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Texas Congress members are lobbying for federal assistance to bring a Canadian seabed mining firm to the state. Texas A&M researchers have reservations about the pace of development.
Elyse Hauser
Gulf Coast communities have long faced outsized hazards from petrochemical industries. High-profile oil spills. The accumulation of spilled plastics. Air and water pollution from refineries—all issues that disproportionately affect communities of color. Yet the infrastructure behind this pollution is exactly what makes the region appealing to The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian deep sea mining brand pursuing a processing plant in the Houston area. There, deepwater ports could receive ships packed with seafloor minerals, and offshore drilling infrastructure could be repurposed for deep sea mining work. As TMC’s CEO has pointed out, deepwater oil and gas production in the Gulf helped form the basis for today’s deep sea mining efforts.
This mining, which is currently being tested around the world, would gather seabed formations rich in manganese, nickel, and other metals used in electronics, including smartphones, solar panels, and much more.
A Texas-based processing plant could help support the transition to lower-carbon energy sources while reducing fossil fuel use and bringing more skilled jobs to the region. However, deep sea mining comes with its own risks. It would remove habitats, for instance, create contaminating sediment plumes, and bring noise and light pollution to as-yet untouched ecosystems.
Unlike resource extraction on land and in coastal waters, deep sea mining would shift damage far from people’s homes—to the abyssal seabed. And these impacts would, at least initially, be far removed from the Gulf.
Current mining interests largely target the Pacific. Yet Texas would face possible impacts from shipping and processing of the mined minerals, which are often toxic. It’s not yet clear whether the rewards of bringing seabed resources to the Gulf Coast would balance these risks—or even if there will be a market for them.
Deep sea mining has already a secured quiet local foothold on the Gulf.
Swiss contractor Allseas, TMC’s offshore technology partner and second-biggest shareholder, has a Houston office. Deep Reach Technology, which has supported deep sea mining research since the ‘70s, is based in nearby Stafford, Texas. Deep sea mining brand Ocean Minerals, pursuing mining in the Cook Islands through its subsidiary, operates a PO Box on Houston’s north side. TMC, in other words, might fit right in with the neighbors.
Five Texas congressmembers wrote the U.S. Department of Defense in November to support a Texas facility as a “national security imperative.”
One of them, Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Conroe, also signed a letter in December with 30 other members of Congress asking the Department to strengthen mineral supply chains and consider financial guarantees and possible subsidies to make it happen. Both letters cite concerns about China’s growing mineral supply power.
For now, though, any benefits are hypothetical, as deep sea mining remains mostly in the research phase. Although the U.S. isn’t at the forefront of the seabed mineral pursuit, U.S. research institutions like Texas A&M University have played a major role in assessing its feasibility and potential impacts. In 1982, A&M researchers produced an early economic analysis of deep sea mining, concluding that the proposed model of deep sea mining offered a poor return on investment “unless a critical feedstock for a company’s major product is produced or a national need for a strategic metal develops.” Today’s increased reliance on metals for electronics, of course, has shifted the financial equation.
In 2020, A&M oceanographer Jessica Fitzsimmons received funding from DeepGreen (now The Metals Company) to produce research the company could use to produce an environmental impact assessment. Some of the preliminary findings have begun to be released by TMC, including that seafloor plumes may be more limited than previously believed due to a “gravity-driven turbidity current that hugs the seafloor.”
Fitzsimmons told Deceleration that she participated in three research expeditions with TMC in 2021 and 2022 and that data is being actively delivered to the company. She said that while she is one of only a handful of scientists in her field, making her popular with the growing number of seafloor mining companies, she refuses to sign non-disclosure agreements as a rule. That way her research can ultimately still find its way to the public ostensibly overseeing the mining activities.
While she does not take a position on TMC’s proposed mining activities, which are largely focused on the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico, she said that TMC has demonstrated an interest in good science.
“They have put more money into environmental monitoring than any company that has approached me,” Fitzsimmons said. “I am impressed by their commitment to science.”
The U.S. Department of Defense is expected to release a report assessing the potential of domestic seafloor mining by March 1, 2024. The Metals Company expects to start mining by 2025.
The pace has caused some anxiety among researchers at A&M.
Biological oceanographer Jason Sylvan hasn’t worked directly with mining brands, but contributes to relevant research. As a fairly conservative university, A&M is more open to industry partnerships that can fund expensive deep sea research that might not otherwise happen, Sylvan said. Yet he worries about the pressure to speed up science for industry goals.
“I think there’s a genuine effort to inform [deep sea mining] with science, but sometimes the pace of progress is a little quick for me to be comfortable that the science is adequate,” he said.
