or your memories, but the way you worded it makes it sound like it was successful if you didn't already know the full story. It's crazy to me how close to being successful this operation was, but the one aspect that people were suggesting was the biggest point of failure is exactly where it failed. of course, we have the luxury of hindsight.

Unfortunately this sort of mining has long-term impacts on deep sea ecology. It causes substantial loss of species diversity and activity even 26 years later, with this paper estimating recovery will take at least 50 years for a small test patch. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5922

Things are a little more complicated than that.

1. Surface mining also has environmental consequences which have to be weighed against the costs of deep sea mining. An area impacted by surface mining can recover in just a decade, but it takes intensive environmental restoration efforts on the part of humans (https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/05/mine-remediation.html). If similar techniques could be developed for deep sea applications, it could reduce the impact of deep sea mining.

2. Researchers are developing robots with advanced propulsion systems which could dramatically reduce the disturbance to sea-floor sediment by mimicking the ways that rays move. (https://interestingengineering.com/culture/new-autonomous-su...) Of course, this is still an active area of research, and it would probably take regulation to force deep sea mining companies to adopt these measures.

3. Nodules are much easier to process, reducing the carbon footprint of deep sea mining vs. surface mining by up to 80% for some metals. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) This study even tries to account for the secondary effects of mining such as the different impacts that surface and deep sea mining have on carbon sequestered in the ecosystem.

4. Surface mining is more harmful to humans than deep sea mining is because it can leach dangerous chemicals into fresh water supplies. (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...)

The effects of deep-sea mining on ocean ecology are much less well understood than the effects of surface mining. While I do think there's good reason to be optimistic about the benefits of deep-sea mining, especially if it can displace surface mining, we shouldn't assume we understand what will happen. I hope the industry continuous to be forced by regulators to move forward cautiously and allow time for environmental studies to take place.

edit: These people are trying to build a deep sea miner that doesn't destroy the seafloor: https://impossiblemetals.com/

Point 4 is mostly confined to old abandoned sites, as mentioned in your link. Modern tailings aren’t left to leach acid all over the place, at least not in North American mines. I get that all bets are off in eg Africa, however.

Sure, but a lot of surface exploitation is planned globally. Africa and Asia are certainly going to be seeing new mines opening due to demand for solar/batteries.

For sure, I was taking issue with the absoluteness of the assertion that all terrestrial mines are leaching from their tailings piles/ponds. It’s not true of many (most?) modern mines.

I didn’t mean it as an absolute assertion, but I can see that I didn’t make that clear.

>Surface mining also has environmental consequences which have to be weighed against the costs of deep sea mining.

What will actually happen is both types will be happily used at the same time, so there's little point in weighting one against the other.

Any other rationalization misses the fact that this is an extremely poorly understood environment (especially if we do compare with surface mining). It's never a good idea to tinker with unknown at scale without understanding it first, let alone commercializing it. Mining history is practically written in mistakes like that.

Right. Especially as we ramp up our reliance on solar panels (and therefore batteries). These operations are now heavily subsidized and we'll likely be making 100% use of every avenue available to mine as much as possible as soon as possible

sigh. If only we put this much funding into solving our exploding e-waste crisis which could also help alleviate the problems of rare metals

We don't need weird elements to support solar with batteries. Grid stabilization can do fine with lead-acid batteries. Both lead and sulfur are readily available. There are also iron batteries and other emerging battery chemistries, as well as non-battery storage like pumped liquids or pressurized gases.

Don’t need manganese or any rare minerals for batteries. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are used in the least expensive Teslas (base Model 3 and Y), and although lithium is very abundant, you can even substitute it for the even more abundant Sodium with only a slight weight increase. That’s superior to Lead based batteries in nearly every way.

Manganese is not a rare mineral. One does not mine manganese nodules for the manganese. Mining them would create an enormous surplus of manganese that would get dumped in waste piles.

Why is a "waste pile" worse than having it distributed all over the ocean floor?

I wasn't making a judgment here. I was just pointing out that most of the manganese ends up in the waste stream. One would not be mining these things for the manganese (although what manganese that could be sold would be sold.) In a world mining manganese nodules, the price of manganese would be very low.

Or you can reduce your need for batteries by combining wind and solar with green, safe nuclear reactors - and smart grids capable of varying their demand instead of us trying desperately to adjust supply.

For example, as more folks move to electric cars, a smart grid would allow chargers to charge less at periods of intense demand.

We've historically focused exclusively on adjusting supply to meet demand - which is clearly very difficult and very expensive (especially if you look at gas peaker plants) - but we instead (or in addition) can adjust aspects of the demand curve to smooth out variability in load. This should be easier and significantly cheaper.

