The Daily - Promise and Peril at the Bottom of the Sea

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

The adoption of electric cars has been hailed as an important step in curbing the use of fossil fuels and fighting climate change. There is a snag, however: such vehicles require around six times as many metals as their gasoline-powered counterparts.A giant storehouse of the necessary resources sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But retrieving them may, in turn, badly damage the environment.Guest: Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Mining in the Pacific Ocean was meant to benefit poorer countries, but an international agency gave a Canadian company access to seabed sites.Miles below the surface, harvesting metallic nodules may threaten animals found nowhere else on the planet.Here are some of the seabed authority emails and other documents The Times assembled as it worked on its investigation of seabed mining.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. A giant storehouse of metals that could fulfill the environmental promise of electric cars is buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. of electric cars is buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But retrieving all those metals may itself badly damage the environment. Today, Natalie Kittroweth spoke with our colleague Eric Lipton about how a mining company and a regulator are balancing billions of dollars in profits against the future of the ocean floor. It's Friday, September 16th.

It's Friday, September 16th. Eric, tell me how you ended up on a boat in the Pacific Ocean last year. Well, the story of how I ended up on this boat really starts towards the end of the Trump administration in 2019. I was working on a piece about how various federal agencies were racing to get things done before President Trump left office. And one of the things that I saw was this surge in new applications for mining operations in spots across the United States. And the Trump team was trying to steamroll as many of these through as possible. And I thought, what's going on here? You know, what explains this surge in demand for new mines in a country where actually there had not been a lot of new mines started in recent decades? And the answer was the electric vehicle revolution.

Mining was really at the center of that. It's not just in the U.S., but around the world. Governments and automakers have been hailing electric vehicles as key to curbing the use of fossil fuels. Right. And really to fighting global warming. the use of fossil fuels and really to fighting global warming. But these environmentally friendly vehicles, they require something like six times as many metals as gas-powered cars, mainly to power their batteries. We're talking things like nickel and cobalt and lithium and copper. And the existing mines just aren't producing nearly enough of these metals to satisfy the booming demand for these materials worldwide.

So everyone's racing to develop their own metal supply chains to try to meet this growing demand. But it turns out that one of the richest untapped sources for these raw metals is not on land, but rather two and a half miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. So Eric, you're saying there are a bunch of metals that are just sitting on the ocean floor. Yeah, that's right. At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for hundreds of thousands of square miles in the area between Hawaii and Mexico. The seabed is blanketed with these black potato-sized rocks, and they have this really high content of manganese and nickel and cobalt, and they're just sitting there on the bottom of the ocean. Wow. It's incredible. The storehouse, potentially at least, of metals for electric vehicle batteries.

potentially at least, of metals for electric vehicle batteries. Wait, so how did these black rocks that look like rocks but are actually pretty special actually get there to the bottom of the ocean? It really starts with something like a shark tooth that drops to the bottom of the ocean and lands there in the darkness of the Pacific floor. And there is various sediment that's forming around that tooth. There are organic materials. And the water is passing over, and the sediment is passing over this shark tooth, and the metals are sucked in and attaching themselves to it.

And over millions of years, gradually, a solid object is formed, and that's what becomes what we call a nodule. Wow, it's kind of magical. It really is. These nodules are effectively a battery in a rock. And it's an incredible potential untapped source of these metals. So right now, no one's actually mining the seabed in international waters. But there's research going on to study these nodules and the environment they're in to prepare for industrial-scale mining.

