Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Mining the deep sea

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

The good news: The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) contains more nickel and cobalt than the rest of the world’s land-based reserves combined. It also has significant resources of high-grade lithium, copper and rare earth metals—all of which are critical for the batteries the world needs to meet Paris Agreement targets. The bad news: The CCZ lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and contains biodiverse ecosystems we know very little about—and that we could profoundly harm if we mine them. The CCZ lies between Hawaii and Mexico and is about half the size of the continental United States. And it’s just one of many potential deep-sea sources of critical minerals. So should we mine the deep sea to fight climate change? And if we do, how do we also protect seafloor ecosystems? In this episode, Shayle talks to Renee Grogan, an expert in deep-sea mining. She is a co-founder and board director at Impossible Metals.  Together they cover topics like: The different types of seafloor resources, including polymetallic nodules, cobalt ferro-manganese crusts, and massive sulfides Better understanding seafloor ecosystems and incorporating science into mining practices and regulations, including selective harvesting, protected areas, and offsets The challenges of enforcing regulations three to five kilometers below the surface Ongoing negotiations at the International Seabed Authority, which was planning to finalize regulations for deep-sea mining last week, but announced that it needed more time. Recommended Resources: NYT: Pacific Seabed Mining Delayed as International Agency Finalizes Rules Forbes: Deep Sea Mining: The Biggest Climate Issue You’ve Never Heard Of British Geological Survey: Deep-sea mining evidence review – MineralsUK Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by RE+. RE+ is more than just the largest clean energy event, it’s a catalyst for industry innovation designed to supercharge business growth in the clean energy economy. Learn more: re-plus.com.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst. The size of the resource is really staggering. So there's an area called the Clarion-Cliberton Zone. It's between Mexico and Hawaii. It has an estimated resource of nickel that is larger than the entire global terrestrial nickel resource. Understanding the complexities of mining,

copper and cobalt and nickel and other means, minerals that we totally need for the energy transition from polymetallic nodules at the bottom of the ocean and from the complex ecosystems that sit there that we know almost nothing about. You know I love a deep dive. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on,

coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made.

Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies and energy impact partners. Welcome. So to a first approximation, I think. that a big part of decarbonization is basically a transition from the extraction of fossil fuels to the extraction of minerals. If you've got a sufficiently extended time horizon, then the bet is to go short oil and gas and go long mining. Graphite, silicon, lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, rare earths, and on and on and on. At the highest level,

I think that raises two big questions. One, are we going to be able to find and extract all those minerals cost effectively. And two, how do we avoid creating an entirely new environmental disaster in the process? Enter the concept of deep sea mining or seabed mining, which is easily one of the most controversial topics in the world right now in a literal sense. The case in favor, abundant, rich deposits of minerals that we absolutely need more of that are ready and waiting for us to extract. The case against, a bevy of basically unknown ecosystem impacts in some the world's richest ecosystems that we are yet to explore. It is literally a live debate amongst countries and companies and populations and international authorities, and it's one of those thorny issues

that really does deserve a deep examination. It is important, I think, to understand that there is no free lunch in decarbonization. So if it's not free, how expensive is this lunch? I really enjoyed this conversation on this topic with Renee Grogan. Renée is a deep-sea mining expert. She's been involved in terrestrial mining and then ultimately in seabed mining for the better part of 20 years now. She's also a co-founder and a board director at a seabed mining company called Impossible Metals. But I find her to be fairly balanced as she thinks about these issues. So with no further ado, here's Renee. Renee, welcome.

Thank you for having, Michelle. I'm really excited to talk to you about seabed mining. It's in the news a lot of late. And it's one of these areas that I feel like is super important to understand, but also kind of confusing. So I'm excited to try to separate out some of the complicated bits and talk about them one by one. Starting with maybe why do we care? Like what do we know about the resource that we believe sits at the bottom of the ocean in terms of metals and minerals? and how much of it is there?

