Can Deep Sea Mining Meet the World’s Critical Mineral Demand?

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Found over 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, polymetallic nodules may hold the key to powering the future. In this episode, Dr. Mark Luther, Director of the Ocean Monitoring and Prediction Lab at USF and President Elect of the International Marine Mineral Society, joins us to explore how deep seabed mining could help meet global demand for critical minerals like cobalt, manganese, and iron.

• What is deep seabed mining, and how does it compare to land-based mining?
• What kinds of minerals are harvested—and why is cobalt so vital for battery safety and energy transition?
• How are these resources collected from the seafloor, and what are the environmental risks, including sediment plumes and disruption of deep-sea ecosystems?

Dr. Luther shares insights on how close we are to commercial operations, including updates from the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), and why the Cook Islands could potentially meet all global battery mineral needs for the next 30 years. He also explains the ongoing development of the international mining code, the role of the International Seabed Authority, and how the U.S might  be signaling new deep sea mining ambitions through recent executive orders.

What investments and policies should the U.S. prioritize now to stay competitive in deep sea mineral access? And can we mine the ocean responsibly without repeating the mistakes of land-based extraction?

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what traditional land basedmining is, but could you help us
understand what deep seabedmining is a deep seabed mining,

(02:01):
actually compri. rises severaldifferent minerals, the most
prolific or most. abundant ofthese minerals are called
polymetallic nodules. They'rejust little round balls that sit
on the bottom of the ocean, justsitting there on the surface.
They're various sizes, dependingon where they form, from about

(02:24):
the size of a Swedish meatballup to the size of a cantaloupe,
and they form over 10s ofmillions of years, from just the
minerals that are concentratedin the deep ocean waters that
slowly precipitate out over timeto form these things. And so for

(02:44):
those we don't even like to callit mining. It's more extraction,
because all you basically haveto do is go pick them up, and
the devices that are beingdesigned to harvest them are
based on potato harvesters. Theylook like combines, and you see
pictures in the Midwest wheatfields that just crawl around on

(03:09):
the bottom and rake these thingsup and put them in baskets or
shoot them up a vacuum. That wasgonna be my question. Is it like
a vacuum that just kind ofcrawls along the bottom of the
ocean floor? There's severaldifferent designs. Some are more
vacuum based. Others like, Isay, the particular group that
we're working with has designedone that, again, is just a big

(03:31):
rake. It rakes them up andsticks them in a basket, and the
basket, when it's full, getspulled to the surface. But
there's other types of deep seaminerals as well that are being
exploited, or at least Therewere the ones that they first
explored for exploitation.
Polymetallic crusts arebasically made out of the same
materials, but it's a hard crustthat forms on the slopes of sea

(03:53):
mounts and mid ocean ridges thatactually do have to be like Jack
hammered up off of the bottom,and massive sulfide crusts are
similar in that they're moreakin to traditional surface
mining, where there's some sortof a device that digs them up
off the bottom. They're nottypically buried. They're still

(04:15):
sitting right at the surface ofthe deep ocean floor, but they
have to be physically extracted.
That makes sense. So it soundslike there are three different
main types of deep sea mining,if I'm if I'm correct, what
types of minerals would come outof the like, what types of
minerals are we mining from theocean floor or one of these

(04:36):
crevices or mountain ranges, ifyou will? They're all we
consider critical minerals. Themost valuable one is cobalt, but
there's also nickel, copper,manganese, iron. They originally
discovered back in the late1800s they called them

(05:02):
found in the eastern PacificOcean were primarily comprised
of iron and manganese. But theones that are the most valuable
right now are the ones that arereally high concentrations of
cobalt, because Cobalt is fairlyscarce in land based minerals,
but it's it's fairly abundant inthese deep sea mineral deposits.

