Ok, cue the cheezy, 50’s educational film music.
It seems that while everyone has been focusing on mining good ole’ terra firma, a minority has been looking at the remaining 2/3 of the earth. Some companies want to head down a mile or two underwater, and pull from deep sea repositories of gold and silver that remain, as yet, untapped.
Miners would be able to leverage existing technologies from off-shore oil and gas companies. The technology would work like this: The oil company would pump the highly acidic water (and the contents of the deposits) onto a ship chilling out on the surface. The deposits would be filtered out, and the water would be sent back down a 2 mile pipe, into extremely deep waters, so as not to damage less acid-tolerant sea life.
I could not find an adequate illustration for this project, and was forced to draw it myself. Below is a horribly crude representation of the process in question. The things I do for our readers:
An Ocean Mining Vessel grabs deep mineral deposits, pulls them up through a pipe, sifts it, and then returns the acidic water to depths of 2 miles or more.
Now, according to the AP report announcing all this, mining won’t actually begin until 2011-2012, and the pilot project will be done by Nautilus Minerals, Inc., of Canada.
This type of mining raises interesting issues, such as unseen environmental consequences. As we run out of land-based mineral resources, we may well have no other option but to mine the remaining oceans of the earth. If you think geographical, land-centric turf war is tense, wait until ocean mining becomes wide scale.
Can you imagine the revenue wars that will be fought, the piracy that will inevitably spring up, and the environmental protests that will be waged over some rocks in ocean depths? Russia has already said that it would like Alaska back at some point. Canada says it will defend its ownership of portions of the Arctic circle from the Russians. Battles on the high seas will once again be the norm, and naval spending will rapidly increase.
What will this mean for mining on land, and especially for large earthmoving vehicles? While you still have to haul a portion of the debris and minerals away, the waste produced will not be nearly as much as your average gold mine currently produces. Fortunately for workers in the mining industry, the equipment and compliance with regulations are very expensive. Like all technologies, it will improve over time, and become less expensive.
That will be a sad day for tire manufacturers, as rail and tractor trailers will be able to replace a large amount of heavy equipment. Sure, you’ll still need the basics: a loader here, a haul truck there. Less equipment will be required to do the job. Plus, scientists are saying it is possible to mine the depths, without destroying existing ecosystems, or the ocean in the process. Sounds like a win/win for mining and all but the most extreme environmental activists.
While Ocean Mining has a long way to go before it is mainstream, I believe it will remain a subject of extreme interest to the mining and tire industries in the days ahead. We’ll be here to cover it. In the meantime, you can find the original AP Report on Ocean Mining, here.
Until then, I’ll be…
Signing off…
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