What does it look like? Give me a sense of the asset base that we're talking about. Sure. I think that's a really important first question. So it kind of comes out in a few parts. The first, Why Do We Care relates to the terrestrial mining world and the supply chain that we have in terms of critical metals on land. So we know that there are a whole bunch of different projections

around the volumes of critical metals that we'll need to transition to a lot. low-carbon economy. When I talk critical metals, I'm talking nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, and a few others, rarest. So we understand that, generally speaking, we do not have access to enough of those metals on land to be able to transition at the speed that we would like to into a low-carbon economy. So what that means is that we either don't have access to those metals geopolitically. They're in locations where the nation state is non-democratic or there's not free trade. Or the environment that they're located in makes it difficult to extract them. So they might be in a rainforest or they might be hosted by non-competent rock,

which means it's really hard to manage the waste. Or they might be in really difficult locations to mine. So we know that we need more of these metals than we currently have. And we also know a little bit about the seabed resource, particularly in relation to polymetallic nodules. And the early projections for polymetallic nodules, which are these potato-shaped rocks that sit at the bottom of the ocean on the seabed at about five kilometres depth,

they are high in nickel, cobalt and copper. And the size of the resource is really staggering. So there's an area called the Clarion-Clibertan zone. It's between Mexico and Hawaii. It has an estimated resource of nickel that is larger than the entire global terrestrial nickel resource. So more than you have in the entire global terrestrial environment in this one location of the seabed. So it's a massive resource in terms of opportunity to provide metals for the green economy, but also in terms of enabling a consideration

of market trends and market drivers on those metals. So the way that we look at metal prices, and how that's driven obviously by demand, will also impact on which particular deposits you target in terms of return on investment and risk. These polymetallic nodules contain, they're polymetallic, they contain multiple metals, right? And so as you said, the ones in this particular area, it's nickel, cobalt, copper, all of which we need,

you know, nickel and cobalt for batteries, copper for electricity, transmission, and batteries, and lots of other things. Is it those three in general that we believe to be the big resources in the seabed, or there are others? I mean, you mentioned before stuff like lithium and rare earths and so on. Is it that different regions have different polymetallic nodules that contain different minerals, or is it predominantly nickel-cobalt copper? So the way you break it down, firstly, is there are three different hosted mineralogies on the seabed.

So what that means is three different kind of rock types. The first is the polymetallic nodules. So they're the rocks that just sit on the seabed. They're not connected to the seabed in any way. If you were down there, you could pick them up with your hands. The second type is something called seafloor massive sulfides, which you would have seen on the David Attenborough type show. These are the active smoking vents.

So from a mineralogy perspective, they're almost identical to what we call volcanic massive sulfides on land. So we're very experienced at mining these particular deposits and all our mineral processing technology can take these kinds of deposits very easily. Obviously, there are some pretty different environmental impacts associated with those, but they're very high in copper predominantly. They also host gold and silver. And then we have something called cobalt-feromanganese crusts.

Again, the clues in the name, but they are high in cobalt and also iron. And they resemble what we call on land-banded ironstone formations, which we mine for iron ore. So they have a similar analogy on land as well. Once you get into polymetallic nodules, there are two main regions that we know about. The Clarion-Cliberton zone has a higher mineralogy of nickel, whereas in the Cook Islands, they're slightly higher cobalt.

And those polymetallic nodules also host manganese and some rare earths as well. And, you know, as we know from terrestrial mining world, it's one thing for there to be a resource. There's one thing for there to be a particular kind of ore. There's another thing how high the ore concentration is, how easy it is to extract the mineral from the ore and so on. So you can have a deposit that has lots of the thing that you want, but it's uneconomic to actually extract.

What do we know about these seabed resources in terms of how rich they are in these particular minerals? and I think it's probably somewhat speculative, but just high-level economically, do we think these would be, if we were just placing them on a cost curve for nickel or cobalt or copper or rare earth or whatever it might be,

are they going to sit at the bottom of that cost curve, be really, really cheap to extract, or top of the cost curve? Is this going to be like the most expensive resource we could find, but we might need to do it anyway because we just need so much of this stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. When I talk about costs,

I usually talk about economics as well as feasibility because they're both really important considerations. And when you look at how, for instance, stock exchanges list metal resources, they take into account both of those things. So firstly, in relation to economics and grade, the grade of seabed resources is generally higher than the grade of land-based resources. And that's purely because we haven't got there yet. So back in the 80s, we mined all the high-grade terrestrial deposits.