(05:22):
Cobaltis very important today in a lot
of our electric vehicletechnology, our cell phones,
things like that too. SoCorrect,
that's the primary usage of themright now is that Cobalt is the
most expensive piece of orcomponent of an electric
battery, whether it's for a cellphone or an electric vehicle or

(05:44):
the Tesla wall in your garage orwhatever, for solar systems. And
if you try to make a cheaperbattery, it's usually because
you skimp on the cobalt. And ifyou skimp on the cobalt, those
are the batteries that blow up.
So in fact, there was a youngman, his father is a good friend
of mine, that was killed in StPetersburg a few years ago when

(06:06):
a vape pen that had a cheap, lowcobalt battery and it blew up in
his face and it killed him andset the house on fire. So, and
there was a case just a fewmonths ago in New York City,
where an E bike shop inManhattan, a bike erupted in
flames and burned down anapartment building killed

(06:26):
several people. So yeah, be verywary of cheap, cheap electric
batteries, because the only wayto make them cheaper is to skimp
on the cobalt. Yeah,that, you know, very real, real
concern there, and kind ofbuilding on that, how much of
the global demand for criticalminerals like cobalt or copper
could deep seabed miningrealistically meet compared to

(06:49):
the land resources?
The estimates are that almostall of our needs for these
critical minerals could be metby deep sea mineral deposits.
Land based mining is never goingto go away, but if it was at
scale the way we think that itcan be. And I say we, I'm also

(07:12):
president elect of theInternational marine mineral
society, although I'm speakingon my own behalf and not on the
behalf of the society, it'sestimated that the Cook Islands
alone could supply all of ourcritical battery needs for the
next 30 years. Oh, wow. And thebigger issue is that the land

(07:36):
based sources of these mineralsare one they're harder to get to
because you got to dig off a lotof overburden to get to them.
They're typically lower inconcentration in a lot of these
minerals, particularly cobalt,and they're typically in places
that are politically unstableand controlled by perhaps

(07:57):
unfriendly nations. The deep seamineral deposits, particularly
in the Cook Islands, are about10 to 100 times the
concentration of cobalt as theseland based minerals as well. So
those are there are manyconsiderations, but
yeah, that makes sense, and atthis time, there are no

(08:17):
commercial scale deep sea miningoperations that are currently
going on. With that in mind, howclose are we to a commercial
deep sea mining operations, andthen what steps would need to
take place in order for that tohappen,
there have been some test miningor test collection operations in
the eastern Pacific Belgiumcompany called GSR, the division

(08:43):
of a big marine constructioncompany Demi. They designed a
commercial scale collectorvehicle, and they run it around
part of the what's called theClarion Clipperton zone, and
have collected nodules in fairlylarge quantities that could be
scaled up tomorrow if we had theenvironmental regulatory

(09:06):
structures in place. Theycollected a lot of data on what
the actual impacts of these deepsea mineral extraction
activities are, and it was muchless than than had been feared.
There's still obviously going tobe destruction of deep sea
ecosystem habitat, but the farfield effects were much, much

(09:29):
lower than and had been feared.
One of those biggest effects isyou're stirring up sediment in
the proposed so called miningcode, or the environmental
regulations that will governfuture scalable deep sea mineral
extraction, there's equal squarekilometers left undisturbed for

(09:53):
every square kilometer that youare disturbing or extracting.
And the fear was that thesediment stirred up by those
collection activities woulddrift over the preserved areas
and smother the ecosystemsthere. That didn't happen, the
sediments settled out of thewater column much more quickly

(10:16):
than some of the theoreticalconsiderations had thought was
possible. So that'swhat I was going to ask. Because
I know you had mentioned one ofthe ways to vacuum up, for lack
of a better term, thesepolymetallic modules. There
seems to be a plume that comesoff the back end of that too, so
that, you know, they'll pull upthe module nodules, and then all
of that debris will create, likea debris field, if you will,

(10:38):
correctand in fact, a lot of the
originally proposed technologieswere based on deep sea oil field
technologies, deep sea oil andgas operations, and they
typically use what's called ariser. It's basically just a big
tube that goes all the way downto the bottom, and they pump
fluid up the riser, the fluidcarries the nodules with it, but

(11:03):
it also carries a lot ofsediment with it. Then when it
gets to the surface, to thecollector vessel or the control
vessel, then you got to separateall that sediment from the
nodules. The nodules are fairlyfragile, so they get cracked up
as they're bouncing around theinside of this big metal tube as
well. So then you've got todispose of all that sediment