And that's how I ended up on a boat out in the Pacific Ocean. All we do, we lift it up with a snubber here attached to the crane. We lower it into the water and then we release it. I wanted to see and understand what's happening on this new frontier. Tell me more about the ship. It's a cable lane vessel, so it doesn't really have labs like a typical research vessel would have, but we have these containers which are basically set up as labs. The ship I got onto was called the Maersk Launch launcher. It's a giant vessel, sort of like a cargo ship, and it had just come back from a six-week-long research mission pulling

up these mineral-rich nodules from the bottom of the Pacific. I thought it was a towing vessel for offshore rigs. It probably does that as well. The way they did that is basically they dropped these giant shovels all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. And they used them to grab samples of mud and rocks and whatever else was down there. And they lifted it all the way back up to the surface and onto the deck of the ship. And then there's also, of course, you know, creatures in the sediment that are also just releasing slime and DNA. And what the scientists do on board then is, you know, is they're looking through these chunks of seabed that they pulled up and they're starting to get some answers to some pretty

basic questions. What this allows us to do is ask the question, well, what is that animal and microbial life actually doing at the seafloor? What is it? How fast is it eating? How fast is it producing nutrients? How fast is it producing CO2 as the ocean floor essentially breathes like we do on land? And those answers have allowed these scientists to start to paint a picture of the thriving environment around these nodules. around these nodules. Because here's the thing, the bottom of the Pacific is this pristine,

untouched ecosystem that frankly, we know very little about. We know less about the bottom of the Pacific than we do about the surface of the moon. There are all these creatures that live in and around these nodules, the fish and the shrimp and all kinds of microbes and things like that, most of which we'd never seen before. And the scientists I spoke with estimate that 90% of the species they run into down there, they haven't even yet classified. In other words, they know they're there, but they just don't know what they are. And so these scientists, they're collecting and studying environmental data so that they can begin to understand what kind of impact the mining on these nodules would actually have. And so that's kind of a loaded question, but how do you feel about extracting the minerals from the bottom of the ocean?

What are your thoughts about it? Well, as I say to everyone, I'm not for mining and I'm not against it. All I'm trying to do in this project and others, and I think most other scientists, independent scientists working on this problem or on this challenge, is trying to get the best environmental data that we can so that the best decision about whether it goes ahead or not can be made. I think if we're not getting the best environmental data out there, we may end up making decisions that are the wrong ones. What several of the scientists wanted to make clear was that basically they're not out there promoting mining.

They said that they're there to figure out exactly what the ecosystem is on the seabed and how mining may or may not disrupt it. And they're pretty adamant that I understood this. I have to imagine, though, that there have to be some consequences to removing this layer of rocks that has been on the seabed floor for millions of years, right? No question about that. Without these nodules, there's a bunch of organisms that simply cannot exist. And what's more, you suck up these nodules and you inevitably produce plumes of sediment that can travel for hundreds of meters across the seafloor. And what we don't yet know is how these plumes of sediment may harm other ocean life. So how to quantify that impact

and minimize it is the subject of much research and debate. And it's not just the scientists on the MRS launcher that I met, but by countries and companies around the world who are starting to explore this new frontier. And many argue that there has to be years of additional research to understand what's going on in the bottom of the ocean in this part of the Pacific and to evaluate it to make sure that industrial scale mining is not going to cause harm. But the guy in charge of this whole research mission, who's footing the bill of the scientists on the ship, he pretty much disagrees. I always want to sit in this chair. I met him there on the ship, and he was sitting there in the captain's chair.

You know, I wish there were another alternative. You know, we have to stop extractive industries. But, you know, before we can do that, you know, we need to find a way of injecting a massive supply of metals to be able to build these batteries and to be able to move away from fossil fuels. His name is Gerard Barron. He's an Australian entrepreneur, and he's the CEO of a Canadian-based, publicly traded company called The Metals Company that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars

to try to bring these seabed nodules to the surface on an industrial scale. Now, the average car has 60 kg of nickel, a small battery. And, you know, we're going to build billions of these things because it's not just, you know, light passenger transportation we're talking about. We're talking about heavy transport. We're talking about home storage and trains and boats and on and on it goes. So what's his vision long term? What is his company doing?

