Mining's New Frontier
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Am I sharing KO? This is a sunday story from up first, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today, we're going really deep and I mean, really deep basically to the bottom of the ocean.

There's been a lot of attention lately on a new mineral frontier in the dark depth of the sea. More and more commerce mining interests have their eyes on the sea b floor as an untag source of minerals essential to powering our Green energy future. So far, very few companies have been granted rights to mind the sea floor, but recently villa mark, a reporter in the U. K, was invited to witness one of the mining Operations. And action here is describing in moment standing on the stern of a huge mining vessel as IT brought up a massive chunk of ocean floor.

This huge grabble device, like the a giant metal claw, comes out of the the water. It's .

travelled a mile .

up from the sea.

It's filled with tones of rock and sill. And yet you can see the jewels haven't really closed. And I suddenly realized, as I see the water dripping out, there are a little bit of rock falling out as well. And it's been falling out all away. Our journey.

William Marks joins me now. Welcome to the back.

eh.

So William, i'm given the sensitivities around sea mining. I have to wonder, like how did you get this front row seat on and oratory mining vessel? Well.

it's kind of a crazy story. IT started at last year. I was working on a piece about the tighten.

That's the submersible that kind of imploded, closed the titanic rec. And as my reporting continued, I went to the small island of fee, south coast of the U. K. Called jersey. I met some who had been involved through his company in efforts to rescue that submersible.

And over the course the day talking, he mentioned something which he said at the time, you know, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about this, but IT was that he was working on subsea underwater mining in papa gini. And so in, I stated in touch, I was immediately interested in trying to understand what that looked like. And a few months later, he said his vessel was heading out there.

He said, if you want to join us, we will be there for a few weeks. Just figure out dates that work up to this point, you know deeply a mining just to take us that back. It's been really pretty theoretical.

As far as people like me are aware, there's been a fair amount of exploratory work and kind of an effort to try to understand what the economics would look like. But that's often been done relatively quietly, relatives privately. And so of course, I did wanna join in until I end up booking flights going via singapore, from london onto the capital of pagani pt. Mosby, then catching another local flight to another island, driving across the island for four hours or so, waiting on a beach in the middle of nowhere, and eventually, after a sometime this cateran kind of beaching smoke out, the back appears over the horizon. It's kind of a local ferry, and IT turns up to take me to .

the vessel. So so you finally get on this giant ship. What's happening on board? Like what does he look like?

Well, it's two hundred and seventy feet long towers above the water. When you first bought IT, it's got several decks and you've got a massive amount of machinery. You've got these witches, you've got cranes, a couple of these remotely Operated vehicles, these kind of huge few boy machines that go six thousand meters deeper.

They need to. And they're all on the back of this massive deck, often moving around at times throughout the day, throughout the night, the vessels, couple of us away from the shores I mentioned, and it's really sticking in one place. The engines, the trusters around the outside of the vessel, often firing at different moments to keep IT to the millimeter, almost in one position, as they were several miles, at least a mile deep within them.

But they're not like mining, right? They're are doing like a test. Can you explain like what are they they doing?

So they're not doing full scale long term industrial mining. What they were doing this summer was essentially carving out chunks of the sea bed beneath the vessel in dimensions ten meters by ten metres, to kind of get across sectional analysis of the or the rock that they want to mind from a much largest scared in the future. So they were digin out these huge chunks every single day and night, bringing some of them on day. And they are looking to see essentially how much metal was inside those sections and hoping that, that would then translate into a similar level of metal concentration over a much larger area.

So they're bringing some of the the, I guess, the sea floor that they are. They are digging up. What are they doing with the rest of IT?

Well, this is what was so surprising to me, because they told me they had permits to extract one hundred and eighty tons of this rock from the sea floor for analysis, which will be Carried out in laboratories in australia, which is not that far away from public. Animates slifer old hole.