and the 90s. And so we've kind of run out of the really high-grade terrestrial deposits, and so we have some catch-up to do in relation to seabed deposits. So in polymetallic nodules, you might get higher grade of nickel, sort of double the content of your average terrestrial resource now. In something like seaflomassive sulfides, the grade can be 10 times as high as a typical terrestrial copper mine. So that's the kind of grade analogy. Then secondly, we move into the economics of how to get it off the seafloor. That is a really wide spectrum. There's been a lot of debate among industry members about the economics of that. It will, there are a couple of different projections that kind of put it sort of in the mid to

two-thirds range of economics, so certainly feasible. It's not the cheapest method of mining by any means. But one of the implications, there are a couple of implications that are really important to consider. The first is rehabilitation liability. So when you have a terrestrial deposit and you have something like a waste rock dump or a tailing stamp that you need to manage in perpetuity, there's a massive economic cost to that that's always underestimated throughout the mining process. And that cost undoubtedly will be lower for seabed mining in terms of rehabilitation costs, predominantly because it's difficult or impossible to rehab, but also because you won't have waste form liabilities like waste rock dumps. The other thing to consider is what we call utilization.

So utilization relates to both terrestrial and seabed mining, and it's basically the percentage of time that you're up and running. So all your machines are mining and you're generating revenue. So in a terrestrial mine, you want really higher utilization up around the 90% mark. And if you have a lower utilization in seabed mining, then your economics will fall away. So for mines that are projecting a utilization of about 60%, you could expect them to perform poorly economically related to their terrestrial counterparts. So one of the things the minerals industry in the seabed is working on is increasing that utilization rate. The last thing I think that's really important to consider is feasibility. And in the mining world, that relates to how you define the value of the resource.

So if you're looking at stock exchange rules in particular, all of the stock exchanges, the major stock exchanges have mineral resource definition rules. And there are different categories to the way you can describe your resource. So a resource is basically talking about the ore that's there. So we know how much is there. We know what the grade is. Once you start calling it a reserve or you want to call it a reserve, then you're talking about being able to firstly extract that resource at all, so practically,

and then feasibly, which relates to an economic return. So then you're starting to look at the cost of extracting it and the cost of processing it and determining whether that's going to give you a positive return on investment. And you have to go through all of that in order to be able to convert your resource into a reserve, which is where you start to see valuations of companies increase when they have more certainty around the fact

that they can first practically mine that resource and process it for the required grade or outcome. and then secondly, that they can do that in an economic way. And then the final little bit that sits over the top of that, which is also really important, and I'm sure we'll get to it, is around permitting access. So if you have an uncertain regulatory regime or you don't yet have your permits to mine, then you can't convert a resource to a reserve. Okay, so that's a good segue.

So let's step back for a second. So it appears we have this enormous resource of a variety of minerals that we know we need, and in fact we'll need more of for the energy transition sitting on the seabed. We believe that it would be economic to extract, and depending on a bunch of factors that can move this way or that way, it would at least fall into the, like this fits into the type of mining that we would need to be doing to increase the volumes of these minerals. There is, of course, one big high-level question that is the big question of debate

literally as we record this, which we're going to release this in a week or so, but as we record this, there's a big event going on, as I understand it, which you can tell me more about in Jamaica to address the first order question, which is should we be extracting this stuff? Which then follows from that. If the answer to that is potentially yes, then how do we extract it? How do we minimize the impacts and so on? So let's start with what is actually happening right now in the,

geopolitical arena around this question of should we allow seabed mining? And then I want to dig into the debate there. Like what are the arguments for it and against it and how do different methods of potential seabed mining affect that? But let's start with what's actually happening. Like what is the process? There's an odd process here, at least from my untrained eye, that the world is undergoing to determine whether to allow seabed mining. So how did this all come to be? Sure. So there's a couple of different things. Let's talk about Jamaica first and then we can talk about the rest of the world. So when we talk about Jamaica, we're talking about the international seabed authority, which is a body, an international body that was established by the United Nations under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. And it was created to be the Department of Mines, so to speak, in international waters. So it's a governing body. It's set up quite similar to the United Nations. So it's a governing body. It's set up quite similar to the United Nations. So it's a, it has a council and a general assembly, and they are charged with exploiting and protecting at the same time. So that's one of the many tricky things about it. They are essentially the Department