So after they finish this phase of exploratory research that the company's paying for, the goal is to set up a massive in scale, 24 hour a day, bottom of the ocean mining operation that's eventually going to produce something like 10 million tons a year of these nodules, bringing them up from the bottom of the ocean with a fleet of ships. Basically, as you spray a jet of water in this case across a surface and as the collector head leaves the surface it entraps the nodule and lifts it. So it means you can lift it without having it's not like harvesting a panic of potatoes where you go down and dig everything and sort it out. You know we're lucky to be able to lift these nodules and

we then separate the sediment and put the nodules in a riser pipe so it's a big engineering process and it's the size and the geographic reach of this mining that's perhaps the most extraordinary part nothing like this has ever been done before in terms of how big of an area i mean a mine on land usually it's like maybe a mile or two across. In this case, they're going to be going over hundreds of square miles of ocean floor and sucking up millions of tons of these nodules. So it's a much bigger area than has ever been mined before. In fact, the total amount of metal sitting on the ocean floor in their zones is estimated to be approximately three times as much as any other nickel mine currently being planned anywhere in the world. Wow. One of the company's favorite stats, in fact, to trot out when pitching

Wall Street Analyst is that they estimate that in just a couple of their contract locations in the Pacific, there's enough metals to power something like 280 million vehicles. It's a crazy number. That would be enough to replace every gas-powered car currently on the road right now in the United States. And if you ask Barron, what he's going to tell you is that if these metals aren't coming from the seabed, they're going to have to come from somewhere else. And that's most likely going to be huge open pit mines in places like Indonesia, which have their own set of troubling environmental and human impacts.

If you look at land-based mining, it's pretty horrible. And if you thought about transitioning that into the ocean, you'd say, no way. And so it takes a bit of understanding or time to look at, well, what's different? The fact that we're not really mining, we're collecting these nodules and rocks off the bottom of the ocean. It's a very different process to going to rip down a forest and dig up an ore body. And so for Barron, I mean, he is determined to convince you that this is the right solution to the problem of providing metals for the EV revolution and saving the planet.

So I get that. And it does sound like Barron really believes in the positive mission of his company. But, I mean, if you're supplying the metals to build almost 300 million new electric cars, I have to imagine you also stand to make quite a bit of money. quite a bit of money. Yeah, I mean, this could be enormously profitable. The company is estimating that it now stands to make something like $30 billion in profit over the next two decades if it can start this industrial scale mining. Wow. And that's after all of their costs and their taxes and royalties and everything. So one of the biggest open questions is who should profit from these riches of the sea that nature has created over millions of years. What I learned is that decades ago, world governments came together to confront this exact question. And they wanted to make sure that every country, rich or poor, would have a fair shot at benefiting from the seabed metals.

And they did that by setting aside areas of the ocean floor specifically reserved for developing nations. But the way it's played out is that Barron's firm, the metals company, now controls a huge proportion of the reserved seabed that's been allocated so far. And metals companies poised to reap the vast majority of the profits from mining it. And metals companies poised to reap the vast majority of the profits from mining it. And it made me wonder, how did this happen? And what I found was that it's all thanks to this little-known United Nations-affiliated agency that was tasked to regulate seabed mining in the first place. We'll be right back.

Okay, Eric, before the break, you told us that there is this incredibly valuable source of metals on the ocean floor that could power our transition to electric cars. But the consequences of getting those metals off the ocean floor aren't fully understood. And this CEO, Barron, and his company, the Metals Company, which is trying to get in on this, is perfectly positioned to make a ton of money, all thanks to this little-known regulator. Explain that. That's right. I mean, there's this tiny agency that almost no one has ever heard of, the International Seabed Authority, it's called. It's based in Kingston, Jamaica, and it has this really small office near the harbor in Kingston. It's about 50 employees. But it turns out that this tiny agency has exclusive jurisdiction over all of the international ocean bed in the world. Where did this agency come from? Like, why was it created?

