Searching treasures on the seabed

To prevent rich countries and companies from clearing out the seabed’s resources on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis, the UN set up the International Seabed Authority (ISA). This institution, based in Kingston, Jamaica, has managed resources on the ocean floor in international waters since 1994.

Companies seeking to explore and exploit the seabed can apply for a concession from the ISA. An important condition is that their homeland acts as guarantor. The Belgian administration and the Cabinet of the Minister of the North Sea, Johan Vande Lanotte (Socialist Party), has prepared a bill to arrange that guarantee. It is to be submitted to the Council of Ministers soon. The exploration of seabed treasures is open to Belgian companies half a year after the publication of the new law in the Official Gazette.

‘The beauty of this is that the International Seabed Authority strives for fairness and seeks a redistribution of the resources on the ocean floor,’ says Marijn Rabaut of the Cabinet of Vande Lanotte. When a company receives a concession for a particular area of seabed, it is obliged to share its knowledge about the presence of resources with third world countries. It also provides profit-sharing once it comes to real commercial exploitation. Mining for resources at great ocean depths has not yet occurred in 2013, but that could change quickly.

Mapping the seabed

The first step is to know where the raw materials are located in the vast oceans of the world, which after all make up three-quarters of the planet. G-Tec, a company with sixty employees in Milmort (Walloon Region), specializes in geological and geophysical exploration. ‘Geophysical exploration is to soil research what medical imaging is to medicine. One makes an image of the surface, and that has to be interpreted’, says Professor Lucien Halleux, visiting professor of geophysics at the KU Leuven and the University of Liège. He started G-Tec from his garage in 1993, and today his company is active throughout the world. ‘The essence is that you explore the seabed non-destructively, for example with seismic waves. The environmental impact of seafloor exploration is an important consideration in awarding concessions. The impact should be thoroughly investigated and minimized. In any case, the situation is different for raw materials on the land, where the consequences for the environment often are huge, and few were taken into consideration in the past.’

G-Tec Sea Mineral Resources based in Ostend is the first Belgian company to receive a concession from the International Seabed Authority. Once the Belgian guarantee is ensured legally, the subsidiary of G-Tec can begin exploring the seabed. Professor Halleux: ‘We have a concession for an area in the Pacific Ocean that is 2.5 times the size of Belgium. The intention is to map the seabed over the next five years. We go looking for nodules -they look like potatoes- that contain iron, manganese, copper, nickel and cobalt, and lie around in large quantities on the seabed. Nickel, copper and cobalt are especially interesting for commercial mining later on.’

Surgical dredging

The second step is the extraction itself - no easy feat, since many significant raw material stocks lie at a depth of two to five kilometres. The water pressure is enormous there, which poses a challenge for loosening raw materials from the seabed crust, and for the instruments being used at great depths. On top of that, operating thousands kilometres offshore is very expensive. A ship of 160 by 40 metres with about 120 crew members and all the necessary technology on board costs as much as 250,000 Euros per day.

A company claiming to possess the necessary hardware and technology to mine the seabed is OceanflORE. It is a joint venture of dredger DEME and the Dutch technology developer IHC Merwede.
‘Given the increase in world population and economic prosperity, the demand for commodities will also continue to rise’, says OceanflORE director Hugo Bouvy. ‘We will have to recycle better and learn how to deal with raw materials more efficiently, but we will also need more resources. The known reserves of zinc, tin, cadmium, copper and nickel will last for another thirty years. Then there will be scarcity. These raw materials are available on the seabed. We will ultimately mine the seabed, that’s for sure. The only question is when. The seabed was already partly mapped in the seventies. But with low commodity prices it was not cost effective to start extraction. Seabed mining has been on the agenda again for the last eight years.’

Deme CEO Alain Bernard stresses that technology makes it possible to mine raw materials in such a way that environmental impact is limited. ‘Take the nodules on the seabed. We will not plough the whole earth as a farmer, but we will pick up each ‘potato’ one by one. Surgical dredging as it were. Deme has a number of so-called dynamic position ships, which can position themselves very accurately.’
‘Another thing is the water that is pumped up with the raw materials. You cannot just throw it overboard. It comes from kilometres below and has a different temperature and composition to surface water. By moving it in large volumes, you might disrupt the ecological system. Therefore, we will pump the water back to where it came from.”

So the knowledge and technology are available. Now we wait for interested customers to hand over the money for commercial exploitation. Bouvy reckons that seabed mining is an opportunity for Europe. ‘The U.S., Japan and China are countries that have been thinking about resources for decades now. Europe has relatively few resources available. Europe can safeguard its need for resources in international waters, if necessary, at the other side of the world.’