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#seabed

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#US Is Reviewing #ImpossibleMetals Proposal to #Mine the #Seabed
The Interior Department said it would review a new proposal for operations off the coast of #AmericanSamoa.
The move follows an #executiveorder that urged government agencies to expedite permits for #seabedmining in US territorial waters as well as international waters. Most other nations argue US does not have the legal right to mine the seabed beyond its own territorial waters.
nytimes.com/2025/05/21/climate
archive.ph/B5zn4

The New York Times · U.S. Is Reviewing Impossible Metals Proposal to Mine the SeabedBy Max Bearak

#SodiumBatteries offer an alternative to tricky #lithium

Lithium is relatively scarce and mostly refined in China. Sodium is neither

Oct 26th 2023

Excerpt: "Fortunately, lithium is not the only game in town. As we report this week, a clutch of firms are making batteries based on sodium, lithium’s elemental cousin. Since sodium’s chemical properties are very similar to those of lithium, it too makes for good batteries. And sodium, which is found in the salt in seawater, is thousands of times more abundant on Earth than lithium and cheaper to get at. Most of the companies using sodium to make batteries today are also Chinese. But pursuing the technology in the West might be a surer route to energy security than relying heavily on lithium.

"Besides its abundance, sodium has other advantages. The best lithium batteries use #cobalt and 3nickel in their electrodes. Nickel, like lithium, is in short supply. #Mining it on land is #environmentally destructive. Proposals to grab it from the #seabed instead have caused rows. A good deal of the world’s cobalt, meanwhile, is extracted from small mines in the Democratic Republic of #Congo, where child labour is common and working conditions are dire. Sodium batteries, by contrast, can use electrodes built from iron and manganese, which are plentiful and uncontroversial. Since the chemical components are cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that cost less than their lithium counterparts.

"Sodium is not a perfect replacement for lithium. It is heavier, meaning sodium batteries will weigh more than lithium ones of an equivalent capacity. That is likely to rule them out in some cases where lightness is paramount. But for other applications, such as grid storage or home batteries, weight is irrelevant. Several Chinese carmakers are even beginning to put sodium batteries in electric vehicles.

"Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of sodium batteries is their late start. #LithiumIon batteries were first commercialised in the 1990s and have benefited from decades of investment. But the rest of the world is behind China on both fronts anyway. America and the European Union have announced enormous programmes of green industrial subsidies. If they are determined to bankroll batteries, some of the pot should go to sodium."

Read more:
economist.com/leaders/2023/10/

Archived version:
archive.ph/7x6JX#

The Economist · Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithiumBy The Economist

As #Norway Considers #DeepSeaMining, a Rich History of Ocean Conservation Decisions May Inform How the Country Acts

In the past, scientists, industry and government have worked together in surprising, tense and fruitful ways

by Christian Elliott, April 21, 2025

"At the #Arctic #MidOceanRidge off the Norwegian coast, molten rock rises from deep within the Earth between spreading tectonic plates. Black smoker vents sustain unique ecosystems in the dark. Endemic species of long, segmented bristle worms and tiny crustaceans graze on bacteria mats and flit among fields of chemosynthetic tube worms, growing thick as grass. Dense banks of sponges cling to the summits and slopes of underwater mountains. And among all this life, minerals build up slowly over millennia in the form of #sulfide deposits and #manganese crusts.

"Those minerals are the kind needed to fuel the global green energy transition—#copper, #zinc and #cobalt. In January 2024, Norway surprised the world with the announcement it planned to open its waters for exploratory deep-sea mining, the first nation to do so. If all went to plan, companies would be issued licenses to begin identifying mineral deposits as soon as #Spring2025. To some scientists who’d spent decades mapping and studying the geology and ecology of the Norwegian seabed and Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge, the decision seemed premature—they still lacked critical data on the area targeted for mining. The government’s own Institute of Marine Research (IMR) accused it of extrapolating from a small area where data has already been collected to the much larger zone now targeted

“ 'Our advice has been we don’t have enough knowledge,' says Rebecca Ross, an #ecologist at IMR who works on Norway’s #Mareano deep-sea mapping initiative. She says the decision was based solely on the #geology of the area. Taking high-resolution scans of the seabed and sampling its geology is the first step when research ships enter a new area, but critical biological and ecological research is more difficult and tends to come later—which is the case on the ridge area targeted for mining. Ross says it’s certain that area contains vulnerable marine ecosystems that would be affected by the light and noise pollution and sediment plumes generated by mining. The IMR estimates closing the knowledge gap on the target area could take ten years.

"The same conflict, with a partial scientific understanding misinterpreted and used to justify resource extraction, is playing out in the #Pacific, where mining pilot projects are already underway in international waters. Years before, scientists funded by industry scouted the #seabed there, discovering both valuable minerals and new forms of life."

Read more:
smithsonianmag.com/science-nat

Revealing Hidden Depths - Seabed 2030 [podcast]
--
buzzsprout.com/2093154/1342982 <-- link to podcast
--
doi.org/10.3390/geosciences802 <-- shared 2018 ‘overview’ paper
--
“In [their] first episode Head of Partnerships Steve Hall introduces Seabed 2030 with a summary of the history of mapping the ocean floor from earliest times to the present day...
Find out more about Seabed 2030 at www.seabed2030.org
Find out more about GEBCO at gebco.net/...”
#GIS #spatial #mapping #hydrospatial #hydrography #bathymetry #survey #Seabed2030 #marine #ocean #global #remotesensing #sonar #GEBCO #oceanfloor #seabed #international #topobathy #history #opendata
The Nippon Foundation##

This is a horrendous situation to be in. The deep sea is a huge & biodiverse wilderness. These nodules can take two MILLION years to form. We absolutely do not need minerals from the seabed - battery designers are designing them out - and it will be almost impossible to monitor the significant damage that mining would cause. We must say no.
theguardian.com/environment/20 #ocean #Seabed

The Guardian · Future of deep-sea mining hangs in balance as opposition growsBy Karen McVeigh