(11:24):
that you sucked up from 5000meters depth. Four to 5000
meters is where these things aretypically found, and that was
one of the biggest pollutionthings that were possible is
that plume. They're talkingabout jetting it down maybe a
few 100 meters and releasing itinto the water column, and from

(11:47):
there, the ocean currents couldcarry it for miles and miles in
any direction, depending on howstrong the currents are. And
that's kind of how I gotinvolved in this, because I
measure and model ocean currentsand and what those currents are
transporting, be it sediment orbiological matter or whatever.
So that brings me kind of mynext question, is there like a

(12:09):
an equivalent to an oil spillthat could happen with deep sea
mining,not in the terms of of large
scale environmental impacts? Youknow, we worked a lot on the
Deepwater Horizon disaster inthe Gulf of Mexico, there are
still lingering effects fromthat almost 15 years later. Now,
actually, we just had the 15thanniversary. It was August or

(12:30):
April, 20, and oil is verytoxic. These sediments are not
typically toxic. The only realenvironmental damage is that
they'll blanket other ecosystemsand perhaps smother it. And so
there's, I say, there's not alot of toxicity in the mineral

(12:51):
collection itself. There's someof these nodules have very low
levels of radioactivity, butthey've been able to determine
that it's not a real concern.
The radioactivity is low enoughthat you can shield it easily

(13:14):
and it's not going to cookanybody. So that's that's the
biggest problem is the whathappens with these sediment
plumes, and in addition to thedirect impacts of the collector
vehicles on ecosystems, becausethere's not a lot of life down
there, but there is some, andpeople say that we haven't

(13:40):
studied it enough. Well, we'rehosting the 53rd annual
underwater minerals conferencein St Pete Beach this fall, and
so we've been looking at for atleast 53 years. And in fact,
we've skipped a few years. Soit's more like 60 years that
people have been looking reallyhard at this stuff, but the
technology to really understandthese deep sea marine ecosystems

(14:06):
has not really existed untilfairly recently, and so that's
that's part of the big hold upis making sure that we really
understand what's going on downthere with the biota, And how
can we mitigate the damage tothose deep sea ecosystems and
extract these minerals in asminimally destructive a way as

(14:30):
possible? Absolutely.
I know a lot of land basedmining operations are very
toxic. Have a lot of, you know,horrible effects for not only
the flora and fauna, but thepeople in the area too. So that
absolutely makes sense. I knowyou had mentioned that there was
a mining code of ethics. Whoestablishes that and where? Who
enforces that, if you will?
Well,there couple of different bodies

(14:52):
depending on where the mineralsare being extracted, if it's in
what we typically call in.
National waters, or the areabeyond national jurisdiction,
it's the part of the deep sea,the deep ocean, that's outside
of any individual nation'scontrol. Under the UN Convention

(15:14):
on the Law of the seas, UNCLOS,as we call it, every coastal
nation has a 200 nautical mileexclusive economic zone around
their continental shells ortheir borders. And where that
200 mile limit starts depends onthe geology and geomorphology of

(15:36):
the ocean bottom around anation, but it's typically 200
nautical miles from the edge ofthe what we ever define as the
shoreline. And that can becontentious, because different
nations EEZ overlap each other,and so there has to be treaties
to determine where you draw thatline. But a vast portion of the

(15:56):
ocean is outside of anyindividual country's
jurisdiction, and that's andinternational maritime law.
That's just known as the area,for short. And under the UN
Convention on the Law The Seaswas established the
International Seabed Authority,which is headquartered in
Jamaica, for some reason, I'mnow a representative of the

(16:23):
International marine mineralsociety. To that body, I haven't
had a meeting yet. I just wasmoved into this role, but they
have established a mining code.
They've been at this for 20years, and they still haven't
established a definitive miningcode. They have a draft version

(16:44):
of it. It's on their website. Ifyou just look up the
International Seabed Authority,it's all there, but it hasn't
been formally adopted yet, andcertain nations keep dragging
their feet on it. They they'reeither small nations, small
island nations, typically thathave fairly large eezs and are

(17:06):
opposed to any disturbance ofthe deep sea floor, or there's
certain larger nations, Chinais, is the main one. China has,
has snapped up a lot of thelicensed areas. Isa has, has
granted licenses to differentnations to explore their deep