Alternatively, keep burning fossil fuels, but overproduce renewables on average, and use the waste energy for carbon capture.

(This has the big advantage of buying time to decarbonize things like concrete, cattle and airplanes.)

Wouldn't it be more efficient to not produce the carbon than to produce it on one side and capture it on the other?

Whether something is more efficient might not be relevant. What's relevant is whether there is a path from here to there that keeps us under a survivable amount of climate change. Staying on that path may require some decisions that seem superficially inefficient.

Great, if we don't actually need the metals then there will be no one to buy them from the deep sea Miners and the problem will solve itself

Sorry if I was unclear I think seafloor mining is an awful idea

You still need batteries to support the solar and wind systems. If making the grid responsive to total load increases efficiency then hell, let’s do both

1kg of Lithium in an LFP battery provides diurnal storage for about the same amount of power as 1kg of Uranium can produce, lasts 3x as long, is recyclable, and mining the lithium is less harmful.

Batteries don't store "power". They store energy. Uranium fission, on the other hand, produces energy. Comparing energy storage with energy production is not valid.

Also, your numbers are way, way off. 1 kg of U-235 can produce about 24,000,000 kWh of energy. There's no way you're going to store that in 1 kg of lithium batteries.

Hilarious attempt at misdirection. The conceit is that the 'need' for batteries to run renewables is environmentally destructive and makes renewables a bad option. Putting that in context reveals it's still a better option than nuclear, even though there are other options that are even better on the renewable side where they're appropriate.

You don't mine U235. You mine 99.3% U238 and then leave a third of your U235 in enrichment tailings (or burn it straight in a CANDU).

And storage of a given time duration is indexed by power. 1kW of diurnal storage is enough storage to provide 1kW over daily variation.

Extracting 1kg of Uranium nets you 1kW for a few years.

Extracting 1kg of Lithium nets you enough storage to run 1kW of solar + wind for several times as long.

The solar panel is made of about the same amount of sand as goes into the nuclear power plant. It is less limited by Silver than the control rods are limited by indium, silver and cadmium.

> Hilarious attempt at misdirection.

You don't know the difference between energy and power, nor between energy production and energy storage.

That's not "misdirection" of any kind.

I was quite clear in the distinction both times. Pretending you can't read doesn't help your point.

No, you were not "clear". You said that batteries store "power". They do not. Period.

Worse still, you were attempting to confuse "power" (actually energy) storage with "power" (actually energy) production. That's not even apples and oranges -- more like apples and poetry.

It's like saying that because a refrigerator can hold 100 kilograms of food, buying a refrigerator is same as actually growing 100 kilograms of food. The two are not comparable in any way.

P.S. the ad hominem means that you lose. Sorry.

We're done.

Doubling down on lying about words that are right in front of you doesn't make the lie any truer.

Nor does having a tantrum over having the lie called out. Instead it just makes you look like a cry-bully.

The constant stream of lies and whining when those lies are called out from nuclear "advocates" would reflect incredibly poorly on the industry if it weren't obvious it was just a tactic to keep fossil fuels relevant for a little longer.

I don't think it's true that both will be used at once - if deep sea mining is cheap enough, it could make surface mining non-viable. A carbon tax could certainly eliminate surface mining because smelting surface minerals uses so much more energy compared to smelting nodules.

We actually put much more funding into e-waste recycling. Allseas most recent funding round was $150m, and they're the only major player in the deep sea mining space. But Redwood materials, one of many e-waste recycling startups, has raised $700m in their most recent round.

Abundant battery chemistries are already most of the way through commercialisation. ZnBr, Sodium/Prussian blue, Iron flow, and Iron air are all proven practial and rapidly scaling. AlS, NaS and LiS are hopeful next steps.

The only critical mineral not yet eliminated for the most commercially viable upcoming option is silver which requires about one ounce per net kilowatt with state of the art processes.

Unless you meant cheap energy will subsidize mining, in which case you are correct and this is a problem.

Sea floor mining is widely ridiculed by both environmental and mining professionals as having more risk than equivalent and better understood efforts on land. At least its close cousin, space mining, has the benefit of taking place off planet. I hope we never see this activity occur commercially in our lifetimes: we barely have gotten a handle on surface and underground mining, why do we run off to scrape the ocean as well?

On 1: The study you have referenced refers to the difficulties of remediating historical abandoned sites, often run under inadequate regulations typically in the 1850's - 1960's. Modern sites are no joke to remediate, but regulators are beginning to pick up on what causes problems to occur and how to ensure these costs are factored into the mining operation. The difficulty of applying effective regulations to international undersea areas is enormous.