And then probably five to ten times as much as they bringing on deck, they're digging up and then depositing just a few yards away in these kinds of stock piles. And I think, what are you guys doing that for? And they said, we hope that when we come back, it'll make IT much faster to mine IT. They torn, since this device they're using to put IT up on debt goes up and down a mile or so each time. IT makes sense to a lot of IT down at that depth while they are down there before yanking at off each time, which they did every twelve hours or so.

And it's basically a giant claw like i'm imagining like one of those machines like you know my kids use where you go down and you trying to get the toy at a machine and those are a scam just for people know. But like it's like a giant clock kind of like that.

Yes, it's like that seen in toy story exactly that where they are sending this down on this huge winch next to the the kind of the claw, the grabbing device, they ve then got this underwater vehicle, and that attaches itself onto the claw to help guide IT. And so once they have maneuvered the core into the position, they want to grab, some of the sea floor IT just Young shut. And once you've got a security fasten inside the jaws of that claw that grab, a IT goes up to the surface a mile above.

But I know, like with the two clause, a lot falls out. IT doesn't hold. So is this is this holding like all of the ground that IT picks up? Or is there stuff fAllen?

Now take a question. And so you know, we had a limited time on board. It's hard for me to talk about every single time this happened.

But given that while we were a this core was coming up every twelve hours, they spend a lot of time making sure that the load inside the jaws of IT were security fasten before they moved IT. But at least one occasion I saw that IT hadn't fully locked closed. It's hard to see down there.

It's dark. There's a lot of kind of sill swelling around. And by the time I got to the surface on one occasion, IT was clear that the jaws haven't locked and a lot of the stuff inside had fAllen out on the way up to the surface.

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R, we're back with villa Marks talking about deep sea mining in his recent trip to pa. nogin. I to watch a high tech deep sea mining Operation network.

You, you you're talking here about disrupting the ground, the sea floor and stuff potentially falling from the flaw. As IT comes up from the earth, a big mounds of sea floor disrupted and then their left in these big piles. So all of this to me, sounds very disruptive to ocean ecosystems. Um I would imagine that a real concern IT .

IT isn't a not just among the climate activists but also amongst many of the scientists. We've looked at the feasibility of deeper sea mining and this has been an industry that's been studied for quite some time even though it's not yet really taken off. There are two ways to sort of think about this.

One is the disruption right on the surface and in this kind of deposit that looking primarily for copper, but a goal, but a silver, the rock, the forms, the bed there of the sea floor, is rich in these metals because essentials come out of the earth's. And in the second concern is about what happens as this material travels to the surface, if you're working with a mile deep ocean or two mild e ocean or even deeper, in some cases, there's the scale of that material falling out even gradually over that distance. And then once you have currents that could potentially blanket large areas of the ocean floor elsewhere, and that has the potential, scientists say, to then choke marine life, whether that's coral or other forms of plants or animals.

I mean, you're talking about potential damage, but but no one really knows yet what the the damage may be. So so how do you figure out the impact that doing even just sees test is having on the ecosystem?

They had environmental scientists on board to, every time they sent this device up and down from the surface to the sea floor, they would put out these devices. And IT allows them to test what's happening in the sea water at different depth beneath the ship. And the intention of these environmental scientists was to figure out exactly how damaging this may may not be. So this will will be part of the the kind of examination the data analysis this company does, in theory, a longside regulator, government officials from paper, uganda, to decide whether this .

is something that can move forward. You say in theory, alongside regulators up. So so i'm wondering our government officials and pop monitoring what's going on in their waters?

What's be totally honest, I found IT to be pretty messy. No one really seemed to know the fact that the vessel was there. I went looking back in the capital portal s be for some answers and a bit of A A Better understanding about how this entire industry was shaping up and being regulated in popularity.

I'd tried to chase down the head of the country's environment agency, but I eventually got hold of a manhole. Jerry gary, on zoom, he runs the mining regulatory authority for paper. Beginning an, he told me that any mining vessel that was Operating in paper against territories, al waters would definitely have officials from his agency on board to monitor what they are doing. And I pointed out, I just been one of us at a couple of days earlier, none of his officials had been on board. And this is what he said.

if they are on in in country and if they have not informed us that I don't think one of offices, what would be there? So that, that would be a concern.

