This month, last-ditch attempts are being made to negotiate regulations for deep-sea mining, with the ugly possibility that exploration could begin without any in place. With or without regulation, the novel practice “risks triggering a domino effect of unintended consequences that could destabilize the ocean, trigger food insecurity and affect all life on Earth,” according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC). Yet in the face of international pressure over those risks, the CEO of the Canadian firm that sparked the two-year deadline for these rushed negotiations has explained the decision to push ahead with a relatively simple pitch: Seabed mining has been made urgent for the U.S. and those aligned with it because of China’s dominant position within the cobalt trade and both it and Russia’s roles as major nickel suppliers “cornering the battery material supply chain.”
The case for rushing ahead put forward by the Canadian firm, known as The Metals Company (TMC), is that the battle for the materials which might be found at the bottom of the ocean, could be at the heart of a transition toward clean (low carbon) energy, and China (and Russia) can’t be allowed to control them. This, in their eyes, justifies the use of heavy machinery at depths beyond 200 meters to retrieve valuable mineral deposits from the deep seabed, even if that process — and the process of pumping it up to the surface — releases sand, seawater and other mineral waste back into the water and disrupts marine habitats. However, while the simplicity of that messaging might make it easier to put across — and conveniently taps into existing geopolitical narratives — there are good reasons why this situation doesn’t actually fit into such limited terms, if you listen to ocean conservation groups rather than industry and state players.
“Any TMC reference to China and Russia is a red herring,” Sian Owen, director of the DSSC says via email. “Both nickel and cobalt are on the way out, as far as EV [electric vehicle] battery technology is concerned, with a strong possibility that they will be irrelevant to renewable energy by the time deep-sea mining actually came online (assuming it was approved).”
The point is that you can pitch this as a race for the future, but there’s always a chance you’re actually racing in the wrong direction entirely. “A recent World Bank study concluded that with the rapid evolution in the battery sector, forecasting which technology will be the most used from now until 2050 is nearly impossible,” Owen adds. “LFP [lithium iron phosphate] batteries are already well-established, leaping from 10% of the global EV market share in 2018 to about 40% in 2022, driving a reduction in cobalt demand.”
Duncan Currie, legal adviser for the DSCC, adds via email that “Most nickel is used for stainless steel (60-70%)” and “it’s still an important metal in general,” but the specific pitch for these materials as key strategic sources of clean energy remains a harder sell. Owen details that “Tesla is already using LFP batteries, and Ford and Volkswagen have announced plans to adopt the technology.” She notes that “In April 2021, Chinese EV company BYD [比亚迪股份有限公司)] announced investment in LFP batteries and that they would be removing cobalt, nickel and manganese entirely from their vehicle batteries.” At the same time, “BMW, Renault, Volkswagen, Scania and Volvo have all publicly ‘pre-divested’ from deep-sea minerals.”
A second issue with any China-centric view of the situation refers to the ongoing negotiations at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) themselves. At the start of this week, The Financial Times published an article stating that “China is the biggest ISA member state to be explicitly betting that the seabed could help it prolong its sway over critical mineral supply chains, as the productivity of terrestrial mines continues to decline.” It pointed out that Chinese companies hold five out of 31 exploration licenses, and cited one ambassador to the ISA as saying: “It is well known that China sees this as a way of conserving its geostrategic domination of minerals … Their general attitude is to make sure that the work is advancing as fast as possible … They are very serious.”
But again there are missing details here. China is the biggest country by many measures, because it’s a massive country. The U.S. is not an ISA member because it has not signed up to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and it does in fact hold exploration contracts itself through the U.K. arm of Lockhead Martin, known as U.K. Seabed Resources. And Duncan Currie points out that while “China is an active participant in the regulation negotiations [it has] never indicated that it intends to engage in [deep-sea mining] in the near future. For instance, it hasn’t (unlike India or Nauru) carried out component testing.” Along the same lines, a China Daily article from March this year, written in dialogue with a senior researcher in the country’s shipbuilding industry, stated that regarding deep-sea mining “China lags behind in terms of knowledge, technology and hardware, which highlights the importance of government attention and investment.”
So why the rush to position China as most responsible? Why not simply place it as one of 16 countries the DSCC names as “leading the push to mine the deep sea” (China, Japan, Canada, India, South Korea, Russia, Brazil, Singapore, Belgium, Germany, the U.S. … and the U.K., as well as the Pacific Island states of Kiribati, Nauru, the Cook Islands and Tonga)?
We can only speculate. But from The Metal Company’s point of view at least, you’d have to think it had something to do with its admission to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in June 2022, that: “Operations in the [Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ)] are certain to disturb wildlife and may impact ecosystem function. Impacts on CCZ biodiversity may never be completely and definitively known. It may also not be possible to definitively say whether the impact of nodule collection on global biodiversity will be less significant than those estimated for land-based mining.” In other words, there are a lot of negative consequences here, and pointing at a geopolitical rivalry with China offers the justification for urgency which might reduce the scrutiny on them.
Image by Mitchell Raman from Pixabay
Leave a Reply