Up First from NPR - Mining's New Frontier

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Deep, deep down on the floor of the world's oceans, rare and precious minerals exist in abundance. Mining companies have long had their eyes on this treasure but haven't had the technology to access it. Now they do and the race to mine the sea floor seems poised to begin. Today on The Sunday Story, we head to the Bismark Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It's here that a massive mining ship was recently hauling up chunks of the sea floor from a mile down, trying to gauge the mineral wealth and the possible damage extraction might cause.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe. This is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today we're going really deep, and I mean really deep, basically to the bottom of the ocean. There's been a lot of attention lately on a new mineral frontier in the dark depths of the sea. More and more commercial mining interests have their eyes on the seabed floor as an untapped source of minerals essential to powering our green energy future. So far, very few companies have been granted rights to mine the seafloor, but recently,

Willem Marx, a reporter in the UK, was invited to witness one of the mining operations in action. Here he is describing a moment standing on the stern of a huge mining vessel as it brought up a massive chunk of ocean floor. This huge grabbing device, like a giant metal claw, comes out of the water. It's traveled a mile up from the seabed. Hold stop for the winch. Hold stop.

It's filled with tons of rock and silt. And yet you can see the jaws haven't really closed. And I suddenly realized, as I see the water dripping out, there are little bits of rock falling out as well. And it's been falling out all the way up on our journey. It's a finished drawing. It's a finished drawing. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Villain Marx joins me now. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, Aisha. So, Villam, given the sensitivities around sea mining, I have to wonder, like, how did you get this front row seat on an exploratory mining vessel? Well, it's kind of a crazy story. It started out last year, I was working on a piece about the Titan, that's the submersible that kind of imploded close to the Titanic wreck.

And as my reporting continued, I went to this small island off the south coast of the UK called Jersey, I met someone there who'd been involved through his company and efforts to rescue that submersible. And over the course of the day talking, he mentioned something which he said at the time, you know, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about this. But it was that he was working on subsea underwater mining in Papua New Guinea. And so he and I stayed in touch. I was immediately interested in trying to understand what that looked like.

And a few months later, he said his vessel was heading out there. He said, if you want to join us, we'll be there for a few weeks, just figure out dates that work. And up to this point, deep sea mining, just to take a step back, has been really pretty theoretical as far as people like me are aware. There's been a fair amount of exploratory work and

kind of an effort to try and understand what the economics would look like, but that's often been done relatively quietly, relatively privately. And so of course I did want to join and so I ended up booking flights going via Singapore from London onto the capital of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, then catching another local flight to another island, driving across that island for four hours or so, waiting on a beach in the middle of nowhere, and eventually after a sometime, this catamaran, kind of belching smoke out the back,

appears over the horizon. It's kind of a local ferry, and it turns up to take me to the vessel. So you finally get on this giant ship. What's happening on board? Like, what does it look like? Well, it's 270 feet long. It towers above the water when you first board it.

It's got several decks, and you've got a massive amount of machinery. You've got these winches, you've got cranes, a couple of these remotely operated vehicles, these kind of huge cuboid machines that go 6,000 meters deep if they need to. And they're all on the back of this massive deck, often moving around at times throughout the day, throughout the night. The vessel's a couple of hours away from the shore, as I mentioned, and it's really sticking in one place. The engines, the thrusters around the outside of the vessel

are often firing at different moments to keep it to the millimetre almost in one position as they work several miles or at least a mile deep beneath them. Hmm. But they're not like mining, right? They're doing like a test. Can you explain like what are they they doing? So they're not doing full-scale long-term industrial mining. What they were doing this summer was essentially carving out chunks of the seabed beneath the vessel in dimensions 10 meters by 10 meters to kind of get a cross-sectional analysis of the ore, the rock that they want to mine from at a much larger scale in the future. So they were digging out these huge chunks every single day and night, bringing some of them on deck and then looking to

see essentially how much metal was inside those sections and hoping that that would then translate into a similar level of metal concentration over a much larger area. So they're bringing some of the I guess the seafloor that they're digging up. What are they doing with the rest of it? Well, this is what was so surprising to me, because they told me they had permits to extract 180 tons of this rock from the seafloor for analysis, which will be carried out in laboratories in Australia, which is not that far away from Papua New Guinea but it's still a fair old hole and then probably five to ten times as much as they're bringing on deck they're digging

up and then depositing just a few yards away in these kinds of stockpiles and I said well what are you guys doing that for and they said we hope that when we back, it'll make it much faster to mine it later on. And since this device they're using to pull it up on deck goes up and down a mile or so each time, it makes sense to do a lot of it down at that depth while they're down there before yanking it up each time, which they did every 12 hours or so. And it's basically a giant claw. Like I'm imagining like one of those machines that my kids use where you go down and you're trying to get the toy out of a machine.

