A secret on the ocean floor | Hacker News Reader

A secret on the ocean floor

bbc.co.uk

147 pointsjjp56 comments

"Bram Murton, a geologist with the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, says that if all the cars on Europe’s roads are electric by 2040, and if they use the same kind of batteries as the Tesla Model 3, that would require 28 times more cobalt than is produced right now."

"At the moment more than 60% of all cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. For decades allegations of corruption and human rights abuses have swirled around parts of its mining industry."

"And with renewable power like wind and solar being installed at a frantic pace, every turbine and every panel also requires key metals."

I'm always wondering why more people aren't concerned about the production of these materials we need for all the clean energy, electric cars, and more iPhones. Is it just that it's not as bad as the oil production? Or do people really think we'll be mining asteroids in a few years?

I'm hardly ever an optimist, but I believe that this kind of situation is exactly what the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention" applies to. I am 100% confident that Elon has an entire team of material scientists at Tesla working on alternatives to these rare materials.

I sure hope so. I'm definitely not against these new technologies. I'm just honestly not that informed on where these materials come from generally, and if there are any reasonable plans to source them better or replace them.

Do you think Elon built the Falcon Heavy so he can get an alternative supply of the materials he needs from asteroids (I have no idea if cobalt can be found on asteroids)?

Here's an in depth analysis of the cobalt situation:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/01/no-cobalt-no-tesla/

Tesla are claiming they will only use cobalt mined in North America, the article examines that and find that it might be possible.

I am fascinated by renewable energies, and I too hate the idea of mining more in order to manage our energy transition.

However the massive difference with drilling for petrol is that petrol has a drill and burn lifecycle. You drill once, then burn it, then you need to drill more. Cobalt for instance will be put in batteries that will be charged and discharged numerous time before reaching their end of life. Then the car battery will be re-used in grid-scale battery storage, then finally recycled to be put in a car again (or phone or whatever else)

So although I dislike the idea of more mining, I can see how the situation switches from use once to use thousands of times and how it's a slight improvement on our current situation (climate change aside).

so solid state battery technologies require cobalt? Are we just in a transition from the liquid (they are wet, right?) batteries we have now?

There are plenty of other lithium ion chemistries that use no cobalt. If push comes to shove we use them instead. I already use LiFePO4 everywhere I can.

But LiFePO4 has much lower energy density right? So not great for cars or airplanes.

There's justifiable, moderate concern for cobalt supply as a bottleneck when it comes to ramping up EV battery production with current popular lithium ion battery chemistries. "Every turbine and every panel also requires key metals" is a claim that's either false or trivial (perhaps they've defined "key metals" as "metals used to make wind turbines and solar panels.")

It's hard to have a sensible discussion about material supply constraints for renewable energy, EVs, and electronics because it's a lot easier to affirm a baseless panic than to reject it. Some years ago I saw a forum comment like "China has a rare earth monopoly and there's not enough neodymium for everyone in the world to have an iPod." One sentence of concentrated nonsense. It takes multiple paragraphs of carefully cited evidence to demonstrate why that's nonsense. You have to estimate mass of magnets in the device, carefully show your work to justify the estimate as reasonable, further break down magnet composition to find neodymium demand per device, link to citations for crustal abundance of neodymium, link to evidence of non-Chinese neodymium resources, link to evidence of historical mining outside China, show how much the bill-of-materials cost for raw neodymium can rise before it adds $5 to the iPod cost... If you skip any steps, there's a gap left for the "skeptic" to dodge your counter-argument and keep believing whatever they believed before.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of materials that I've seen asserted as being both in short supply and critical for the expansion of renewable energy:

- Neodymium

- Dysprosium

- "Rare earth metals," generically

- Indium

- Gallium

- Tellurium

- Lithium

Of those, I'd say that only dysprosium is even close. Adding a small amount of dysprosium to neodymium magnets permits the magnets to endure higher temperatures, which makes them better suited for high-power applications like permanent magnet generators in wind turbines. But PM generators are just a "nice to have" -- most wind turbines use electromagnets instead. Lithium is very useful but too abundant to worry about. The others just aren't very important to renewable energy technologies in the first place. Sure, there are solar cells that rely on gallium, but over 99% of the world's PV cell manufacturing does not use gallium. Most is based on silicon, which is extremely abundant.