It was actually born in part because these nodules that we've been talking about at the bottom of the ocean. The sea, a new reserve of global resources. Including metals from deep sea nodules, potato-sized objects covering thousands of square miles of sea bottom. So scientists, they've known that the ocean bed was a potential source of metal for over 100 years. To learn more about nodules, their origins, process of growth, distribution, and other factors, a major deep ocean and land-based research program was carried out. And in the 1960s and 1970s, there were a bunch of rich nations that began to do mapping and exploratory work, particularly in the Pacific, to try to figure out how they could grab these rocks.

At the same time, to determine if deep ocean nodules can be mined, the first self-propelled, remotely controlled robot miner was tested three miles under the Pacific Ocean. These are countries like the Soviet Union, the United States, some European nations, and some Asian nations. On deck, the first box corer on its massive A-frame begins its four-hour round trip to the seabed for the purpose of gathering sample nodules. And they began to collect some of these nodules from the bottom of the ocean to try to see where might they find the highest concentrations of these nodules. Deep sea nodules continue to hold many scientific mysteries, but with deep sea mining engineering now feasible, they also promise a way to meet resource needs for centuries. But there was concern among the members of the United Nations that these rich nations were

essentially going to do a metals grab and to take this wealth that was in international waters and to exploit it for their own profit. So there was a movement to try to regulate the seabed. And from that movement, in the early 1980s, emerged this agency, the International Seabed Authority. And it was given the jurisdiction over 100 million square miles of ocean floor. This is an area, it's sort of a crazy size, that amounts to half of the world's surface. Wow. And the Seabed Authority has quite a to-do list that it needs to somehow accomplish. It wants to make sure that the mining happens in an environmentally responsible way.

It wants to also ensure that developing nations or poorer countries, that they have access to mining if they ever choose to do that. And they also want to make sure that the profits and benefits of this mining is shared by everyone. And somehow they have to balance all these imperatives. It's really quite a task, but that's their charge. How are they supposed to do that, to make sure the profits are shared and to also help developing nations get in on this mining? Well, aside from charging royalties to the

seabed miners that the agency can then redistribute to nations across the world. They also set aside large parts of the Pacific Ocean floor into what they call reserved areas that are specifically for developing nations. These are parts of the ocean that the rich countries have done initial exploratory work, and they've concluded that there's lots of metals down there, but then they have to take half of these areas and put them into a bank for the future so that these developing nations can do their own mining and the nodules will still be there. So, okay, walk me through that. So how this is supposed to work is that the data that the rich countries have collected is sitting there in a

bank, essentially waiting for the developing nations to tap into it and find a contractor like, for example, maybe even Barron's Metals Company. And the seabed authority's own rules say that certain data that's about the reserved areas is supposed to be confidential and not shared with anyone outside of the developing nations or the seabed authority itself. And that's to ensure that when the developing nations want to start mining, they have something that's valuable. The data is really the key to controlling who's in charge. Now, here's the thing. What I discovered as I was reporting on this story was that over time, the International Seabed Authority, at least according to some of its own employees,

started to violate the confidentiality rules around the data in ways that would ultimately benefit the metals company. So what happened? Yeah, I got copies of these emails that showed a metals company executive going back and forth with CBET Authority staffers. And they're talking about reserved area data that he'd been given by the authority starting all the way back in 2007. And this data was telling them where to find some of the richest spots in the reserved areas, the spots with the highest concentrations of these nodules. And they moved immediately to

request that these spots be set aside for them even before they found an island nation as a sponsor. Wow. So they are giving this company really the key to where these riches lie. That's right. And there's actually some pretty surprising emails where one of the scientists at the Seabed Authority writes, here's the entire reserved area data. It's an Excel file. And then he says, this is supposed to be classified data and not disclosed to others. I'm sure you'll use it for your resource analysis and nothing else. So this scientist is communicating that he's aware that the data was classified, and the email makes clear that this was the second time it had been shared.