Those are a scam just for people to know. But like it's like a giant claw kind of like that. Yeah, it's like that scene in Toy Story. Yeah. Exactly that. Where they're sending this down on this huge winch next to the claw, the grabbing device. They've then got this underwater vehicle.

And that attaches itself onto the claw to help guide it. And so once they've maneuvered the claw into the position they want to grab some of the seafloor, it just yanks shut. And once they've got it securely fastened inside the jaws of that claw, that grabber, it goes up to the surface a mile above. But I know like with the toys claws a lot falls out. It doesn't hold. So is this is this holding like all of the ground that it picks up or is there stuff falling out?

It's a good question. And so, you know, we had a limited time on board. It's hard for me to talk about every single time this happened. But given that while we were there, this claw was coming up every 12 hours. They spent a lot of time making sure that the load inside the jaws of it were securely fastened before they moved it. But at least one occasion, I saw that it hadn't fully locked closed. It's hard to see down there. It's dark.

There's a lot of kind of silt swirling around. And by the time it got to the surface on one occasion, it was clear that the jaws hadn't locked and a lot of the stuff inside had fallen out on the way up to the surface. You're listening to the Sunday Story. We'll be right back. support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autografecollection.com.

On NPR's Wild Card podcast, comedian Seth Meyers talks frankly about his early career. I was far more temperamental when I was younger and things ran very hot at S&L. And there were definitely times where my instincts were to say something that would have been relationship ending to people. I'm Rachel Martin. Seth Meyers is on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. We're back with Villa Marx talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea to watch a high-tech deep sea mining operation at work. You're talking here about disrupting the ground, the seafloor and stuff potentially falling from the claw as it comes up from the earth.

Big mounds of seafloor disrupted and then they're left in these big piles. So all of this to me sounds very disruptive to ocean ecosystems. I would imagine that's a real concern. It is and not just amongst climate activists, but also amongst many of the scientists who've looked at the feasibility of deep sea mining. And this has been an industry that's been studied for quite some time, even though it's not yet really taken off. There are two ways to sort of think about this.

One is the disruption right on the surface. And in this kind of deposit, they're looking primarily for copper, a bit of gold, a bit of silver. The rock that forms the bed there of the sea floor is rich in these metals, because essentially it's come out of the earth's crust. And then the second concern is about what happens as this material travels to the surface. If you're working with a mile deep ocean or two mile deep ocean, or even deeper in some cases, there's the scale of that material falling out even gradually over that distance. And then once you have currents,

it could potentially blanket large areas of the ocean floor elsewhere, and that has the potential scientists say to then choke marine life, whether that's coral or other forms of plants or animals. I mean, you're talking about potential damage, but but no one really knows yet what the damage may be. So how do you figure out the impact that doing even just these tests is having on the ecosystem? They had environmental scientists on board who every time

they sent this device up and down from the surface to the sea floor, they would put out these devices and it allows them to test what's happening in the seafloor, they would put out these devices and it allows them to test what's happening in the seawater at different depths beneath the ship. And the intention of these environmental scientists was to figure out exactly how damaging this may or may not be. So this will all be part of the kind of examination, the data analysis this company does, in theory, alongside regulators and government officials from Papua New Guinea to decide whether this is something that can move forward.

You say in theory alongside regulators. So I'm wondering, are government officials in Papua New Guinea monitoring what's going on in their waters? Well, to be totally honest, I found it to be pretty messy messy No one really seemed to know the fact that the vessel was there I went looking back in the capital Port Moresby for some answers and a bit of a Better understanding about how this entire industry was shaping up and being regulated in Papua New Guinea I tried to chase down the head of the country's environment agency But I eventually got hold of a man called Jerry Gary on Zoom.

