Japan Discovers Large Precious Metal Deposit in Seabed
tokyotimes.com
tokyotimes.com
It will be a very long time before mining the seabed for rare earth minerals will be anywhere near as economically viable (or even environmentally-friendly) as traditional mining.
It is just that everyone has relied on China for so long for this dirty (literal sense) industry that they are now effectively being held hostage. It is not due to the fact that "rare earth minerals" are actually rare and for a large part of the 20th century, the US, for example, was one of the primary producers and exporters.
There are contracts for delivery in place: Meanwhile, Tong Ling, China’s largest importer of copper concentrates and one of the world’s largest copper smelters, recently signed a deal with Nautilus for more than a million tons of Pacific sulfide ores per year — an amount equal to about 5 percent of the world’s copper production.
The techniques to extract these deposits would likely be similar to deep sea oil extraction. Their proposed timeline of production in five years is optimistic, especially given these are just the initial samples.
Original post: http://news.yahoo.com/japan-finds-major-rare-earth-deposits-...
I've seen research into replacing rare-earths with other more common materials but haven't seen any serious work into underwater mining (except the fringe stuff where people are pulling gold out of seawater but that doesn't seem 'well funded' to me).
Do you know of any underwater mining projects other than the Scripps Institute and Woods Hole ones?