of Mines and the Department of Environment in one body. So they passed quite a long time ago, they passed exploration regulations, which allows companies or state-owned, state-sponsored companies to explore for seabed minerals and to do all the things that go along with exploration generally. So that includes environmental studies and resource definition. So companies have been doing that under licences for a couple of decades now. And we're now at a point where the ISA is getting ready to approve exploitation regulations. So that would be the rules associated with mining. And in in preparing to approve those regulations, they have kind of answered the question about should it go ahead or will it go ahead? Because the assumption is that if they're doing all of this

work on the regulations, that at some point, whether it's now or in the future, those regulations will be passed or approved and the framework will be laid in place to allow mining to go ahead in some capacity or to allow the consideration of mining projects. And this is something that I think is a really important consideration. So what's just, I will come back to that in a minute, but what's happening in Jamaica right now is that the clock is up. So about two years ago in July of 2021, Nauru, which is a sponsoring state of the metals company, which is a company, private company or listed company that has exploration licenses, triggered what's known colloquially as the two-year rule. So it's a, it's a trigger under Unclos, the Convention on the Law of the Sea,

that requires the ISA to finalize the exploitation regulations within two years. So it started a clock ticking, and that clock is about to run out. So two years ago, the island state of Nauru, tiny, tiny, tiny little country, in partnership with the metals company, which is a seabed mining company, or at least in theory, a seabed mining company, or they haven't mined anything yet, started the clock for the first time on this, like, you have two years to, design rules phenomena. So that had never happened. No one had ever started the clock before, basically, and that's what is coming due right now. Correct. That's right. And all it takes is any,

any country can decide to start the clock at any time. This was the rule that was set out. Well, Nauru did it in his capacity as the sponsoring state of the metals company. So that was a really clear kind of indication that we, Nauru, would like to see the regulations in place so that we can go ahead, we can benefit from the activity taking place, and the mechanism to force the conclusion of the regulations was kind of put in place, I guess, to allow for a kick-starting of the industry if it seemed that it was flagging. So the ISA was, was certainly working on the regulations far before this happened. The first draft of the regs on exploitation came out, I think, in about 2017. So there was certainly a lot of work happening in

the space, but the two-year rule really triggered a sort of speeding up of the process. What happens, so I think just quickly to run out on what happens in Jamaica, there are a couple of different options. The ISA, the council and the General Assembly, approve the regulations. And if that happens, then the framework is in place for the ISA later on to consider an application for mining. It doesn't give anyone permission to go mining. It gives companies permission to submit an application and then for that application to be assessed on its merits from many perspectives, both economic and environmental. So they could approve the regs. They could not approve the regs in two ways. Firstly, they could just

say we're not ready and to not put it forward for a vote, or they could put it forward for a vote and it could be blocked by the council. So in either of those cases, we have a situation where the two-year rule expires, and the wording in the convention, if that happens, requires the ISA to consider and provisionally approve an application. So even if they don't pass the regulations in July, there is a requirement for the governing body to review an application for mining. So there still is some form of kind of safety net around, it's still not a green light to go ahead and go mining. There's just then the water becomes a lot murky, a pardon the pun, because the process for considering that application is not really set out,

whereas under the regulations it's very well set out. So that's what's happening in Jamaica. Just to really quickly give you some context, there is other stuff happening elsewhere in the world. And that is, so a couple of nations, the Cook Islands is one, New Zealand is another, have passed their own deep sea mining legislation. So they have legislation in place that allows for mining applications to be considered. The New Zealand process is a little bit ahead of the Cooks, but that would relate to mining deposits within their exclusive economic. zone. So within the 200 nautical miles that they control as a nation state. So that's the other way

that the deep sea mining could go ahead within the exclusive economic zone of a nation state that has passed its regulations. The regulations that the ISA is proposing or considering apply only to what's called areas beyond national jurisdiction. So pass that 200 nautical miles, what we kind of colloquially referred to as the high seas. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity. But enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators,

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I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital. As I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. Okay, so lots going on from a regulatory and potentially permitting perspective. And it's been hotly debated, right?

