NEXT WEEK IN ISLANDER

Many scientists and environmental groups have raised concerns deep-sea mining could endanger some of the ecosystems least known to scientists.

But according to critics and experts interviewed for this story, The Metals Company appears to be leading the field.

In May, the Vancouver-based company said it successfully trialled a pilot nodule collection system in the North Atlantic.

Deployed from the 228-metre-long former drill ship the Hidden Gem, the nodule collector was dropped to nearly 2,500 metres, marking the first time the vehicle was successfully tested, driving over a kilometre at “ultra-deep-water temperatures and pressures.”

Later this year, the company plans to take its trials to the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, where it will test the collector and a four-kilometre-long riser hose — a conduit for the mined nodules and an umbilical cord linking undersea operations with power and controls beamed down from a surface ship.

When operational, a full-size treaded vehicle is expected to travel across the sea floor blasting the sediment with water jets to dislodge the nodules and pull them into its interior. The company says 90 per cent of the sediment sucked up with the nodules will be separated inside the collector and ejected behind the machine in a plume before settling back onto the sea floor.

From there, nodules will be sent up the riser tubes to within a few hundred metres of the surface, where they’ll be scrubbed of the remaining sediment, shipped to a port and offloaded for processing.

Having made landfall, the “battery in a rock,” as the company puts it, is expected to provide vast quantities of minerals to power an EV revolution.

Its vision, the company says, is to avoid the worst effects of land-based mining while making up for a global shortfall in metals as the world moves to decarbonize.

According to an impact report released in May, the company is looking to begin small-scale commercial production by 2024.

Describing the abyssal plain as a “vast marine desert,” Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron said there are enough metals in just two of the company’s contract areas to power 280 million electric vehicles, roughly equivalent to the entire fleet of U.S. passenger vehicles.

The wealth created from that mining, said Barron, would partially flow to the island nations of Tonga, Kiribati and Nauru. But for many leaders across the Pacific and beyond, the push to mine the ocean’s floor is nothing short of “reckless.”