And there are other emails like this that we got copies of. We actually posted a bunch of them online, so you can read them for yourself. So Eric, why would this agency that is tasked with helping developing nations benefit from sea mining allow this to happen? Well, the Seabed Authority was really struggling at this point to get anyone to mine these reserved areas. And it was a source of great frustration for some of the folks that worked there that they didn't have developing nations coming in and saying, please allocate us some of the seabed. So that's why the seabed authority started to engage with the contractors more directly. I could see it in the emails. Teaming up with these private contractors was now the

new way forward. We are historically, as an organization, it's horrifically under-resourced. Right. And the boss of the CBET authority told me about this shift in direction himself. I would say the whole system has not quite worked in the way that it was originally constructed, but is that necessarily a bad thing? His name is Michael Lodge. I'm not sure. I think time will tell. What do you think? I don't really know.

Or is it a good thing? It could be a good thing because it's made the system work. Lodge used to be the legal counsel of the CBET authority when this data sharing started. And I've seen emails written by him where he's discussing how the authority can share at least some of the data and, quote, cover itself from any potential complaint. And when I asked him about this data sharing, he dismissed any suggestion that the data

was improperly shared. A lawyer for the CBET authority in a statement to The Times also strongly disputed to us that there had been any wrongdoing. At no point, the lawyer said, were data confidentiality rules violated. Wow. What really stood out to me, though, in my two conversations with Lodge was just how much he believes in the mission of the CBET Authority. This has been his life's work. He's been a maritime lawyer ever since he graduated from law school, and he spent years at the authority watching it struggle to move ahead.

So that's been really frustrating for him, and it's obvious. He just wants to get the sea mining regulations finished that the agency has been tinkering with for years, and that's going to allow the mining to finally get underway. But he has to spend a lot of time dealing with critics of seabed mining, like the environmentalists. And Eric, what is his problem with the critique from the environmentalists? I mean, one of the things that he said to me in his

cutting British satire, almost, was that, you know, the environmentalists and their followers, he sees them basically as hypocrites. His actual words were, everyone in Brooklyn can say, I don't want to harm the ocean, but they sure want their Teslas. He's the guy out there trying to actually get these seabed metals to help move the EV revolution along. So when he gets attacked by these environmentalists that are protesting seabed mining, warning that it's going to damage the undersea ecosystem, he sort of sees them as narrow-minded. ecosystem, he sort of sees them as narrow-minded. This sounds terrible, but if you spend your whole life studying the worms that live on nodules, then you get very attached to that. I'm not sure that they really see the wood for the trees, you know, I think. Which is what? What are the trees? What's the broader issue at play here? The broader issue is where are you going to get these minerals from and the scale at which this is happening. Right. Okay, so Eric, it seems like the sharing of this prized

information is pretty significant. What does it allow the metals company to do? Well, once the metals company, through its predecessor, has obtained this data on the reserved areas, it's basically able to turn the intended relationship on its head. Instead of the developing nation that's wielding this reserved data and having the power to negotiate a contract, now it's the other way around. The metals company has the advantage. And what happens is that they go around searching effectively, opportunistically for a country that's going to charge them the least amount of money to get into the game. So which nations does the company go to?

So they use this data that they've gotten from the CBET Authority to partner with two tiny island nations in the Pacific, Tonga and Nauru. But the deals that are signed with these countries are really highly tilted towards the contractor. Metals Company won't disclose the exact terms, but a representative from Tonga told us that it will receive $2 per ton for the nodules that are harvested. And these are rocks that are worth something like $700 to $800 a ton. So that means that Tonga is slated to get less than one half of one percent of the revenue that each of these nodules is worth. And these islands,