In the context of this clock ticking at the ISA, there have been, I don't know, 20-some countries have called for a pause or a moratorium. There have been a bunch of companies that have done the same thing. They're Greenpeace activists, all this kind of stuff. So I want to kind of just try to lay out the case on either side. side here. There's obviously a contingent of people who think we should we should not be doing this at all. Can you make the case? What is the argument against seabed mining fundamentally? Sure. So the argument against seabed mining is that the impacts aren't well understood and that

the impacts could be really significant and that the deep seabed itself as an ecosystem is not well understood, which is kind of part of the argument that if you don't understand the environment, then you probably don't understand the impact you're going to have on the environment. That is the main concern or the main kind of no vote parameter for not having seabed mining, go ahead. And not well understood implies impacts could be, who knows what the impacts would be. So we could be damaging ecosystems and populations that we don't even know exist, let alone, you know, that we understand how they behave.

And so if we, the argument, I guess, then is if we move too quickly to exploit these resources, we won't know the damage we've done until we've already done it. Is that basically right? Yeah, that's the concern. Absolutely. And so I think there's a couple of really important considerations when we start to talk about this, because it is a valid concern. And we do need to be very, very careful. There's a term called the precautionary principle or the precautionary,

approach, which is something that's been talked about a lot, which is sort of this concept of taking precautions and not acting before you know what your impacts are going to be. So from my perspective and also from the experience I've had in the terrestrial mining world, there are two really important things to understand. The first is the value of the ecosystem. So you need to do baseline studies and you need to understand what species and what ecosystems live in the deep sea and to what extent they're valuable to themselves and to each other and to the broader ecosystem. So it's a very complex question and it's not at all easy to answer.

But that's the first thing. And then the second thing that you have to do is to engineer a solution that protects those values. So we have a situation where if you have really, really good understanding of the environmental values in an area that you're proposing to impact, then you do have a little bit of an easier pathway in terms of engineering and impact or engineering a system that impacts on the environment, but making sure that you can protect the values. And so traditionally on the land, that has looked like rehabilitation of a mine's light at the end of the mine's life, but also things like offsets and protected areas. So you might say we're not going to impact this particular part of the mining lease

because we know there's a lot of really important values there. We're going to make sure that it stays protected. But we are going to impact this other area over here because we're going to dig a big hole. So you do have a little bit more freedom if you really understand the values in your environment. We have done a huge amount of work on the seabed, but almost everybody agrees that there's more work to do. and I think the concept that I frequently rely on is something called a species accumulation curve. So usually when you do a survey on land and you start to look for animals,

the more you survey or the more sort of work that you do and species that you count, eventually that curve will start to flatten out because you've basically counted all the species that are there. You're not seeing anything new. We don't see that species accumulation curve flatten out in the deep sea, particularly for what's called sediment in fauna, so stuff that lives within the sediment or the mud on the seafloor, it is so biodiverse and so low in biomass.

So there's not much of it, but it's very diverse, that it's very difficult to get that species accumulation curve to flatten out, which means it's very difficult to really know what's there. And if you don't really know what's there, then it's quite difficult to protect it. So then you have to sit back and say, okay, we have to come up with different engineering and different mind planning strategies

that account for that uncertainty and that would give us a way to make sure that we are not destroying the environment. So there are two sort of really simple mechanisms that you might think about. The first is, again, those kind of offset areas or the areas that you commit to not disturbing and quite a lot of mining companies

are committing to having very large areas of offsets. And then the second is that you might try and engineer out some of your impacts. So for instance, if lots of species that live in the sediment are unknown to us, then we might try and engineer a solution that doesn't disturb the sediment that only picks the rocks up from the surface

