An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people
Thomas Jefferson
Critical thinking is a vital and fundamental skill we’re all taught in high school. It means analyzing all of the available facts, evidence, observations and arguments to form a judgment that is based on rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis. Employing critical thinking skills is a must when it comes to making decisions on complicated issues.
Environmental groups that oppose nodule harvesting have generally avoided the use of critical thinking to evaluate the practice, preferring instead to take a one-sided approach that puts a premium on emotive appeals over objective and unbiased analysis. Virtually every critique of nodule harvesting by these groups fails to take the most basic step in critical thinking and compare the practice’s impacts to the impacts of the alternative – terrestrial mining for the same metals. The lack of comparative analyses leaves NGOs without a valid yardstick to measure costs and risks associated with the activity. Without a yardstick, these groups rely on absolutes which renders their analyses nearly meaningless in the context of critical decision making.
Organizations that peddle misinformation do so for a reason. They know that using sensational claims and emotional language is a tried-and-true formula for overcoming the lack of substance behind their arguments and winning attention from the popular media. A lie told often enough becomes the truth with a little help from the mainstream press.
Prohibiting nodule harvesting runs counter to the missions of many of the environmental groups, who claim to be in the business of protecting the environment and humanity. Why would they provide misinformation that would hurt their ability to fulfill their mission? They know that sensationalism sells. A lie told often enough also helps win donations.
This behavior is dangerous, and we all pay the price for it. It compromises our national security, causes massive damage to the environment, threatens people’s lives, and threatens our economy. Not only do we have to deal with the consequences of these groups’ deception, but sometimes we quite literally pay the price. The US government funds some of these organizations – to include WWF. Your tax dollars help pay the CEO of WWF over a million dollars a year so that he may oversee the organization’s destructive campaigns.
We’ve listed a few examples below of the type of misinformation these groups use to try to frighten people. The truth is that we could fill many pages with the false information NGOs peddle about deep sea mineral extraction, but we are limiting the length of this section because a few examples are sufficient to make the point.
The deep sea hosts “…a staggering diversity of life on a par with that of tropical rainforests…”
Environmental Justice Foundation website, “Deep Sea Mining Has To Be Stopped”
The abyssal plains are “one of the most biodiverse places on the planet”
Bloomberg story by Todd Woody, “A Startup’s Rush for Underwater Metals Comes with Deep Risks”
The most comprehensive science today estimates that there are approximately 8.7 million species inhabiting the earth, and that 2.2 million of those species are marine inhabitants. (Camilo Mora, 2011). Around half of the world’s species are believed to be held in the world’s tropical rainforests (Lewis, 2015) implying that roughly 4.35 million species inhabit that ecosystem. Yet, the most recent work around species diversity within the Clarion Clipperton Zone (“CCZ”) abyssal plain estimates that only 8,000 metazoan species live in that region (Rabone, 2023). The CCZ occupies a part of the ocean equal in size to about half of the world’s existing tropical rainforests, so it is clear that the species density in the CCZ pales in comparison to that of tropical rainforests, and the claims made by these environmental groups are false.
Claims that the abyssal plains hold massive biodiversity almost always link to a 2002 paper by Paul Snelgrove and Craig Smith which pushed back against the idea that the deep ocean harbored no life at all. The authors in that paper cited estimates for species richness on the abyssal plains that ranged from 500,000 to 10 million. There are three important caveats to the biodiversity numbers posited in that work.
First, the numbers are highly speculative as the authors acknowledge. They noted that the high-end estimates, which environmental groups have latched onto, were “surprising.” The extremely large spread of estimates itself indicates that these numbers are preliminary – guesses that are not founded in primary data from the abyssal plains. They also noted that the estimates came from shallow water sampling, and the high-end number used a simple linear extrapolation to come up with an estimate. In other words, it assumed a constant rate of growth in species richness across the entire ocean even though at the time we knew that species counts tended to decline with depth, per a chart provided by the authors.
Second, and perhaps most important, work done since 2002, which depends on actual sampling on the abyssal plains, and species accumulation and rarefaction curves rather than general estimates, has generated species numbers that are far more modest than the high-end estimates referred to by environmentalists. As previously mentioned, the work published in 2023 by Muriel Rabone and her team suggested an upside estimate of around 8,000 species for the CCZ (Rabone, 2023).