There are a lot of incentives aligned to panic about shortages more often than makes sense. Stories in the popular press emphasize shortage and panic because "we're not running out of gallium" is not a story. Junior mining companies play on the panic to lure money -- "we're going to solve the rare earth crisis and make our investors rich!" Shills for the fossil fuel status quo tu quoque renewable energy: "greenies against coal never tell you that those wind turbines need filthy, dangerous mining too." Even several environmentalists of my acquaintance have swallowed this nonsense; perhaps they've seen so many bad examples that they're pre-primed to believe it when someone says that we're even running out of materials to make wind turbines and solar panels.

And, oh yeah, by the way, even if we do “solve” this “problem” by mining asteroids, and unlock an unlimited supply of all minerals on demand at all times, how long before we import so much mass, that we drastically alter the concentrations of strange, toxic compounds in the biosphere, well beyond what would have ever been possible with decades of the most dehumanizing mining operations imaginable?

In a hypothetical worst-case scenario, let’s imagine the world had an insatiable appetite for mercury thermometers, and presto! Asteroid mining to the rescue! We discover that all the asteroids have a delicious, juicy mercury core!

Extrapolated to extremes, the world adopts disposable mercury thermometers as the new normal, and in a decade, methylmercury poisons the globe, as landfills accumulate tons and tons of broken thermometers, and the waste quickly seeps into the water table.

Inexhaustable supply can cause problems on its own.

Perhaps, just maybe, our need for these materials may help stabilize and improve countries where they are found. Now, it could easily go the other way. Natural resource wealth is often paired with terrible poverty and does not seem to alleviate it, but to make it worse. However, each find is a chance to get it right.

In short: a almost romantic cold-war story of a mission to recover a sovier submarine triggers an interest of mining the deep ocean floor.

Not actual until the whole world is moving to an electrical future where raw materials such as copper, cobalt, zinc, etc are in shortage, or suspect of child work, thus an option of mine the ocean floor.

This has other drawbacks, such as destroying the ecology of the deep ocean floor, possibly wiping out species that we might not even know.

"We’ve drilled the ocean floor for oil and gas, scarred it with trenches for communications cables, poisoned it with old radioactive waste and chemical weapons, and polluted its remotest corners with a blizzard of discarded plastic. So, is mining a step too far?"

"I put that question to Sir David Attenborough at the launch of his series Blue Planet II. When he sees our video of the giant machines being readied in Papua New Guinea, he is aghast. “It’s heartbreaking,” he says."

This sums it up for me. Our greed is sad.

I'm not so sure. What's happened to the ocean floor is a tiny, tiny fraction of what we've done to the land. Its just invisible, which in my mind lets people's imaginations run free. A few cable trenches? We've got two or three crossing the lot my house is on, not to mention 3 billion other people's lots. Mining? This ocean-floor stuff won't be a patch on what the US has done to the southwest, nor what Russia's done in the Arctic. As for landfills, every city, town and berg has one. I can't dig a shovel of dirt from my field without finding a plastic fragment.

So, not to say its all good, but its just so remote from what should be our true concerns.

But the hydrothermal vents host thriving communities of marine life - snails, worms and shrimp that have evolved to cope with very specific conditions.

In some cases these creatures are extremely rare, which is why the prospect of deep sea mining is highly controversial.

You can't say the same for the earthworms and dandelions harmed by digging a trench in the yard in New England.

We're largely unaware of the millions of extinct insects etc that humanity extinguished in our conquest of the 7 continents. Suffice it to say, all those that evolved on land for very specific conditions are long gone. Except for those we're bulldozing today without noticing.

> I can't dig a shovel of dirt from my field without finding a plastic fragment

This, in the wider environment, whether microbeads in fish or plastic bags in the ocean, is one of the greatest modern tragedies IMHO.

I disagree. I'm not sure its at all significant. Whether the fish has sand or plastic fragments in its gut may be immaterial. This issue has been fastened onto by well-meaning folks without much study.

Perversely, the fact that many fish have micro beads in them is encouraging - they clearly are surviving and reproducing despite the beads (or we wouldn't be finding them in such large numbers).

So, not a big fan of the hippocratic oath (precautionary principle)?