and doesn't kind of take any of the sediment away or disturb the sediment in a real way. So you might be able to protect the ecosystem in that way without having the full level of understanding that you need. But these are the kind of mechanisms that they're really science-based, firstly. So you have to have, really strong science if you're going to have these kinds of conversations. And then secondly,

which is equally important and kind of equally as controversial, is that the regulations need to support this really robust method. And then once you have a set of regulations in place that are really supportive of a robust method, then you have to enforce them. And that's also challenging. So there are a lot of really tricky aspects to this discussion. And there are a lot of theoretically strong protection mechanisms, the question is whether we can enforce those protection mechanisms effectively. So you gave me a good segue into what I really want to talk about, which is sort of the technologies and some of these questions around can you engineer out some of this ecosystem risk that would otherwise be there. Before we get to that, though, on the offsetting

idea, I guess I sort of understand it in a terrestrial mining context where you can acquire a big plot of land and then say I promise not to disturb this particular area of that plot of land because I'm going to disturb this other area. In the sea, I guess, how would that work? Is it a similar concept? You just acquire the rights to a large area of the seafloor and then only disturb a little bit of it. Can it work the same way? It's a great question. Theoretically, it would work the same way. You need a very strong regulatory body that is going to enforce those offset zones. So that's the first challenge. And then the other challenge I would say, and I'm not a deep sea ecologist, so I will defer to my learned colleagues for the nitty-gritty.

But the concept of connectivity in the deep ocean is quite tricky and sometimes certainly more complex than on land. So part of the really important ecosystem protection mechanisms is ensuring that connectivity remains between habitats or ecosystems that are similar at a regional level. So what that looks like in the deep ocean might be if you have species that colonise using larval dispersion, then you need to make sure that larval dispersion will continue to work. So if larvae can travel, you know, 100 kilometres, then you obviously can't have an offset zone that's 200 kilometres away because the larvae is never going to get there and it's not going to kind of continue to have some connectivity.

So really understanding the connectivity and the function of those offset areas is, again, it's complex science and you need to invest as both a mining company and a regulatory body in understanding that whatever offsets you're proposing are actually going to function and are going to be protective mechanisms. And I'm not sure, look, to be frank, I'm not sure we're even there terrestrily, but certainly I would say we're not quite there on the seabed side either. Yeah. Okay, so then moving on to the sort of technology component of this.

So let's focus on the polymetallic nodules, which is a category of resource. What are the different mechanisms to extract them from the seabed floor? And so how do you think about comparing them against each other? Yeah, so I think there are lots of, there are a couple of different methods that are being proposed. there's a couple of different methods that are based on a dredge system. They're not exactly a dredge system. They've got different components, but they are kind of mechanisms that involve taking the nodule

and a portion of the sediment underneath the nodule and bringing all of that up to the surface and on the vessel that's then dewatered and separated and then the sediment and the water is pumped back down into the ocean, not at surface, but ideally at the seafloor or varying depth. So that's the first method. And in terms of mitigation, the predominant management there is one of trying to limit the sediment plume, which is like a cloud of dust but in the water,

and trying to make that not as big as it could be. And so certainly those companies that are proposing that kind of technology are working on minimizing the plume, so that, areas that haven't been dredged or disturbed are kind of protected from that plume impact as well. In other words, in that version, you mess with the sediment, and so whatever's in the sediment in that area is going to get messed with, but you're trying to minimize the plumes such that that area where the sediment gets messed with is as small as possible. Yes, exactly. That's right. And then those companies predominantly also are looking at very large offset areas, so only

disturbing a very small percentage of their mining lease or their mining contract area. So that's how that's, and I think the other thing that it's really important to say is that most of those companies who are working in that space are still working hard at looking at other alternative mitigation strategies. So there's no kind of silver bullet right now, but I would say in fairness to those companies that most of them are working pretty hard to continue to lower those impacts in theory before they, test them and then and then put them into practice. The other technology that's being looked at is called selective harvesting and that's using a fleet of underwater vehicles that do not