Finally, there’s an apples to oranges problem with environmentalists’ claim. When we cite biodiversity in tropical rainforests, we are normally referring to plants and animals that live predominantly above ground. The environmentalists who claim massive biodiversity on the abyssal plains are referring to macrofaunal organisms (and sometimes microbes) which are subterranean, because these are the majority of the species which inhabit the abyssal plains. Most of these organisms are so small that they are not even visible to the human eye. Species estimates for tropical rainforests don’t generally include subterranean species. In fact, scientists believe that there is greater species richness below ground than there is above ground (Anthony, 2023), so it may be the case that we would need to expand the 4.35 million rainforest species significantly to make the comparison a fair one. Regardless, the fact that marine biologists believe approximately 8,000 species live in the muds of the CCZ tells the story adequately.
“The results of this new study (here – showing 92% of species on abyssal plain remain undiscovered, estimated species population of ~8,000 for CCZ) clearly show that decision makers and scientists still do not know nearly enough about which species live at the bottom of the CCZ, how big their populations are, or how each species contributes to the wider ecosystem. Without this information, it will not be possible to accurately predict or assess the environmental impacts of seabed mining activities.”
Pew Trust, 2023
The reality is that the proportion of undiscovered species is remarkably uniform across the globe. The authors omit the important fact that we haven’t discovered 86% of the world’s species on a global level, and we haven’t discovered 91% of ocean species. Despite the fact that approximately 85% of rainforest species are yet to be discovered, we clear cut these environments all over the world to mine for battery minerals today, potentially driving extinction of many unique species (not to mention all of the other human activities that make tropical rainforests the most endangered ecosystems in the world today).
A reasoned view would acknowledge that on an absolute basis there are far more unknowns associated with species in tropical rainforests than on the abyssal plains, and those species are more at risk as well. Tropical rainforests are believed to hold millions of unknown species while the abyssal plains hold tens of thousands according to research. (Rabone, 2023) (Park, 2002)(Pillay, 2021) (Mora, 2011)
While a terrestrial mine can destroy 100% of the biomass and biodiversity in its footprint, the comparative damage from nodule harvesting seems modest. A number of studies have found that the biodiversity directly in the path of a nodule harvester will decline 20-30% while there is no evidence of a decline in biodiversity in the plume zone around harvested areas. (Vonnahme, 2020) (O’Malley, 2023) In addition, terrestrial mining’s indirect impacts extend much further than the mine footprint, as damage can cover entire watersheds and pollution can travel great distances impacting all living organisms to include humans. (Macklin, 2023) (Sonter, 2017) The indirect impacts from nodule harvesting are far more modest by comparison. (TMC, 2023)
If our goal is to minimize uncertainty, then we should cease mining in tropical rainforests and move that production to the abyssal plains.
“Alternative solutions already exist: a combination of innovation, recycling and repair can satisfy industries’ needs for raw materials without opening the seafloor to mining.”
WWF Website, Activist, Jessica Battle, Deep Seabed Mining Would Destroy Biodiversity – And We Don’t Need It
This line of thought is incredibly dangerous. Wishful thinking doesn’t build products – minerals are required. If recycling, repair, and innovation could supply industry, why hasn’t this happened after more than 100 years? Why does the mining industry continue to grow today? These factors (recycling, repair, reuse, innovation) cannot even meet the underlying mineral demands for a world that is growing and industrializing – before accounting for the substantial incremental demand from the energy transition. As Daniel Yergin from S&P Global notes, “At the current rate of supply growth—which encompasses new mines, mine expansion and greater efficiency, and recycling, as well as substitution—the amount of copper available will be significantly smaller than the copper supply requirements.” Link.
Ignoring the need for a massive increase in primary metal production guarantees the world will not successfully decarbonize. High prices for electrification are already causing backlash. Restricting supply of minerals further by downplaying the need for and canceling new mines will only intensify the problem. So why would Jessica Battle make the astounding and counterintuitive leap to suggest that when we rapidly increase demand growth, we will find that recycling and repair save the day?