(17:29):
sea mineral deposits in the thearea. And China has taken up the
vast Well, a large portion ofthose, it's, I think they have,
oh, eight to 10 licenses out of33 that have been granted. I
have to look up the exactnumber. It needs to pop off the

(17:52):
top of my head. But if,if this code of conduct was a
formally published and ratified,if you will. Would that open the
door to commercial scale deepsea mining? Do you think? Yes,
there's several otherdevelopments that are going on
that may make that whole thingmoot. There was a provision in

(18:14):
the isas charter that said thatthey had to establish this
mining code by a certain date.
Well, that date has passed, andthe country of Nauru, who has
partnered with the companycalled the metals company, a
Canadian based company, they'reone of the most advanced in all
of this. They have invoked aclause that says you have to
issue exploitation licensesbecause you're past that

(18:39):
deadline that was in yourcharter, so you're in violation.
So they're basically sayingyou've lost your right to
regulate us. We're going to dowhatever we want. And secondary
to that, the metals company hasset up a US subsidiary. The US
has never signed on to the UNConvention on the Law of the

(19:01):
seas, so we're not evenrepresented at the ISA. We're
not eligible to get a licensefrom the ISA to explore any of
these areas beyond nationaljurisdiction ourselves. But
there's an obscure at least itwas obscure until a few weeks
ago. US law passed in the early1980s it basically said the US

(19:25):
has sovereignty over the areasbeyond national jurisdiction
that have not already beenclaimed by someone else, and
basically we can do what we wantin those areas. And so the
metals company has invoked thatand is basically proposing to
thumb their nose at the ISA andgo after some of these mineral

(19:50):
deposits that they are alreadylicensed by the ISA to explore.
That was going to be one of myquestions. I know in April, at
the end of April of. Anexecutive order was signed
stating unleashing America'soffshore critical minerals and
resources. I was going to ask,did you think this order hinted
that we might join the ISA? Butfrom what you're saying, like it

(20:12):
might be a moot point.
Every president since George H WBush has signed on to the UN
Convention of the law of theseas, but the US Senate has
never acquiesced to that. Iforget the exact language. They
don't call it ratifying thetreaty, but basically saying

(20:33):
that, yes, the President isallowed to sign that treaty, and
it's in our own nationalinterest to sign this treaty
because it establishes formallythe 200 nautical mile exclusive
economic zone, and evenextensions to that, if you have
extended continental shells, asRussia has tried to claim in the

(20:55):
in the Arctic. But there arecertain members of the Senate
who are ultra nationalist intheir their political bet and
feel that signing on to this,UNCLOS would give up our
sovereignty over the seas, andhave always blocked it. And it

(21:18):
only takes one or two senatorsto block something like that in
this in under the rules of theSenate. So that has gone on
since Strom Thurmond and JesseHelms, back when I was in
college and grad school. Sounder this, this US law, though,
the US is basically claimingthat, or these US based

(21:41):
companies are claiming that wecan just go ahead and do what we
want in these areas where thereisn't already some license block
from the ISA. Compounded on thatis that we have extensive EEZ
areas in the Pacific Ocean,around Guam and Midway and

(22:04):
American Samoa and places likethat that are potentially chock
full of these minerals as well.
So we just had a conversationwith Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management last week about howwe might encourage or accelerate
exploration of those zones.

(22:24):
Right now, there are no USregulatory structures in place
that would incentivize anycommercial operators to go and
explore these areas, becausethere's no guarantee that if
they find big deposits of thesethings, that they'll have rights
to them. It's like the goldrush, and people can jump your

(22:45):
claim because there's there's noway to actually establish an
exclusive claim to whatever youmight find. So there's rule
making underway right now,basically an extension of what's
called the Outer ContinentalShelf act that established the
rights for oil and gas drillingwithin our EEZ to if you find

(23:10):
oil and gas deposits, thenthey're yours. You can stake
claim to them. And so they'retrying to get that extended to
also cover deep sea mineraldeposits. I'm not up on the
latest caveats there, but, butthat's my understanding of it,
at least. Yeah.
I mean, that makes sense. If youdon't you want to waste the
resources if the resources thatyou find aren't even going to be