On 2: That's great -- lots of things could happen to improve technology in both terrestrial and submarine mining.

On 3: Carbon footprint is not everything when determining the appropriateness of mining. The study cited by the Science article assumes tailings deposition at sea -- mines are not permitted to do this. The article also swans repeatedly over how "high grade" nodules are, but makes no direct reference to their actual grade. The underlying paper suggests a grade of 1.3-1.4 weight percent which is on the bottom end of mid-grade.

On 4: This point can not be concluded without further study. While terrestrial mining has had more historical impacts to humans, this does not allow for comparison on future terrestrial mining vs. a relatively unknown ecosystem impact from aquatic mining. Mining is also not assessed on purely anthropocentric impacts. We've begun to appreciate that systems are interconnected and humans are only one receptor. Enormous caution is required, certainly more than "lower emissions = good".

I'm not sure that sea floor mining is widely ridiculed. I've seen it taken about as seriously by grantmakers as other emerging technologies. That said I’m not in the mining space.

I'm don't disagree with your points - there's a lot of uncertainty around all of this research. But, from what I can see, regulators are doing the right thing and being very cautious to do environmental studies at each step of the way. Maybe I'm way off about that.

I wonder how large a patch we could mine over 50 years, and if it is a meaningful fraction of the ecosystem? The planet is almost covered with deep sea ecology. Plumes and water contamination could significantly increase the affected area, which I'd hope for these studies to be watching for.

(how much affected by drag net fishing might give a ballpark figure)

The nodules themself offer a habitat with its hard crust compared to the soft sea-floor. As it takes millennia for the nodules to form this means the habitat for those organisms is basically lost.

Just found this article with some research from earlier polymetallic nodule mining finding significantly decreased carbon sequestration in the mined areas. Won't be great news if mining the "Planet’s Largest Deposit of Battery Metals" winds up worsening global warming.

https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/environment/explorin...

Ceramics.org vs Metals.co, how surreal.

This study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...) looked at what the actual impact of that carbon release would be. Even if deep sea mining completely destroyed the ability of the sea floor to sequester carbon and it took 100 years to recover, it would only release 0.025 gigatons of CO2.

In contrast, if we wanted to get the same metals from the land, it would release 0.065 gigatons of CO2.

While there's a good bit of uncertainty in these estimates. Regardless, the impact is dwarfed by the savings from more efficient smelting processes enabled by deep sea nodules, which could save about 1 gigaton of carbon.

That's releasing, but what about the impact of the ability to sequester more CO2? Most of soil sequestration estimates are based on some really shaky soil science,[^0] but the oceans are known to be a much more effective means of sequestering carbon

[^0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-rev...

Oceans are great at sequestering carbon, but that's via dissolved CO2 and ecosystems near the surface (which are not impacted by deep sea mining). The seabed ecosystem plays an ancillary role.

Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any proposals to sequester carbon in seabed ecosystems.

I'm certainly not qualified to analyze the accuracy of a soil science study or the field as a whole. As someone not in that specialty, the figure that jumps out at me is the 40x difference between the impact from ecosystem damage vs. other impacts. Generally that tells me that the potential for ecosystem impacts to nix the climate benefits of deep sea mining is low - it would require that soil science be so wrong that they missed over 90% of the carbon content of the seabed.

Near the surface? My understanding is that absorption happens at the surface but actual sequestration only happens when the carbon drops below some depth (1000m?) and never comes back.

I’m far from an expert in this - but I thought the paper I linked did a good job explaining it. Suffice it to say that it has nothing to do with the seabed itself.

Not that I have a better solution, but won't this suck up and kill seabottom creatures and denude their habitat?

Doesn’t surface mining also do that?

> Doesn’t surface mining also do that?

No, surface mining doesn't "suck up and kill seabottom creatures". :)

More sympathetically: yes, surface mining can have habitat loss issues (i.e. land use changes), but the bigger issue erosion and sediment control, the management of which is a major component of any modern mine in a well regulated country. Maybe there are ways to mitigate subsea sediment migration, but they definitely haven't been studied to nearly the same extent as surface issues and mitigations

The sediment migration was part of what was being studied here, so maybe they will mitigate it somewhat. I’m not super optimistic given our mining record on land. Still the deep ocean is mostly a desert, and it’s massive, so I think we can afford to damage it a little. The alternative is land mining, which is also damaging.

Not only that, it also creates an enormous amount of underwater noise which distresses whales and dolphins. Further, it creates plumes of silt and tailings. All of this in a very poorly understood ecosystem. We have no idea what consequences this activity will have.

