The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea, With Robot Drones (vice.com)

merbs writes: In Papua New Guinea, one well-financed, first-mover company is about to pioneer deep sea mining. And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they've been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they'll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.

Comments

That will go well

[retroworks]

Metal mining is the #1, #2 AND #3 most polluting industry. 14/15 largest superfund sites, etc. Primary barrier to cyanide treatment and tailing ponds is the property value of abutting land. This is what has driven mining out west in the USA, to rain forests, and now to the ocean, where no on can hear you scream.

Re:That will go well

[gurps_npc]

Normal gold mining is known for using vile chemicals (mercury, cyanide) to seperate out small percentages (1%) of gold from non-gold. Deep sea gold mining avoids this problem. They go to hot vents where the gold is much higher percentages. So they don;t use mercury or cyanide.

They do however involve large transportation of materials up from the sea bed, most of which is released to float down.

The risks are radically different than land based mining and relatively unknown.

But I am a firm believer in diversification of risk. I'd rather have some coal and some nuclear, rather than just one, as the risks are different.

Similarly, undersea gold mining is worth a pilot project or two to see how it affects the local ecology.

Re:That will go well

[Applehu Akbar]

Hasn't offshore gold dredging been done for years in Alaska? The environmental effects should be well known by now.

Re:That will go well

[Bengie]

Tungsten. Cheap material, extremely difficult to machine. You pay for the effort, not the materials. And a mirror finish that never tarnishes.

Impressive Monsters

[no-body]

Indeed:

http://www.animals-zone.com/7-...

No concept what hit them, when it does.

Yeah right.

[Harlequin80]

This has to compete against mines on land operating with excellent infrastructure and somehow do it for less money.

I'm sorry but it just isn't going to happen any time soon. Olympic Dam in South Australia has absolutely massive gold, copper and uranium deposits but the economics of that mine couldn't be made to stack up in the current market. There is no way that untested, experimental mining in an incredibly hostile environment stands a chance.

Re:Yeah right.

[Dereck1701]

If the yields were the same you would no doubt be correct, but the article suggested that the deposits around these hydro-thermal vents are 10 times the density of modern land based deposits and they don't have to remove massive amounts of stone/dirt covering them in order to start mining, they're sitting right on the sea floor. That of course still doesn't make it a sure thing, but it definitely helps.

Re:Yeah right.

[CanadianMacFan]

Of course they don't have those pesky environmental regulations to stick to. There's nobody down at the ocean floor to complain about them dredging up tons of sediment. Just like the damage from fishing trawlers. Out of sight out of mind. Not that I'm for this because each of these vents is a unique ecosystem that is almost unknown to us.

Re:Yeah right.

[Rei]

The deposit in question is 6g per tonne - which is still 5x better than your average gold mine on land. So the gold from 20k tonnes actually only pays for about 15% of a robot. But it also gives you 1400 tonnes of copper worth a quarter of another robot, plus nickel, silver, cobalt, and zinc.. altogether, yeah, 20k tonnes of ore, refined and sold at typical market prices, probably buys about one robot.

However, it's worth adding that there's no overburden. On your average surface mine, you have to remove an awful lot of rock before you get to anything that's actually worth something.

Re:Yeah right.

[jabuzz]

You are assuming they don't pump the "tails" back down to the ocean floor. Near bottom plumes as they are known are however still likely to have environmental impacts.

DeBeers have been doing sea floor mining for quite a while now for diamonds of the coast of Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Who cares?

[Harlequin80]

Uh-huh. Gold is useful BECAUSE it isn't reactive. It is highly ductile, doesn't corrode quickly and it conducts electricity well.

Re:Time to short Manganese ?

[Tim the Gecko]

When I was a kid I read about manganese nodule mining on the sea floor. It later turned out that it was Project Azorian, where the nodules were a cover story for a CIA-funded attempt to lift a Soviet sub from the sea floor.

Hmmm

[tsotha]

Did a Russian sub go down around PNG?

Nope.avi

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing about each gold rush is that for the most part anybody who could scrounge together some very basic equipment could strike out and attempt to make their fortune. We are talking shovels, and sifters not multi-million dollar underwater robots the size of a tank. Heck most people aren't even qualified to land jobs working on the ship.

It might have some great prospects and if you are already have a boatload of money and or a large corporation, it might make you a boatload more but a gold rush this is not.

"5 years in future" since 1960s

[peter303]

I read this article all the time. They were not called drones then.

Deepwater Horizon in the making

[Anonymous Coward]

Has everyone already forgotten the BP disaster of 2010? Last thing we need is millions of barrels of gold spilling up from the depths of the ocean, polluting our beaches and choking our marine life.

Still can't separate fact from fiction

[Solandri]

In 1968, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine sank in the Pacific ocean. In the 1970s, the CIA built a ship, the Glomar Explorer, to attempt to recover this submarine. The CIA got Howard Hughes to provide a public front for the ship's construction. Its cover story was that it was going to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor. As part of this cover, there was a massive disinformation campaign regarding the amount of valuable materials which could be mined (or vacuumed as some of the news stories described it) off the ocean floor. Newspaper and magazine articles proclaimed how by the turn of the century, we would be mining most of our metals from the ocean. Growing up in the 1970s as a kid extremely interested in ocean sciences, I read a huge number of these stories with fascination.

The cover for the operation was blown in 1975. But because of the disinformation campaign, it's still difficult to tell if these proposed mining operations have in fact accurately analyzed the financial viability of mining materials from the ocean floor. Or if they've been taken in by the hype generated as a cover story decades ago, and are assuming that if there were so many stories in major publications about the financial viability of ocean floor mining, that someone must've done their due diligence and concluded it was in fact financially viable. (As for the submarine, it broke while it was being hauled up to the surface, and the CIA only managed to recover about the front third of it. The more valuable conning tower section and propeller were lost. The recovered bow contained a couple nuclear torpedoes tough, so the CIA considered the operation one of their greatest successes of the Cold War.)

Re:horrible

[ColdWetDog]

what a disaster this will be for the ocean life for hundreds or thousands of miles around the site surely, not to mention any coral and deep sealife in the direct area, and whales and other migratory sea animals will be affected too

Hyperbolic much? Hundreds or thousands of miles around the site? They're dredges, not hydrogen bombs. Yes, they will create a mess - as does mining everywhere. It will be fairly localized. And likely remain a rounding error in the grand scheme of horrible things we do to the ocean floor (e.g. trawler fishing).