Massive amount of rare metal deposits found off remote pacific island in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Massive amount of rare metal deposits found off remote pacific island in Japan

tnfsa.nippon-foundation.or.jp

33 pointsNalNezumi24 comments

5km down. That's deep. Deepest water depth for an oil well is only 3km. Nobody has ever done ocean mining that deep. Is it worth it? It's just cobalt and nickel.

The US has one cobalt mine. It closed last year when the price of cobalt dropped from $40/pound to $15.[1] Now the price around $12. For that mine, they need at least $20 to start up the mine again.

Something similar happened in rare earths. The Mountain Pass, CA rare earths mine has been closed and opened several times since 1985 as prices went up and down. Right now, it's running but losing money.[3]

It's nice to know there are some deep ocean resources down there if necessary, but extracting them looks uneconomic right now.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan...

[2] https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=co&u=...

[3] https://s25.q4cdn.com/570172628/files/doc_news/2024/11/MP-Ma...

Location of Minami-Torishima is interesting - https://maps.app.goo.gl/dJe8bnbFkcYZEpPw5. It's really in the middle of nowhere, far from the Japanese home islands. It would be a shame if Japan had a neighbour with a known history of claiming tiny islands far from its mainland.

Regardless, an increase in the supply of manganese, cobalt and nickel is a cause for celebration. It makes future battery production easier and energy abundance more likely.

> really in the middle of nowhere

Closest land is ... Guam. Home to the US's biggest Pacific military base. Don't think there's going to be a problem there

China will still claim it as theirs, because they know no one wants to go to war with them.

Wanna bet?

You sound so sure. Can you elaborate?

It's China, it's what they do. 9 dash line can always have more dashes, they've already just claimed something that isn't theirs, claiming more is less of a leap.

User name checks out. How's GIJoe doing these days?

Dexter's Lab actually, you heathen.

> It would be a shame if Japan had a neighbour with a known history of claiming tiny islands far from its mainland.

Like the US ? /s

>a vast field of manganese nodules [...] on the seabed in the Pacific Ocean

We've known for years that the seabed is full of easily extractable nodules containing various metals

Scraping the seabed has a long list of irreversible environmental consequences

> easily extractable

Easy if you don't mind destroying the seafloor

In the interests of kicking awake one of the stagnantest economies known to man: Drill, baby, drill!

This area is on the order of 100km x 100km. There is a lot of sea floor out there. And 5km depth is not exactly brimming with life. If it can be used to replace substantial amount of fossil fuel consumption it would still come out as net positive.

OTOH death by a thousand paper cuts is a thing. And frankly, that the exploitation could yield Japan's demand for 75 and 11 years only appears to be a 'long time' for types who don't see beyond quarterly bottom lines. It's one (high-output) country of 200, and we're talking about a decade and less than a century. How long until the fauna and flora of the seabed have recovered? One must also take into account that extraction will likely mean vast amounts of sands being upset, something that should almost never occur in the deep ocean except in case of an earthquake and also something that may affect areas far beyond the field proper.

> Scraping the seabed has a long list of irreversible environmental consequences

I know scraping the see floor at shallower depths with dragnets can destroy coral and have other negative effects. Is scraping the seabed at 5km down bad?

I recommend watching Last Week Tonight's episode on Deep-Sea mining[0], they go quite thoroughly into all the potential damage.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW7CGTK-1vA

Great video. Thank you.

FTA: “The team of experts conducted a survey from April 24 to June 9 over 100 seabed sites on the ocean floor off Minami-Torishima Island, nearly 2,000 kilometers southeast of Tokyo, using mining equipment and a remotely operated underwater vehicle at depths of 5,200 to 5,700 meters.

As a result, the group confirmed the presence of a dense field of about 230 million tons of easily extractable manganese deposits in the form of fist-sized nodules spread over an area of approximately 10,000 square kilometers.”

So, that’s 2.3×10¹¹ kg on 10¹⁰ m² or 23kg/m²

“Based on the analysis of nodule samples, the foundation estimates that the deposits contain approximately 610,000 tons of cobalt, enough to meet Japan’s demand for the metal for more than 75 years, and 740,000 tons of nickel, enough to meet demand for more than 11 years”*

So, roughly 3/1000 of that is cobalt and 3/1000 is nickel. Total about 150 gram/m².

Apparently, digging that up from 5 km depth is “easily extractable” and economically feasible.

Looking at https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalprices.php?c=co&u=kg&d=..., cobalt does $24k per kg, nickel $15k. So, question is: can you grab 1000kg of rock from about 7,000 m^2 of ocean floor and process it to get 3kg of cobalt and 3 kg of nickel, worth about $120k?

I wouldn’t know, but at scale, that doesn’t look impossible to me.

I fear you've mistaken the use of a period as a decimal separator for a thousands separator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator. Your numbers are thus off by a factor of 1000. Cobalt is actually $24/kg and nickel is $15/kg. Still not impossible, but you've unintentionally illustrated the problem.

Thanks. I should have followed my gut which said “that’s more expensive than I thought, but demand is rising sharply”.

Ocean nodules right? We've know these exist, right? Environmental reasons against extracting these are plenty. Or are we gonna start the scraping of/to the bottom begin?

Yeah, 'race to the bottom' has just taken on a new, grimmerer shade.

I'm reminded of "Playground", the extraordinary novel by Pulitzer-winning author Richard Powers, which includes a close look at phosphate mining in French Polynesia. Highly recommended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com