Energy analysts agree that the WWF spokesperson is providing deceptive information. The World Bank notes that, “While the recycling and reuse of minerals can play a key role in reducing emissions, mining will still be required to supply the critical minerals needed to produce these low-carbon technologies, even with large future increases in recycling rates.” They add that, “Technology and subtechnology choice, material substitution, and technological improvements will shift the demand for individual minerals under different low-carbon scenarios. Still, any lower-carbon pathway will increase the overall demand of minerals” Link
The International Energy Agency states that, “Overall, the recycling of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries to recover the valuable minerals, and to a smaller extent their reuse as second-life batteries, can reduce combined primary supply requirements for these minerals by around 10%. Although this does not eliminate the need for continued investment in primary supply of minerals, the contributions from recycled minerals could be even more prominent in the total supply if effective recycling policies are adopted more widely across the globe, with larger benefits particularly for the regions with higher EV deployment. (IEA, 2022)
Battle’s assumption that technology will save the day seems misplaced too. While technology is constantly creating greater efficiencies in battery technology and electric motor technology, it will not eliminate the need for new metals. If our goal is to take advantage of advances in technology to the greatest extent possible, our aim should be to create an abundance of energy minerals. Allowing scientists to work in an unconstrained environment where they are free to find the best solutions without limiting their choice of material, will lead to better outcomes. Restricting mineral supply while hoping that scientists figure out a workaround to the artificial constraint is not a winning strategy for faster decarbonization.
Recycling has its own set of issues and challenges, so we need to build realistic assumptions around the activity. As Wood Mackenzie notes, “While recycling can relieve some pressure from the supply deficit of battery raw materials, it will not be able to meet demand…. At present, the challenges of recycled battery raw materials seem insurmountable. Most of the discussion has been around the collection and recycling of end-of-life electric vehicles (EVs), but the process is plagued with challenges.” Link
Recycling electric vehicle batteries can be dangerous, and non-economic. “Recycling lithium batteries, however, can be hazardous. Cutting too deep into a cell or in the wrong place can result in it short-circuiting, combusting, and releasing toxic fumes. Because batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction, it is difficult to create efficient recycling systems. And because the cells are often held together with tough glues that make them difficult to take apart, it is often cheaper for battery makers to buy newly mined metals than to use recycled materials, even with rapidly increasing prices.” Link. And technologies that aim to make batteries less expensive can often work against recycling. For instance, LFP batteries, are uneconomic to recycle (at least the iron-phosphate portion) and thus they work directly against the concept of creating a circular energy transition (without large subsidies from the government.) Link
“We’re talking about destroying huge parts of our ocean”
Foreign Policy Website, Diva Amon, Activist, “Race to the Bottom: Deep Sea Mining Is the Next Frontier”
Deep-sea mining is a threat “to the entire marine environment” and cites “wide scale destruction of the seafloor”
Sharproject website, Deep-Sea Mining – an Environmental Disaster in the Making
The facts stand in direct opposition to these statements on two levels. First, the idea that harvesting nodules would destroy any part of the ocean is not in keeping with the empirical data gained over 45 years of harvesting tests on benthic impacts. Second, the activists greatly exaggerate the potential scale of the impacts from the activity and the potential those impacts have to do harm.
The DISCOL Project (DISturbance and reCOLonization experiment) intended to mimic the impact of nodule harvesting in a 11km2 area of abyssal plain off the coast of South America in the Peru Basin. The initial experiment was carried out in 1989 and involved a tracked vehicle that repeatedly traversed the ocean floor over the area trailing a specially designed plough-harrow that simulated the impact of a harvesting vehicle (Discol.de, n.d.). The DISCOL monitoring study from 2020 noted that microbial cell numbers were reduced by less than 30% in the 26 year-old tracks from the initial experiment (Vonnahme, 2020). The damage from the plough-harrow itself was more limited. “Less similarities to the subsurface communities were found in ridges, while communities in the furrows and the samples outside the track were even more dissimilar to the subsurface and indistinguishable from the reference communities” (Vonnahme, 2020). In addition, the microbial biodiversity had not shown significant negative impacts from the experiment: “No significant differences between the diversity indices inverse Simpson, Shannon Wiener, number of operational taxonomic units (OTUs), or Chao1 have been found between the microhabitats or sampling sites” (Vonnahme, 2020). Other studies have shown negative impacts to biodiversity soon after the simulated harvesting, as well as potential positive impacts to biodiversity after 25 years of recovery (Jones, 2017).