they weren't picked by accident. They are really, really tiny places. Nauru is one of the smallest countries in the world. It has only 11,000 people. And it also has a history of being exploited by entrepreneurs from Australia, including stripping the surface of the land there for fertilizer and leaving much of the island uninhabitable. Australians did that over a matter of many decades. And Barron, another Australian entrepreneur, has come back to team up with the island again. And to be clear, what's happening here is that the company is going to these developing nations and inviting them to mine in areas that had actually been reserved for them in the first place. But the company got first dibs. That's right. And what that has allowed them to do is obtain the right to exploratory mining in nearly 90,000 square miles of seabed, which represents almost half of the

reserved areas that have been contracted so far. Wow. So fast forward to today, and this private company, backed by international mining giants, is dominating the reserved areas that were set aside for poorer developing nations. Eric, it sounds like you have these two guys, Barron, the CEO of the metals company, and Lodge at this seabed authority who are aligned in their desire to get sea mining going. And they both say in a way that they can help the world pull off the electric vehicle revolution. pull off the electric vehicle revolution. But at the same time, they've been operating in this world without much oversight and sometimes with what seem like questionable practices in this totally new space where the environmental risks are completely unknown. It really is an illustration that powering electric vehicles is an incredibly complicated task. And it's something that I don't think that we've fully come to terms with.

And what's happening at the Seabed Authority, this tiny agency, is, you know, really without much public awareness and understanding when, you know, what's at stake is, you know, one of the most undisturbed parts of the world's environment, the bottom of the ocean. But the Metals Company and the Seabed Authority at this point are moving with a determination to get this mining started. In fact, you know, later this month, Metals Company intends to send a new ship that they've just retrofitted.

They're calling it the Hidden Gem. They're going to be sending that ship out to the Pacific to begin one of the largest lifts ever of these seabed nodules. It's actually, it's a full-scale test of the mining that they want to start in 2024. So they're determined to move ahead and to begin mining by 2024, even though there are others who are saying the world may not be ready for this. Eric, you started this investigation years ago because you realized there was this tectonic shift happening in mining. I wonder what you think now that you've discovered all of this, all of what you just described to us about what's going on beneath the surface. Well, going through this reporting, I knew that the electric vehicle revolution was driving huge shifts in our economy.

But I think it's actually even more tectonic than I realized. For nearly a century now, we've lived in a world where power and money has been defined in part by access to oil. But now power and money is going to be defined, at least in part again, by access to metals like these sea nodules. So there's a lot of people who've probably never heard of the metals company or the International Seabed Authority. They don't know who Gerard Barron is or Michael Lodge. But these are people that have been working steadily in the background on these issues. And they're poised to emerge as power brokers in this new world. So the story of seabed mining, it's just one chapter in this transformation that we're living through.

But it's about a lot more than just how you fill up your car. However the story plays out, we're going to be living with the consequences for decades to come. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Natalie. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Well, good morning, everyone.

As you might guess, I am very pleased to announce a tentative labor agreement between that have been reached between the railroad workers and the railway companies. This agreement is a big win for America. A much-feared strike by railroad workers was averted on Thursday after the Biden administration brokered a deal between freight rail companies and the unions representing tens of thousands of their employees. In the end, the railroad workers won several key concessions, including better pay and more flexible schedules, including time off for medical appointments, a major sticking point in negotiations. During a news conference, President Biden said that the deal had spared Americans a strike that could have profoundly damaged the economy.

So I thank the unions and the royal companies for negotiating in good faith. They've been up for 20 straight hours through that negotiation and for sticking with it, especially over the last few days. In fact, the negotiators here today, I don't think they've been to bed yet. And the cost of borrowing money to buy a home has doubled over the past year. As of Thursday, the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.02%, up from 2.86% during the same week in 2021. For borrowers, that increase could add thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home.

The higher mortgage rate is largely the result of the government's efforts to make it more expensive to borrow money in order to cool off the economy and lower inflation. Today's episode was produced by Will Reed, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Rochelle Banja. It was edited by Liz O'Balin, with help from Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wunderli. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro.

See you on Monday.