(23:33):
yours. With that said, what keypolicies or investments do you
think that the US shouldprioritize right now to avoid
falling behind in deep seamineral access or innovation,
oneof the major provisions of the
presidential executive orderfrom a few weeks ago states that
we should support friendlynations that have extensive

(23:54):
deposits already identifiedwithin their exclusive economic
zones, read Cook Islands, andwe're working with the I've been
working with the Cook Islandsgovernment for about six years
now to try to help them developtheir own mining code to their
own regulatory structures, andthey're, pretty much have done

(24:15):
that, and they're simply waitingfor funding to make sure that
all the baseline environmentaldata are collected as specified
in those regulations. Right now,they have granted three licenses
to private companies to exploreportions of their nodule

(24:41):
deposits. Again, they haveextensive fields of these
polymetallic nodules just layingthere on the bottom. It's not
the other things where you haveto go down and jack hammer it
up. It's the nodules that youjust rake up and all three of.
The companies that have licensesfrom the Cook Island seabed

(25:01):
minerals authority, it's, it'stheir national counterpart to
the International SeabedAuthority. They've been relying
on those companies to collect,to collect all that baseline
environmental data that isrequired. Well, these companies
are all funded by venturecapitalists that are looking at,

(25:25):
you know, market pressures andand various things. They're
investing a lot of money now forsomething that might not yield a
profit for three to five yearsinto the future. So they just
don't have the money that ittakes. It's very expensive to
collect this kind of baselinedata. So we're working with the

(25:48):
Cook Islands to try to encourageUS federal government agencies
to invest money to collect thisdata that then would allow them
to issue the licenses to beginextraction activities,
exploitation activities of theseminerals that would ultimately
benefit the US, because thesecompanies are all proposing to

(26:13):
refine These minerals in the US,for US interests. So it's a
strategically important issue,because most of the land based
sources, as I said earlier, ofthese minerals, are controlled
by China and other nations, notby the US. Yeah,

(26:37):
absolutely. And it seems toosince the areas outside of
countries, exclusive economiczones, their eezs. That's kind
of everyone's water, if youwill. It's everyone's ocean out
there. So having cooperationbetween other countries would
seem pretty critical, I wouldthink, and especially if it's
within their EEZ so with that,that brings me to my last

(26:59):
question, what do you see as themost pressing policy or research
question for the next five to 10years in this space? Whether
that's environmental, you know,economic, you know, take that
anywhere.
And in terms of research, justcollecting the data, it's, it's
very difficult to collect dataat 5000 meters, that's three

(27:22):
three and a half miles below thesurface of the ocean. And we can
do it. We know how to do it. Itjust is expensive, particularly
the biological data, is itrequires sending remotely
operated vehicles down that cancrawl around on the bottom and
pick up samples and and then putsensors that are anchored to the

(27:46):
bottom. That's sort of myspecialty, that can sit there
for, you know, six months to ayear at a time, collect data,
and then you go back andretrieve it. Then you've got to
analyze all of that data. Sothose are the biggest issues
right now. As I said, they'vetested these collector vehicles.

(28:07):
So the technology exists tobring the nodules up from the
bottom at scale, but again, itjust requires more of an
investment in the technology.
But they have tested thesevehicles. They work again. The
sediment plumes are are anissue, but not as big an issue
as originally thought. So that'swhere we are right now is, is

(28:32):
somebody needs to come up with abig pile of money for us to go
out and collect all this data,and then we can or countries
like the Cook Islands can beginissuing exploration or
exploitation permits.
Well, thank you so much for thisdiscussion. Today was very

(28:52):
informative, and if peoplewanted to know more about you
and your work, where could theyfind you? Could
go to the international marineminerals Society website. It's
just I, M, M, S, O, c.org, orour lab at the University of
South Florida is justmarine.usf.edu my particular lab

(29:15):
is cmps.marine.usf.edu,awesome. And we'll be sure to
include those links in the shownotes. Dr Luther, it was
wonderful speaking with youtoday, and thank you so much.
Thank you. Great to be here. You