make contact with the sediment. So they hover above the seafloor and pick up the nodules one by one. And that premise, that engineering premise is around really not disturbing the sediment on the seafloor and ensuring that that part of the ecosystem remains intact. That also, it's assumed would have a smaller plume again than a different approach, and also would enable mine planners to leave a percentage of the nodules behind, even in an impacted area. So that has potential positive implications for connectivity. So if you were leaving a percentage of the nodules behind,

even in the place that you'd mined, and they were not covered by a sediment plume, then you might have stronger connectivity between the areas remaining. So that technology is in its infancy. It hasn't been tested in the deep ocean yet, but it has been tested in shallow water and it does work. And the other, I think the conversation again, when you start to talk about these technologies, really also reverts the economics. So which parts of those technologies are going to be stronger from an economic perspective? and that's all still from where I'm standing,

the jury's still out on that. Companies are still working on that. It's interesting that you describe it as being predominantly from an economic perspective because I imagine, I mean, that makes sense, but I imagine almost before the economic perspective, it's this permitting question. Are you going to be allowed to do it? And so the benefit of that second category that you described,

which I think of as being more like precision mining, is intuitively, it seems, clearly like lower impact. Again, you're not disturbing the sediment at all, smaller plumes. You can select polymetallic nodules individually and leave some. You're not dredging.

I understand that it's way earlier stage technology, so maybe it won't work, but all else equal seems to me like, sort of, there's maybe a case where independent of the economics, like you could, it's binary. You can get a permit for one and not the other.

or do you not think it plays out that way? If I was to sit here as a citizen of society, I would say for sure it should play out that way. But coming back to feasibility and the question of feasibility, mining doesn't get permitted if it's not feasible. So the regulatory body will never allow a mining activity to go ahead unless it's generating revenue for a couple of reasons. firstly because there are royalties involved.

And so the governing body or the governing state, or in the ISA's case, the Common Heritage of Mankind, which is another difficult question, will benefit economically from a mining activity that makes money. And so there's a certain selfish aspect to that. But also, I think more practically, it does relate in some ways to the environmental impact because all forms of industry have an environmental impact. There's no such thing as a zero impact industry. And so one of the considerations when you're thinking about economics

is if it's not going to make money, then why are we allowing the environment to be disturbed anyway? So it does come back to an environmental statement. When you think about permitting, yes, I'm a huge advocate for really tough permitting. I've spent nearly 20 years permitting projects in the mining industry, predominantly in the terrestrial world. And my experience is when you have a very strong regulator and very tight and tough permitting conditions,

it's better for everybody. It's better for the mining companies because they have a better reputation. It's obviously better for the environment. And it's better for the companies and the industries that use that product because they get to take confidence that their impacts are being managed in a responsible way. So, yes, I think permitting is probably the most important aspect of developing engineering

because it's also relating to return on investment and investor risk, right? Like if you're going to put money into a company that's technology, may be difficult to permit because of the environmental impacts, then you're sort of lowering the potential return on investment, or you're raising the risk on that investment, and that comes back to the extent to which you want to have both a responsible investment, but also an investment that goes ahead and makes some money for you. So obviously assuming that this goes ahead,

that some companies get permitted and that they start to extract resources, like the next big question is around enforcement. And I'm sure this is one of the reasons why there's a big debate around permitting in the first place as well, which is like, how do you ensure, you know, we're not, we're not like sitting with a terrestrial mine, at least you can have somebody like go inspect the mine site pretty easily. But in the deep sea, that seems harder to do. So what, like, what is the state of affairs and thinking around how these rules and regulations might be enforced? And, and relatedly, the sort of ongoing monitoring of potential ecosystem impacts?

Yeah. This is, from my perspective, the question. It is the most important question in the deep sea mining debate is if you have a set of really strong regulations, which we are hoping we will have, how do you enforce them? And we're in a really challenging environment for two reasons. Firstly, the isolation of the mine side at the bottom of the ocean means that it's economically unfeasible for a regulator to do a spot inspection. You just cannot raise the kind of capital you need to go down. and see what's happening. So you're going to rely on mining companies to submit their environmental monitoring data and for that data to be reviewed by an independent, either the regulator or an independent body. And I think the couple of things that you really need to be strong on are firstly understanding what data you need to be able to hold the company to account and say, okay, you said your impact was going to be X, it's actually looking like Y.