More recently, scientists have studied the impact of harvesting nodules in nodule harvesting operations undertaken in the CCZ during 2022. A study by Bryan O’Malley and his team of researchers has noted that biodiversity of foraminifera within the collector tracks decreased by only 20% immediately following harvesting and that biodiversity was not impacted at all in the plume zone (O’Malley, 2023).
In terms of scale, if the deep-sea mining industry supplied all of the NCM minerals (nickel, cobalt, manganese) required to electrify the world’s auto fleet over 20 years, harvesters would cover just 0.1% of the abyssal plains. Activists will argue that the indirect impacts from harvesting will compromise larger areas due to the midwater plume and noise impacts from riser systems. Yet, even when these impacts are considered, and we allow for much larger volumes of nodule harvesting, studies show that the impacted area is not much larger than the Clarion Clipperton Zone, which is equal to approximately 1.25% of the total ocean. Link If risers are not used, the impacts will be limited to well under one percent of the ocean.
Even with risers (and a midwater plume that may or may not accompany that technology), the idea that nodule harvesting has the potential to destroy large parts of the ocean is unrealistic. Scientists have estimated that a midwater plume might travel thousands of kilometers, but in such small concentrations that the plume would add 0.01 micrometers to sediment deposition, or approximately one percent of background sedimentation rates. Link And the noise from harvesters and risers is almost identical as that from dredges or oil and gas operations which operate all over the ocean every day. In other words, if these activities were capable of “wide scale destruction of the sea floor” then there would be no life on the seafloor today.
These statements represent nothing more than irresponsible fear mongering which has no basis in fact or place in a scientific discussion.
“Once massive mining machines begin stripping the seafloor, they’ll create dirty clouds of sediment, which will suffocate deep-sea habitats.”
The Oxygen Project Website, Five Ways Deep-Sea Mining Will Destroy Our Oceans
Environmental NGOs often use emotive words to charge their propaganda and entice donors. There has never been a nodule harvester that “strips” the seafloor. If you want to see strip mining, you need to go to Indonesia, the DRC, or Brazil to see battery minerals being mined. The plume which the Oxygen Project claims will suffocate habitats has proven to be very manageable and not very dangerous at all. Work done by Bryan O’Malley documented impacts from nodule harvesting in late 2022 and noted that foraminifera (forams), which are widely considered an excellent bioindicator for ecosystem stressors, indicated zero impact to biodensity or biodiversity in the plume zone (outside the harvester footprint) following harvesting. (O’Malley, 2023)
“The effects of noise and sediment plumes will be far-reaching and their effects can be expected to persist over long timescales.”….“Deep-sea ecosystems will struggle to ever recover to pre-impact state.” … “The critical role of benthic and pelagic deep-sea species and ecosystems in the cycling and storage of carbon. Deep-seabed mining may disrupt and lead to the potential collapse of these processes and could exacerbate our current crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.”
Flora & Fauna Report, Update to “An Assessment of the risks and impacts of seabed mining on marine ecosystems”
Without the use of risers, the effects of noise and sediment plume are highly localized and not very impactful. As noted above, empirical data from nodule harvester operations has demonstrated no impact from bottom water plumes on biodiversity and biomass outside the harvesting footprint. TMC’s harvesting program has shown that benthic plume impacts will not extend more than 1,000 meters from the harvesting footprint, and that the plume does not migrate upward into currents that can take the plume further. (TMC, 2023) In addition, an operation using an alternate non-riser lift system will create no more noise than traditional dredging operations that occur every day all around the globe.
Riser systems can cause midwater plumes that travel long distances, but contractors have suggested that they will stop releasing sediment at midwater levels and will instead return that sediment back to the ocean floor, eliminating the long-distance plume. Noise from riser systems will still impact the SOFAR channel where it can travel greater distances than normal. But the same is true for oil and gas operations that have been working for decades. There are thousands of deepwater oil and gas rigs that use risers which span through the SOFAR channel, so it is difficult to imagine that even if nodule harvesting becomes a big business, it would push anything in the ocean to the point of no recovery as the Flora and Fauna document suggests.