He runs the mining regulatory authority for Papua New Guinea. And he told me that any mining vessel that was operating in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters would definitely have officials from his agency on board to monitor what they're doing. And I pointed out, I'd just been on a vessel a couple of days earlier. None of his officials had been on board. And this is what he said. If they are on the vessel in country and if they have not informed us, then I don't think one of our officers would be there. So that would be a concern.

So right now, do you know that the vessel is in the country? I am not aware of the vessel in the country. And yet you're managing director of the Mineral Resources Authority? You're right. I will deal with the proponent now that you told me. Now the companies, the investors involved in this, they say, well, of course he knew about it. All of the officials in Papua New say, well, of course he knew about it. All of the officials in Papua New Guinea know about what we're trying to do there.

All of them have signed off on it. But he wasn't the only person who said they weren't aware of that vessel. I had a similar interaction with the man called Alan Bird, also in the capital city. He's the governor of one of the largest provinces in Papua New Guinea. He's been opposed for years to the idea of underwater mining. So I asked him about this permitting issue. Well, we have not permitted any new mining operations. On land though? On land. What about offshore? We don't have any offshore operations. Alan, we've just been on a vessel in theessmarque Sea that is pulling up the ocean floor. Seriously.

How do you feel about that? Shocked. I had no idea. I thought the whole thing was mothballed. You're a senior governor in this country. Yeah. And the fact that you don't know about that, how does that make you feel? Deeply worried.

Okay, so what's your take on this? Like, what's going on? It kind of depends, right? So you've got people who have an obligation to regulate an industry like this, whether that's the environmental agency or the mining regulator, the fisheries authority. Really none of them claim to know anything about it or were willing to talk to me. And then you have people like Alan Bird and another senior governor I spoke to. And in Papua New Guinea, if you're the governor of a province, you're also a member of the country's parliament, at which point you're meant to obviously have oversight into particularly

controversial industries like this one. And the fact that these people who for years have publicly opposed the idea of deep sea mining, the idea that they say, well, they didn't know about it is in a sense not surprising. And the shock when I spoke to some of them about this was really very genuine from where I stood. I mean, so here we've got a developing nation. As an outsider, it seems like this is that story that's often told of really exploitation, a resource grab from these foreign companies coming in and just trying to get materials and wealth. Is that what it looked like to you?

Well, I guess what was really striking was, you know, you get off this vessel on this island in the middle of this ocean, and you've got these officials saying, oh, we didn't know it was happening. You've got senior members of the government in some cases, senior governors of other islands who've been very engaged in the subject saying, we didn't know about it. You then go to nearby villages on the nearest island to where the mining operations are taking place and people there had no idea that just over the horizon, kind of 20 miles south of where we were sitting, talking, there's a vessel that's taking the first steps in

starting deep sea mining operations and when they found out about this from us they really were not happy. You know people are surprised. They're shocked. This is Jonathan Masulam. He's a former teacher. He spent years trying to stop mining from happening off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and particularly this island, New Ireland. Masulam helped fight against a previous incarnation of this deep sea mining venture, and he and the communities he worked with along the island thought they'd won that fight because the company went bankrupt. It was all our efforts on campaigning against secret mining we thought it was a dead issue

now. And you know this in turn was pretty surprising to me because it showed that the company involved in this effort you know it may have been meeting with government officials, maybe the local governor, maybe the prime minister, but it doesn't seem to have really met with local people, the communities that maybe have the most to lose in terms of their livelihoods, particularly around fishing, being threatened. People that really rely on fishing, just off a few yards from where they live on the coastline, the idea that their fish might be impacted by the industry was really surprising. You've got pretty powerful people involved in this particular effort as well.

There's a Russian oligarch who's helped to finance this company. He currently is under EU and US sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You've got another very powerful and wealthy mining magnet from a country called Oman in the Arabian Gulf. And there was this really poignant moment where this man, Jonathan Masulam, the anti-mining activist, he was really upset that this vessel was back in those nearby waters, he told me. It's essentially, he was saying, local people who will be the ones that suffer the consequences over the long term.

For us, we don't want to be used as guinea pigs for trial and error because these metals that are going to be dig out of our ocean will not benefit anyone from here because nobody here is using electric cars or this green energy and all this. So you are taking minerals from the poor people and you go and enjoy your luxury life, but these people are going to be affected in a long-term destruction to the marine ecosystem. And that is something that we are very concerned about.