I really don’t know how to respond to denial, whatsboutism, selective incredulity. Mostly, I give up.

But know that when obstructionists finally get a clue, I’m fresh out of goodwill, and won’t be helping.

Good luck.

Sure, be cautious. But about what? Which things?

Talk about isms, the tendency of the popular press to latch onto big obvious things and say "What about microplastic beads?!" Its something folks can see and get behind. Never mind there's not much evidence its actually a problem.

We have a limited fund of energy, emotional and productive. To spend it on microplastic beads may well be the right direction. But is surely takes attention away from things that ARE definitely a problem.

I'm not some Pollyanna ignorant person that's deliberately denying science or whatever. Just the opposite.

"Never mind there's not much evidence its actually a problem."

What measure of proof do you require, to convince you that it's a problem worthy of your attention?

Any proof at all. To say 'there are plastic beads in fish' is not any kind of data point.

Then you wouldn't mind to drink water containing such plastic for the rest of your life, would you ? And give it to your kid ?

Cause as long as we have no proof it's dangerous...

Well of course we're all doing that already. Just in very low amounts. I don't worry about what's not a problem.

That seems quite the stretch. We don't know enough of the long term consequences of them in fish, or if there is any genetic damage. Or of chemicals concentrating as they move up the food chain, eventually to us.

To me that is very discouraging. We should be trying to find out consequences before we dump millions of tonnes and find plastic strewn over uninhabited beaches and micro beads in most oceanic life. We should study the possible consequences of undersea mining long before companies are formed and machines start rolling. It might, after all, turn out to be yet another bad idea.

Sure, that's a good idea. But we're doing a million things every day, and tiny plastic beads are just one thing. And maybe not even a damaging thing.

I think we could attend to things that are provably a problem. That way, we're actually doing good. Instead of just playing a game of 'ecological theatre' .

This really is a proven problem. Plastic doesn’t enter into the ocean in isolation. It’s dumped with all the other environmental, health damaging chemicals, metals, and etc. Humankind is not taking care of its waste and it’s destroying the weather cycles, climate, and ecosystems.

I can’t see how microbeads in fish can in any way be a good thing can it?

And I think it’s pretty conclusive plastic waste in general is a very bad thing in the ocean for more reasons than just ingestion by fish [0]

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/28/bali-declares-rub...

What I find most astonishing is the open admission that they are going to intentionally destroy thermal vents, which may be the origins of life on earth. The loss to science is incalculable, and the destruction of the life that lives around them is the equivalent of wiping out an entire ecosystem.

It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process.

It's encouraging to know the world will be monitoring this as it happens. Often forgotten about American history is how badly we had to destroy our own environment before we took action to make things better. Much of our country was turned into barren wasteland as all the trees were cut down for industry, and it took FDR deploying a literal army of tree-planters to bring the forests back. I think we are watching the same history repeat in China now as they deploy tree-planters along their growing deserts.

So we'll watch this new environmental front. We'll read stories about companies breaking the rules and listen to pundits decry government regulations that protect snails over jobs. Hopefully we'll strike a balance and survive long enough to make asteroid-mining profitable and maybe take all of this off-world where such environmental conflicts don't exist.

I'm much less optimistic than you. The amount of willful cognitive dissonance on display here is staggering.

> “Where we’ll be operating, it’s cold and dark,” says one senior Nautilus executive. “There are no tuna there, they need entirely different conditions near the surface of the ocean.”

I expect nothing less from the mining executive to dismiss concerns that the ocean's ecosystems are directly connected.

> "For Michael Lodge, secretary general of the International Seabed Authority, a UN body set up to manage deep sea mining, there’s a clear case for pressing ahead. “Are we going to continue to develop huge mines that destroy villages, alter rivers, pollute water courses, take thousands of years to restore, remove whole mountains? You don’t have any of that with deep seabed mining.”"

But this one is from the UN body itself that you are talking about monitoring this. This man just finished saying "pollute water" in the previous sentence then proceeded with the claim that this doesn't occur with deep seabed mining? How can people claim this with a straight face?

I don't want to come off as naive. The article is very good at explaining the consumer needs driving this development. 8 billion people with smartphones and 4 billion electric cars does not scale.

On the other hand, there are also hundreds of millions of people that rely on fish for their protein. Are we willing to risk destroying our oceans to save our land?

