Deep-sea mining (Part I)

Four Corners throws another prawn on the BBQ

ABC’s Four Corners episode “Race to the Bottom” (RTB), with reporter Mark Willacy, is about the prospects of mining the deep ocean in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) for metals to power the clean energy transition. The CCZ is about 3.5 per cent of the Pacific Ocean and current mining plans involve about 1/3rd of it.

If you want to assess the environmental impact of a new activity, comparing it with the current method of doing the same thing would seem an obvious choice. But while Willacy shows some aerial shots of large land based mining operations, he doesn’t attempt any quantitative comparison. Aerial shots of mines really need something to provide a sense of scale. How big are these scars on the landscape? How many do we need? How many can deep sea mining replace?

Think also about tailings dams. When these collapse, which they do from time to time, they are frequently deadly and always destructive. The most recent large one killed some 250 people in Brazil in 2019. Willacy could have considered how many lives can we expect to save by shifting some mining operations offshore. He could have interviewed people living near a tailings dam and asked their views.

But RTB neither asked nor answered such questions.

This critique will compare alternative mining options in more detail. Making decisions is usually about comparing alternatives; it’s not as if there is a “no mining increase” alternative. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps we in the developed world can reduce our energy, material and meat use by 90-95 per cent, offset the other 5-10 and ensure that the under-developed world stays that way.

But that’s a barbaric and arrogant option; it shouldn’t be on anybody’s table.

Comparing deep sea mining with other ocean activities would also seem a reasonable strategy.

Watching RTB and the angst over deep see mining is like glimpsing an alt-universe where there is no industrial fishing. I’ll detail later how one Australian prawn fishery, in and around one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, the Great Barrier Reef, kills nearly 4 tonne of marine animals for every tonne of prawns it delivers to human consumers. I say kills, but many will be injured and discarded to die slowly.

Watching RTB is like glimpsing an alt-universe without a fleet of ocean going vessels laying and servicing the 1.4 million kilometre of cables which carry information, and sometimes electricity, around the world; not to mention massive natural gas pipe lines like the now inactive Nord Stream pipelines which once delivered Russian gas to Germany.

This critique will begin with some background to set mining in general, and mining in the CCZ, in the context of other impacts on land and biodiversity. Then we’ll give a quick overview of the structure of RTB as a TV production, then move on to cover some of the issues that RTB missed.

Lastly, I will discuss the issue of biodiversity generally. It appears in news stories like a tribal tattoo. You’re either for it or agin it. But tribal allegiances are getting incredibly messy in an age where the Universities of Melbourne, Queensland and Princeton have a Net Zero Australia (NZAU) plan which includes scenarios where the area of solar panels in Australia alone is similar to the footprint of the entire global mining industry. With the built footprints of some scenarios substantially larger.

[I’ll be publishing this critique in bite sized chunks every few day]