So to me, it's really emotional when discussing this issue. It's our place, it's our home. We have to defend it. Hey, it's Peter Sagal, the host of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Now, if you like Wait, Wait and you're looking for another podcast where the hosts take self-deprecating jabs at themselves and invite important guests on who have no business being there, then you should check out NPR's How to Do Everything. It's hosted by two of the minds behind Wait, Wait, who literally sometimes put words in my mouth.

Find the How to Do Everything podcast wherever you are currently listening to me go on about it. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org. You care about what's happening in the world. Let State of the World from NPR keep you informed.

Each day we transport you to a different point on the globe and introduce you to the people living world events. We don't just tell you world news, we take you there. And you can make this journey while you're doing the dishes or driving your car. State of the World podcast from NPR, vital international stories every day. We're back with Villamarks talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea

to watch a high tech deep sea mining operation at work. So you have a government in disarray, a local population fighting to save what they see as their way of life, and a company looking to exploit these resources. It's really messy. Does Papua New Guinea have a strategy moving forward? Well, in some ways this will depend on what this company involved decides to do. If they think this is not going to make them money and therefore isn't worth it, they may walk away, but that seems unlikely.

The government has a financial stake in this effort, and that's really important to be aware of. They invested money many years ago in this idea. And officials there are concerned about recouping that investment in a country that doesn't tend to have a huge amount of spare money. Elsewhere in the world where this is theoretically been given approval countries like Norway, Japan and the Cook Islands, things are moving really slowly. The effort in Norway has been tied up in litigation for many months. In Japan, they're moving really cautiously looking

at the science before moving ahead. And that will be essentially a Japanese state entity involved in that. And in the Cook Islands, they're still quite early on in terms of their analysis of whether this will be a good idea or not. Those are really the only places on earth where this is being considered genuinely at the moment. So let's step away from Papua New Guinea and these other countries where, you know, mining in territorial waters is possibly on the horizon. I understand that most of the actual interest in seabed mining is in international waters. Now, why is that?

Yes, you have these parts of the ocean worldwide that have these massive and rich amounts of rare minerals and metals. Some of them are like these deposits in Papua New Guinea. And then you have other types of deposits on the seafloor, these kind of nodules that sit around on the seafloor and can be relatively easilyules that sit around on the seafloor and can be relatively easily picked up. They're very rich in some of the minerals and rare metals that are of interest to companies worldwide. Until really recently, we didn't have the technology to reach some of these places that are miles deep in places like the Pacific Ocean. But now because of the advent of these remote control vehicles, these incredibly strong winches that can move things

like these grabbing devices down there, this is all becoming a lot more accessible. So with everything that you've learned from this reporting trip that started from someone telling you, I shouldn't be saying this, but we're doing this thing, how are you thinking about deep sea mining right now? There are arguments for and against like many of these things. We need, as a species, to

reduce carbon emissions, right? No one really questions that. And one way to do that is to transition the way that we generate and use energy into techniques that are less likely to emit carbon molecules into our atmosphere. And one way of doing that is using electric vehicles, let's say they need huge amounts of material more than we know we have on earth right now. So if everyone's going to drive an electric car one day, let alone everyone in developing nations that don't even have cars yet, and I'm talking 30 40

50 years down the road, how are we going to develop those technologies without stuff, material, metals, minerals? If that is needed, where is it going to come from? But then you balance that with this idea that these activities could have huge damaging impacts on environments we don't really understand in the deep sea. And we don't really understand what those deep sea environments mean for our broader atmosphere, for instance, that really is concerning. This was a story again, about powerful people,

and powerless people, you go to these local villages, those people don't feel they have a voice, they don't feel like they're being listened to. They don't feel like they're even being seen. And then you have outside investors, outside engineers, outside companies operating over the horizon, doing work that's not being broadcast or published or talked about. And it's certainly not sharing their information with those local communities, or even necessarily with all of the

local government officials, you end up having that, what I think of as an informational inequality. It really does strike me as something that needs strong global coordination, particularly if we're going to move into international waters, deep sea mining. And part of that will obviously focus on ensuring that local communities benefit from this kind of activity if it does go ahead as much as some of the billionaires involved in it. Well, Willem, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us today. Thanks so much for having me, Aja.

This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Kwesi Lee was our engineer. It was fact-checked by Greta Pittinger. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Kim Naderfein-Petersa. Our supervising producer is Leona Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.

I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org.

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