tell us what's going on. But then having the appropriate expert body that can actually interpret that data and say, hey, this data is telling a different story. We've got a problem here. So that's the first thing, is having a mechanism for monitoring in place that's really robust, that is really transparent, but is really comprehensive. And so you're getting the data you need to answer the questions you've got about whether the impact is bigger or smaller than it was permitted to be, which is the critical

aspect of compliance. And then the second part of that is, okay, but what if it's not? So what happens if your data is telling you that the impact is actually bigger than what's permitted? There are two things here. The first is the strength of a regulator to actually stop the mining activity from continuing. And that relates to both practical strength and regulatory strength. So you need to have a mechanism in the regulations themselves that allow the regulator to stop mining. So that's the most important thing. And then the second thing, thing is you need to have a boat on the water, basically. You need to be able to send out a boat that says, we're going to stop your mining activity. That's also really challenging. And I think

if you look to the international fishing industry, there are a whole bunch of things we can learn from that industry, which is very heavily regulated, very well established, and still has very significant enforcement concerns. So from my perspective, that's the number one issue. to worry about. It's the number one issue to work on. It's the number one issue to have consultation and expert bodies working on and providing advice on. And it is the thing that I think as members of civil society, we should be asking a lot of questions about. All right. So just to wrap up, obviously we're in the early days here. And so there's lots of unknowns and uncertainties, but things happening in real time as we record this, as we've discussed. What is your, you know,

If you have to make a prediction, what is your prediction as to how this industry plays out over the next five or ten years? What will permitting end up, and the regulatory construct end up looking like? When might we actually see the first minerals extracted from the seabed floor and what it look like when that happens? What is going to happen here? Yeah, I have been asked that question a lot. I'm glad you didn't ask me what was going to happen in Jamaica next week because quite a lot of people have also asked me that. I don't like answering that question. So what do I think will happen in the next five to ten years?

I think that certainly the industry will go ahead. I think that the mining in domestic areas, so exclusive economic zones will probably happen reasonably quickly. I think the bodies of enforcement in exclusive economic zones are much stronger, much better established. And I think the process of implementing, well, drafting, agreeing and then implementing regulations inside exclusive economic zones may be simpler and more straightforward. So I would expect to see mining activity or at least progress

on regulations and the framework occurring in exclusive economic zones. I think the ISA will pass its exploitation regulations. Whether they do that in July is a question that I can't answer. but I think there's, it will go ahead. And I also think that potentially we will start to see this, we will start to see something that I really personally am a little bit excited about, which is a form of stewardship from investors. So that's whether the ISA has the capacity to enforce regulations on the high seas, is yet to be seen. As I've said, we've got a few precedents in other industries where that hasn't

hasn't been as effective as we would like. But we are also moving into this part of this stage of investing where investors themselves get to have a say. And in fact, by owning a percentage of a particular company, have a seat at the table and can have active ownership, can enforce stewardship, and can on behalf of their investors, sort of strive for better sustainability outcomes. And I think that that will become a really important part of this industry, that you will see companies that take metals from the seabed demanding a certain standard that may be in excess of what's demanded by the regulator

or certainly delivered as data that's digestible by the general public, in a way that the regulator would not do. And I think that that's possibly one of the really shining lights in this scenario that could be really good for the industry as well as for consumers and the planet. All right, so now I'm going to hold you to it. What year, in what year do you think we will see the first commercial scale recovery of seabed minerals? Oh, gosh, well, let's just put it in the context of the first time.

a company claimed that it would be mining seedbed minerals was by 2012. So we're already a decade and a bit late. I think probably around 2028 is a fair guess. But as for where and what that would be, that's a little bit harder to predict. All right, Renee, thank you so much for talking me through all these complexities. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Renee Grogan is a deep sea mining expert. She's also the co-founder and a board director at the Seabed Mining Company Impossible Metals.

This show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. You can head over to canarymedia.com for links to the topics on today's show. PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and ag, transportation and logistics, advanced materials, advanced materials. manufacturing and advanced computing. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquand,

theme song by Sean Marquand. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.