So right now, do you know that the vessel is in the country?

I am not aware of the and .

yet you managing director.

the mineral resources authority.

you're right. Um I will deal with the um um prominent now that you told me now the company .

is the investors involved in this, they say, well, of course you knew about all of the officials and public. Can you know about what we're going to do there? All of them have signed off on IT, but he wasn't any person who said they weren't aware of that vessel.

I had a similar interaction with the manual Allen bird, also in the capital of city. He is the governor of one of the largest problems in paper. Again, he's been opposed for years to the idea of underwater mining.

So I asked him about this permission issue. Well, we have not permitted any new mining Operations on land, though. On land, what about offshore? We don't have any offshore Operations.

Allen. We've just been on a vessel in the base mark sea that is pulling .

up the ocean floor. Seriously, how do you feel about that shot? I had no idea. I thought the whole thing was a moveable.

You're A A senior governor in this country. yes. And the fact that you don't know about that, how does that make you feel?

Deeply worried.

okay. So so, so what should you take on this? Like like what's going on?

IT kind of depends, right? So you've got people who have an obligation to regulate an industry like this, whether that the environmental agency or the mining regulator, the Fisheries authority, really none of them claim to know anything about IT or we're willing to talk to me. And then you have people like alan bird and another senior governor about to and in happen again.

If you're the governor of province, you also remember the country's parliament, at which point your men obviously have oversight into particularly controversial industries like this one. And the fact that these people who for years have publicly opposed the idea of deeply mining the ID that they say, well, they didn't know about IT is, in a sense, not surprising. And the shock when I spoke to some of them about this was really very genuine from where I did.

I mean, so here we've got a developing nation as an outsider. IT seems like this is that story that's often told of really exploitation, uh, a resource grab from these, you know, foreign companies coming in and just trying to get materials and wealth. Is that what IT look like to you? Well.

I guess what was really striking, you know, you get off this vessel on this silent in the middle of this ocean, and you've his official saying we didn't know this happening. You've got senior members of the government, in some cases senior governors of other islands who've been very engaged in the subject saying we didn't know about IT. You then go to a nearby villages on the news sign to where the mining Operations are taking place. And people there had no idea that just over the horizon, kind of twenty miles south of where we were sitting talking, there's a vessel that's taking the first steps in starting deep sea mining Operations. And when they found out about this for us, they really were not happy.

You know, people are surprised the shocks. This is .

JoNathan museum is a former teacher. He spent years trying to stop mining from happening off the coast of pap egan ii, in particularly the ireland new island. Masterton helped fight against a previous increase of this, deeply, a mining venture. And he, in the communities he worked with along the island, thought they won that fight because the company went bankrupt.

Was all of our efforts on campaign inst mining. We thought that was, uh, that is.

you know and you know this this in turn was pretty surprising to me because IT showed that the company involved in this effort, you know, I may be meeting with government officials, maybe the local governor, maybe the prime minister, but IT doesn't seem to have really met with local people.

The communities that may be have the most to lose in terms of their livelihoods, particularly around fishing being threatened, people that really rely on fishing just off, you know, a few yards from where they they live on the coast line. The idea that the fish might be impacted by the industry was really surprising. You've got pretty powerful people involved in this particular effort as well.

There's a rush, Oliver, who's helps to finance this company. He currently is under eu and us sanctions after the russian invasion of ukraine. You've got another very powerful and wealthy mining magnet from a country called on in the arabian gulf. And there was this really pointing ant moment where this man, JoNathan Mason, the anti mining activists, he was really upset that this vessel was back in those nearby waters. He told me it's essentially, he was saying, local people who be the ones that suffer the consequences over the long term.

for we don't want to be used as skinner pigs for trial and arab because these metals that are going to be digg out of ocean benefit anyone from me because nobody, uh, Green and a generally show you you are taking minerals from the poor people and you go and enjoy your luxury live. But these people are going to be affected in a long term destruction to the marine ecosystem. And that that is something that we we are very question about.