And while the Flora & Fauna report asserts that deep sea ecosystems will struggle to ever recover, actual data show that biodiversity can return to and exceed previous levels 25 years after harvesting takes place.
As for the potential “collapse” in cycling and storage of carbon, we treat these concerns under the next quotation.
“We do know the seabed is an important carbon sink – making the idea of mining operations that would churn up sediment and release that carbon an unlikely “solution” to our climate crisis. The potential harms extend to fisheries and food security, as well.”
WWF Report, The Future is Circular
Multiple lifecycle analyses have demonstrated that nodule harvesting not only releases far less sequestered carbon dioxide than does terrestrial mining, but that carbon dioxide emissions from nodule harvesting are just a fraction of those associated with terrestrial mining on a per unit of metal produced. In other words, the data shows that rather than exacerbating climate change impacts, nodule harvesting would do the exact opposite.
Nodule harvesting takes much less energy per unit of metal extracted than terrestrial mining and so creates fewer emissions. This is because there is no heavy work needed to blast, drill, and dig through massive quantities of overburden to access nodules. In addition, there’s no need to transport and process waste rock, which is ~98-99% of the ore that is trucked out of a terrestrial mining site (nodules are 100% commercial material – virtually no waste). Finally, because nodules are soft, they can be crushed with little energy while hard rock deposits often require massive amounts of energy to crush ore before the pay can be separated.
Nodule harvesting also reduces the release of sequestered CO2 that is stored in the ground. Again, the extraordinarily large benefits from nodule harvesting relate to overburden and grade advantages of nodules vs. terrestrial mines. Consider the fact that we move an estimated 500,000 tons of rock to make a 1,000 ton battery when we mine those battery minerals from a terrestrial mine (using a 4:1 strip ratio and 1% ore grade). By contrast, we don’t have to move any rock (releasing sequestered CO2) to acquire battery minerals with nodules. This is because there is no overburden removal necessary in nodule harvesting, and because the ore grade is 100% in a nodule vs. around 1% in a terrestrial mine. The implication in terms of CO2 release is clear. If one methodology unearths sequestered carbon at a 500:1 ratio of rock to pay material, and the other unearths at a very low figure of something approaching 1:1, then we should do everything we can to encourage the extraction technique that causes far less unearthing of sequestered carbon dioxide if CO2 emissions are the main driver for decision making.
The low potential for CO2 release from nodule harvesting is due not only to the lack of overburden, but also because the low levels of CO2 present in sediment disturbed by the harvester does not have a pathway to the atmosphere. As a number of scientific bodies have noted, disturbed particles form a plume, but that plume settles quickly and without migrating upward. At abyssal plains depths, methane gas is soluble and does not form bubbles, so it does not rise as it would in warm, low pressure waters near the surface. Instead, the carbon will settle along with the sediment. TMC website Link
The Seabed Mineral Authority in the Cook Islands states, “Although there is a very small amount of organic carbon in the sediment, we would expect some to be mobilised in any sediment plume and should consider its fate. Experiments and models of such plumes show that almost all the sediment resettles within a few kilometres. Furthermore, because of the high density of the bottom current, the Antarctic Bottom Water, the plume would not rise more than a few hundred metres above the seafloor (plume studies have shown that it will not rise more than a few meters, but this website was published before that data became available). This seabed-mobilised organic carbon will not reach the surface waters.” “The present scenarios for seabed mining in the Basin would not release significant amounts of deposited inorganic, deposited organic carbon or dissolved carbon, and would not have a significant effect on the climate crisis.” (SBMA website)
The same scientific underpinnings are evident in comments from Professor of Geoscience, Derrik Stow, Head of Institute at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. According to Dr. Stow, “The sediment churned up and organic carbon released by seabed mining will have “almost no effect” on climate.” “The amount of disturbance that could be caused to sequestered carbon dioxide in the sediment is almost terribly minimal in scale.” (Scientific American, 2019)
“The damage to ocean biodiversity would be 25 times greater than the impact of land-based mining”
Jessica Battle, WWF Activist, Link
The claim that Jessica Battle makes bears no resemblance to reality and is based on the faulty work from an activist group called Planet Tracker. The Planet Tracker statistic comes from a report the group published in June 2023. That report is so full of faulty analyses, poor logic, omitted information, and bad data, that it is hardly worth mentioning. Yet bombastic claims from the report received widespread coverage in the media, so we rebut it here despite its notable shortcomings.