No sound from a machine can come close to 235dB naval sonar pulses. Cetaceans voices can reach 180dB, 40dB more than a jet taking off. A machine may be annoying to cetaceans but it isn't going to kill them. Silt and tailing plumes made by mining aren't going to come close to the silt dumped into the ocean by rivers or disturbed by submarine landslides.

I say forge ahead and make corrections as we learn more.

The ocean was always a desert, right? No animals ever known to live there, even before we set about industrial scale mining in the name of ecology, so no harm done.

These deep sea species tend to be very slow growing. It could take centuries for a mined section to recover.

Yes, but the alternative is having fewer batteries.

No, the alternative is manufacturers paying a dollar more for a battery made using more careful mining processes. Obviously that's a no go, because then I can't sell $3 "one time use" lithium ion battery packs as a "quick charge on the go" and literally throw away a reusable product.

But the alternative is less profit, think about the economy!

It's taking place in 4000m deep abyssal zones. Aside from these nodules, there's barely any flora there and even less fauna. They've got a research vessel trailing them measuring all of the effects, which the researchers will publish in scientific journals.[1]

I think of it as sifting economic value from seafloor cat litter.

[1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...

I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become. I find it fascinating to watch how ingenious we are, but equally or more terrifying. The ocean is our single life sustaining force.

I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources.

And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.

A large part of the reason Phoenix (the greater metro area) is as large as it is is because most of California restricts new housing construction so severely. I'd not live here if it weren't so much more affordable than California.

The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.

Interesting, but that’s just a proximal cause.

The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what?

Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.

> what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire

Evolving to a new species entirely. What you described is one of the most fundamental attributes of homo sapiens.

zoon logon echon

You blame others for the bed you make and sleep in? What should we do to convince the Faunecians to stay in Cali?

> I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become

I'd say the attitudes 50 or 100 years were dramatically more short sighted than today; destructiveness is bit debatable but lets not kid ourselves that the past was some gentle setting. Also take into account the fact that human population has quadrupled in the past 100ish years, and industrialized population growth has been even more dramatic; I don't know if you can say technology has become much more destructive when there are just so much more people partaking in that destruction.

Yes, that is interesting, and it is exacerbating the visible negatives. It is true, in general the expectations of first world quality of life; insofar as the current daily drivers. I do believe regardless of the scale, technology has become more destructive. The root cause has become far more nuanced, yet at the center is the idea. Human curiosity to see and prove, which itself isn't bad. The capital to prove the idea, and advance; is when the damage starts. I am not able to refute this cycle, it is just how the cutting edge of industry works.

So it might appear you are correct.

I enjoyed this 3-minute video from The Metals Company YouTube channel a bit better than this press announcement for learning about what this company is and what they're trying to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4azYzQY9k

I want to add a comment so people can watch this video about poor folks doing sea mining in Indonesia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAw26nSzBA&t=657s

I'm not posting this as a critique of the parent link, just as additional data about this topic.

Summary: In many Indonesian islands, there used to be large deposits of tin. Those have mostly been mined out, and sea floor mining has taken over. There are approved commercial companies that do it, but the video shows poor folks who are doing offshore seafloor mining "illegally" in very unsafe conditions. In either case, the practice rips up the sea bed and causes ecology problems.

* I quote "illegally" because the system largely sounds like it's powered by bribes to get the right certifications.

Tin mining brought Indonesia and Malaya an enormous amount of wealth. Unevenly of course, and also much to the parent Anglo-American companies.

Look at the scale of this tin mining dredge: https://tt5perak.com/

The last preserved, originally one of hundreds.

BTW your link is to a very late moment in that video.

The metric of "hauling 40 Tesla Model S vehicles up every sixty minutes." is a strange one. A '93 Honda Accord would be divisible to the minute (60/hr). Or even 52lbs/second... Though I suppose those don't sound as flashy.

Alternatively, I'd be curious how many tesla batteries in raw materials that equated to per hour.

It is crazy that there are trillions of dollars worth of these nodules laying around just waiting for someone to pick them up.

Congrats to the team that made this work.

Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.

There truly is nowhere left for nature to hide.

How do you feel about asteroid mining?

A matter of time until someone (whether negligently or maliciously) screws up the orbital insertion of a packet of minerals or a whole-ass asteroid. "Oops"

And it will undoubtedly happen because an american company, after lobbying for fewer regulations, will fail to do the right or necessary thing like "testing their systems" or "being fail safe"

Ideally, not that much material would be returned to Earth from asteroids, and certainly not "whole-ass" asteroids themselves. They would be kept far from an Earth-crossing orbit and mined in some safe orbit for their valuable minerals, and then a lot of those would probably be used in space, such as on the Moon, for constructing manufacturing facilities there.