Fitzsimmons shares that anxiety.
“There is still a lot more science to be done and that’s why the pace is frightening,” she said. “We do not understand the science enough to be making decisions about [seabed mining].”
This research often focuses on possible ecological harms. However, since it’s still unclear how these minerals would be extracted, shipped, and processed, it’s hard to measure all the risks of deep sea mining. International regulations are still being developed. At every step, new systems must be created for the developing industry.
Last year, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an assessor of lithium-ion battery supply chains, published a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for TMC in an effort to quantify possible shipping and processing impacts. Such analyses measure the environmental impacts of making a product and can be done speculatively before production begins.
TMC’s LCA considered seabed mineral production fueled by renewable energy in Texas. “Their LCA would change a fair amount if it wasn’t renewable energy they were using,” said Charlotte Selvey-Miller, Benchmark’s head of sustainability. It also considered high-grade seabed ore, which requires less processing than low-grade ores from land. However, while the assessment factored in renewables to keep the lights on, it also included processing the ore through pyrometallurgy—a metal extraction technique that uses coal.
Benchmark found this to be the main source of potential environmental harm from the proposed plant. Other ore processing techniques, like acid leaching, could reduce the use of coal but create other potentially damaging pollutants.
Overall, the LCA suggests TMC’s plans would be more environmentally friendly than current mineral production from on-land sources (such as in Indonesia, where nickel mines cause both pollution and deforestation). For Gulf Coast residents, there are other possible benefits. The letter from the Texas Congress members to the Department of Defense spelled out hopes for the processing plant: “port utilization, infrastructure development and approximately 1,200 direct and 9,000 indirect good-paying technical jobs.” And, if the processed minerals go toward local electrification, that could help the Gulf wind down its toxic relationship with petrochemicals a bit while buoying the economy.
Any potential benefits come with caveats. It’s not yet certain how seabed minerals would be processed or how accurate job predictions are. (TMC did not respond to Deceleration’s request for an interview.) The raw seabed material also has high natural radioactivity, a potential risk for workers. And, since TMC hasn’t yet acquired buyers, there are no guarantees of how the minerals would be used.
On its website, TMC’s stated mission is to provide metals for the energy transition and create a recycling loop “to help create a metal commons that can be used in perpetuity.” But it remains to be seen how that recycling loop would be built, and which energy projects would use these minerals. “There’s a lot of corporate resistance to using deep sea minerals,” noted Arlo Hemphill, project lead for Greenpeace USA’s campaign on deep sea mining. It could be bad for brand image, as environmentalists (and many scientists) worry about deep sea mining’s ecological risks.
The biggest environmental damages from seabed mining would be at or near the mining sites. Still, bulk carrier ships headed to the Gulf Coast would cross the sliver of habitat occupied by the world’s last few Rice’s whales, a population at risk from ship collisions and sound pollution.
On land, storm impacts could shift toxic materials from mineral processing into the human environment, as occurs with fossil fuel facilities and Superfund sites.
TMC doesn’t appear to have specific plans for mitigating storm-related issues. But their current investigations and testing required by the International Seabed Authority must detail how they’re planning to minimize risks, said Jeroen Hagelstein, public relations manager for the offshore technology contractor Allseas.
“I think with every industrial job you do, there is a risk of something not exactly going as planned,” Hagelstein said.
However, a remaining question is whether these minerals are necessary. Electrification projects, consumer electronics, and military defense technology create a massive demand for minerals. Yet given Earth’s finite resources, it’s important to differentiate between demand and need, and to explore alternatives to business-as-usual extraction and waste.
“We are shifting from what we call the ‘old energy world’ to the ‘new energy world,’” said Bryan Bille, a Benchmark analyst.
Mineral-based electrification, so far, has fueled the new energy world. But to go from fossil fuels to minerals is to shift from one non-renewable resource to another while accepting mining’s environmental damage.
“I feel like we’re gonna like blow through this [seabed mineral] resource pretty quickly, and then be in the same exact position that we’re in now,” said A&M’s Sylvan. “But maybe there are other kinds of engineering and technology solutions to the problem.”
Building a new energy world that doesn’t hinge on environmentally harmful resource extraction and processing looks increasingly possible. Innovative battery designs that use fewer or more common materials could support electrification without increased mining. Improved recycling could harvest minerals from existing electronics, like the billions of phones that get thrown away each year. Such advancements might render the deep sea mining industry very short-lived, if it develops at all.
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Elyse Hauser is an environmental writer from the Pacific Northwest who studied nonfiction at the University of New Orleans. Her work focuses on aquatic ecosystems, especially the deep sea. This is her first article for Deceleration.
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