Jessica Battle says that the study points to damages to biodiversity from nodule harvesting that are 25x that of terrestrial mining, but she managed to get this wrong in two respects. The report doesn’t measure damage or potential damage, it only measures the potential area (volume) impacted by the two types of operations. Ironically, Battle has unwittingly pointed to one of the key shortcomings of the report – measuring impact rather than damage. Beyond that, the impacts from harvesting are exaggerated in the report, while those of terrestrial mining are minimized, to make the comparison more dramatic in the direction that the authors aim to steer their readers.
Impact and damage are very different concepts. When we clear cut one square kilometer of tropical rainforest, blast hundreds of feet below the surface, and truck out massive quantities of ore for processing, we are doing immense harm to that 1 km2 ecosystem, destroying all of the biomass and biodiversity that once was resident in that patch of land. On the other hand, if you took a walk over that same 1 km2 you would also have an impact on the land, compacting the ground, moving vegetation, making noise, and exhaling carbon dioxide. The Planet Tracker analysis treats these two activities – taking a walk and strip mining – as equals. As one can imagine, this faulty logic invalidates the entirety of their report.
Damage or potential damage is what matters, and the Planet Tracker report makes no attempt to assess damage from nodule harvesting impacts. This is because doing so would be detrimental to their cause. They cite widespread harvesting impact from plumes and from noise (their impact estimates are far greater than the empirical data suggest, but we don’t even need to call them out on this because the rest of their work is so faulty). Studies have shown, however, that there is minimal to no damage from bottom water plumes, and the noise of a harvester is similar to that of a dredge. We allow dredges to operate every single day of the year, all over the globe, in environments where there is far more sea life than on the abyssal plains.
The data show that the damage done from terrestrial mining is far greater than that done in nodule harvesting, and it extends over an area far wider than the mine site. (Benchmark, 2023) (Paulikas, 2022) (Sonter, 2017) Terrestrial mining also causes far greater damage to human beings, triggering disease and death, taking land and sustenance from people, and causing considerable social upheaval and strife. (Macklin, 2023) Human damage from nodule harvesting is virtually non-existent as there are no known mechanisms by which indirect impacts from harvesting would impact humans or their food supply (unless something from the vessel was spilled into the ocean – and assuming no midwater plume).
The Planet Tracker study also downplays the impacts and damage from terrestrial mining – awkward for an organization that is supposed to be dedicated to stopping ecological collapse! We will leave the calculations for a footnote but suffice it to say that based on data from independent scientific studies, Planet Tracker underestimated the volume of mining impacts by approximately 520x. When that adjustment is made, the impacts from terrestrial mining extend over an area 70x larger than those from nodule harvesting. But if the nodule operations are adjusted to reflect an alternate lifting system rather than risers, then the nodule impact zone will be reduced by more than 95%, so the reality is that terrestrial mining impacts will be hundreds or thousands of times larger than a non-riser system nodule operation. Finally, the Planet Tracker uses data from mining sites today without allowing for growth, and the energy transition is forecasted to result in large growth in supply. On the other hand, the group assumed very large growth in their assumptions for nodule harvesting. Biases permeate the Planet Tracker analysis.
- Footnote – Planet Tracker estimates the amount of land directly impacted by terrestrial mining to be approximately 25 million km2 and that the total volumetric impact is spread over 1-10 million km3 based on vertical impacts of 50-400 meters. But Planet Tracker doesn’t apply the same level of inspection to noise and plumes associated with land mining as it does in the case of nodule harvesting, and this allows it to keep the mining numbers small. While it assumes that plumes from mine activities can travel from 50-400 meters vertically to make its calculation, a study on mineral particles has noted that they can travel over 10,000 kilometers and rise 7 kilometers in the air. Making the adjustment per data from this study could increase the land area impacted by approximately 12x to 300 km2 and the volumetric area by a further 17.5x, leaving a total area impacted of approximately 5.2 billion km3. This would be around 70x the amount of impact that Planet Tracker estimated as impacted by nodule harvesting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5#MOESM1