Ultimately, we should be trying to move a lot of our "dirty" industries offworld, to places where no one cares much about keeping pristine and where nothing lives.

But yeah, The Expanse showed what happens when 1 jerk plays around with asteroid orbits...

If anyone is wondering how people can just destroy natural commons with no recourse, one need only look to the ISA headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica (1.). Sure, they've fully investigated the irreversable ecological repercussions and have taken zero kickbacks.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority

Every computer simulation that they created said it would be fine.

Oh, I thought this type of mining didn't even exist and was just a cover for that nuclear submarine retrieval

It used to be and actually helped to spark the industry because the Intel folks paid for studies and the like to cover their tracks which actually helped contribute to opening up the field!

Hadn't heard of this, found concerns about the environmental impact & the CEO's previous company Nautilus Minerals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule

(2021-Jun) https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-...

An opposite take of the validity of deep sea mining was covered on Real Engineering's youtube channel a couple months ago:

https://youtu.be/73mXXJpEjRI

I couldn't figure out from this article what a "nodule collection system" is? A submarine, a robot, a big bucket?

That's the part I am really curious about if anyone knows.

There's a thumbnail in the article that links to a bigger photo of the "collector vehicle". It appears to be a Giant Roomba.

https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f4344afd-acde...

YouTube channel has good videos.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7N_BtWn6wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydMJToa2iU

In the 80s on UK’s Channel 4, there was a series of four films, Oceanus Ecumenicus, that talked about mining ocean floor nodules, Ocean Thermal Energy (OTEC), Saudi Arabia mining silver from the bottom of the Red Sea, I can’t remember what the fourth one was but since the series was sponsored by British Gas I could make a guess.

I’d love to see that again, but it doesn’t seem to have found it’s way to YouTube yet.

What happened to the common heritage of all mankind?[1] How come these fuckers can go and grab them for themselves?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_heritage_of_humanity

They have a permit issued by an international body

> international body

Where some nations are more equal than the others...

Fun fact: the people in that international body (The International Seabed Authority) are very close to the mining industry

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-19/gold-rush-...

>Mining firms have found an ally in Lodge, a 62-year-old British lawyer first elected as secretary-general in 2016 after serving at the ISA since it began operations, according to former authority staffers, activists and scientists.

>“I am disturbed by the fact that popular perception of deep seabed mining is increasingly subject to wildly inaccurate and distorted scenarios portrayed by some sections of the media and interest groups,” Lodge said in a 2018 speech to a business group in Hamburg, Germany. “Suggestions that deep seabed mining will inevitably cause large-scale irreversible damage and ecosystem collapse appear to be grossly exaggerated and lack any basis in fact.”

It's covered in many of the documents on the project page[1], specifically the just-released Social Impact Assessment scoping document.[2] There are 168 members of the ISA, including Nauru which sponsors TMC's exploration license. Once the project reaches commercial operation, royalties will be distributed to ISA for division amongst the members or funding related international programs.

Maybe look into it even a little before spewing bile?

[1] https://metals.co/nori/ [2] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...

I want to remind everyone that the reason one might mine manganese nodules is not for the manganese, it's for the lower concentration elements like cobalt and copper. Manganese is very cheap; South Africa has enormous quantities.

If this was 1974, it would be "..much of it packed into a Soviet submarine..."

It's crazy how as a child in that era, I totally bought into the Glomar Explorer being this amazing thing.

And 45-50 years later, here we are.

Why is the text on that website 3x larger than all the rest of the text on my PC? Who looks at that formatting, nods, and says "yup, ship it!"

The perspective of the photograph makes me think the collector is the size of a small house. Is this true, or just an optical illusion?

this is true

for more information, there was a podcast episode on the daily about this practice

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/podcasts/the-daily/electr...

I would like to know the average element ratio in the mined nodules. Is it really what they were hoping for?

It's broken down on page 16 in Table 1 in the scoping document (probably quoted elsewhere as well).

[1] https://metals.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NORI-D-SIA-Scop...

This sounds like a disaster for the ecosystem in the sea and especially on the sea bed.

Lol, this is going to be so much better for the environment, right?

Article aside, the interface shown top left in the control room pic looks quite polished.

Couldn't make out what the program is called...was expecting a more win xp looking UI haha

Disturbing that the wall of monitors seems to be blocking the exit out of that control room or it’s some really tight crawl space!

3000 Teslas!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com