8e9 + 4e9 > 1e8. We know how this is going to go. /s

> On the other hand, there are also hundreds of millions of people that rely on fish for their protein. Are we willing to risk destroying our oceans to save our land?

Plenty of fish you can eat that live in tanks of water. Who says they need to come from the ocean?

Maybe it was the tone of your comment that got you downvoted, but there's an important point here. Fish farming is a crucial tool in preserving our oceans. We can't keep taking fish from the open seas; we need to set up dedicated farms to grow what we need.

I wonder, if USIC (US intelligence community) has used billionaires in the 1970s to cover up their secret operations, if they do it today?

Like the removal of dependence on foreign oil thanks to solar power, and development of inexpensive large-payload space launch systems for national intelligence payloads?

No, like digging under Washington DC to build a fake transport tunnel, when you're really providing cover for putting new construction in place under the capitol that the US Govt doesn't want their enemies to know exists.

(I'm not saying that is occurring, just that that would be the more likely example)

I would imagine this is very common. I also wonder if there are "billionaires" who aren't even actual billionaires, just CIA operatives with legends slowly built up around them through the years.

What are you implying about SpaceX and BlueOrigin...? What's really in that Roadster? :)

Was that actually a car sent to mars?

Humans do not need to mine the ocean. The proven reserves of existing mines and future projects are more than enough for decades. Anyone who says otherwise is only looking to save a dollar and will cut costs on environmental sustainability. The USA is sitting on millions of tons of copper while watching other countries mine it out of theirs. We could supply the whole world for decades on our own if we wanted to restore our mining industry.

But there's no real economic need for US minerals.

I would argue there might be a strategic need for them, but not an economic one.

There is certainly no economic imperative to mine the ocean floor in the face of the potential environmental harm it may cause.

I question it's morality on the basis of balancing mankind's needs versus our calling to manage our resources properly.

Wouldn't this money be better spent recycling e-waste where the copper and gold content is significantly higher and the environmental impact is demonstrably positive?

So those vents, the ones covered in crabs, worms and all the other living things, are going to be ground up into slurry? Didn't Monty Burns try something like this?

A mile down might seem far, but that's where sperm whales and elephant seals feed. This will come back to haunt us.

Why do you say that? Mining companies have a long and honorable history of responsible environmental stewardship.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you meant that sarcastically.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rio+tinto+environmental+dama...

For just one example. Resource extractors of all kinds are among the worlds biggest polluters and destroyers of habitats and entire eco systems.

I don't think there is any other interpretation possible for the GP. I don't think we should adopt the habit of postpending a "\s" everywhere, at least not on HN.

I agree wtr to the GP, but in general I disagree. You can never really be certain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Now I have to wonder if the downvotes are people not getting the sarcasm or are offended that I might be snarky about the mining industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960)#...

> But the US had given the command and control system for nuclear weapons to the Russians

But what does this mean? Why would they give it to the russians, and why would the russians accept it?

With all the concerns in the OP, the many questions, many calls for more research, the speculations of disasters, the lack of lots of solid, detailed information, etc., where the UN, etc. can be involved doing much of anything on the ocean floor will be blocked for decades.

But there is an alternative: Use the TIFO method -- try it and find out.

So, pick some spots on the ocean floor. It's a huge ocean with lots of candidate spots.

At some of these spots, take a census of what is there. Gather some worms, crabs, shrimp, nodules, parts of hydrothermal vents, etc. Admit that these are not exhaustive or comprehensive but just samples.

Then at some of these spots where took the census, do the mining. Leave the other spots as controls.

Then take another census. Compare the mined spots with the controls. See what the changes and upsides and downsides are.

Since some of the candidate spots for mining are in the waters of sovereign countries and, thus, largely out of the control of the US, likely some of this TIFO work will be done and not blocked by the UN, etc.

Maybe then we will begin to find out.

I like how the eco footprint is compared to a graphical depiction of Prominent Hill mine in SA. I used to code telemetry on site there.

Related: Radioloab episode on the Glomar explorer and how the Glomar clause ('neither confirm nor deny') was born out of it. http://www.radiolab.org/story/confirm-nor-deny/

This is still a CIA plot. Don't be fooled by the geology

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