So to me, it's really no emotion alone discussing this issue. It's it's you. So at home we have to.

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Now we're back with villa Marks talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to papa nogin I to watch a high tech deep sea mining Operation network. So you have a government, in this way, A A local population fighting to save what they see as their way of life. And in a company looking to exploit these resources, IT is it's really messy. Does people get me have a strong energy moving forward? Well.

in some ways, this would depend on what this company involved decides to do if if they think this is not going to make the money and the forests en worth that they may walk away. But that seems unlikely. The government has a financial stake in this effort, and that's really important to be aware of.

They invested money many years ago in this idea, and officials there are concerned about recouping that investment in a country that doesn't tend to have a huge amount spare money elsewhere in the world where this is theoretically been given approval. Countries like norway, japan in the cook island, things are moving really slowly. The effort in norway has been tied up in litigation for many months.

In japan, they are moving really cautiously, looking at the science before moving ahead. And that will be essentially of japanese state entity involved in that. In the cook islands, there are still quite early on in terms of their analysis of whether this will be a good or not. Those are really any places on earth whether is being considered genuine at the moment.

So list up away from public gi and in these other countries where um you know mining and territorial waters is is possibly on the horizon. I understand that that most of the actual interest in seabed mining is in international waters. Now why why is that?

Yes, you have these in plants of the ocean worldwide that have these massive and rich amounts of rare minerals and metals. Some of them are like these deposits in panic gini. And then you have other types of deposits on the sea floor, these kind of nodules that sit around on the sea floor and can be relatively picked up, the very richness, some of the minerals and rare metals that are of interest to come these worldwide until the the reason we didn't have the technology to reach some of these places that are, you know, miles deep in places like the pacific. But now because of the the advent of these remote control vehicles, these incredibly strong winches that can move things like these grabbing devices down there, this is all becoming a lot more accessible.

So with everything that you've learned on from this reporting trip that started from someone telling you, I shouldn't be saying this, but we're doing this thing like how are you thinking about deep sea mining right now?

There are arguments foreign against, like many of these things we need as a species, to reduce carbon emissions, right? No one, no one really questioned that. And one way to do that is to transition the way that we generate a news energy into techniques that the list likely to MIT carbon molecules into our atmosphere. And one way of doing that is using electric vehicles that say they need huge amount of material more than we know we have on earth right now.

So if everyone's going to drive an electric car one day, let alone everyone in developing nations that don't even have cars yet, and i'm talking thirty, forty, fifty years down the road, how are we going to develop those technologies without stuff, material, metals, minerals, if that is needed? Where is IT gonna come from? But then you baLance that with this idea that these activities could have huge damaging impacts on environments we don't really understand in the deep sea n and we don't really understand what those deep py environments mean for our broader atmosphere, for instance.

That really is concerning. This was a story, again, about powerful people and powerless people. You go to these local villages, those people don't feel they have a voice. They don't feel like they being listen to. They don't feel like they're even being seen.

And then you have outside investors, outside engineers, outside companies Operating over the horizon doing work that's not being broadcast or published or talked about, certainly not sharing their information with those local communities or even necessarily with all of the local government officials, you end up having that. What I think of is an informational in inequality. IT really does strike me as something that need strong global coordination, particularly we're going to move into international waters, deep sea mining. And part of that will obviously focus on ensuring that local communities benefit from this kind of activity. But does go ahead as much as some of the the billiards involved in IT.

Well, William, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us today.

Thanks so much. Having me I .

this episode was produced by Andrew mambo o. IT was edited by junior T. Q.

Lee was our engineer. IT was factual ked by great a pitcher. The Sunny story team includes jun yan and kim nature fame.

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