Lets not forget that the purpose of a lot of environmental studies is just to seek regulatory capture. Im not saying every time someone says we should take care of our environment we should all assume its actually a big corporation preventing competitors from finding alternatives bit it does happen.

I had a entomologist friend that pointed out that each little body of standing water has dozens of unique species of bugs and you can theoretically just say any piece of land needs to be conserved because destroying it will destroy an entire species.

Again not saying it would be good or bad to mine this stuff. (On first glance it sounds bad to reduce the oxygen we breath). Im just saying caution should always be used with this kind of stuff.