In 2022, The Metals Company ran a 70-ton crawler along the Pacific seafloor at 13,000 feet depth, vacuuming up mineral-rich nodules across a tenth of a mile. The test was declared a success. Now the Canadian firm is seeking commercial approval to mine 65,000 square kilometers of seafloor and extract over 600 million metric tons of nodules packed with copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel.
They are not alone. Thirty-one separate initiatives from companies, governments, and state-owned enterprises, including China, India, and the Pacific island nation of Nauru, are actively testing equipment or collecting nodules for analysis. The race for the deep ocean floor is no longer hypothetical.
The full article is worth reading for how it maps the geopolitics and the competing technical approaches across those 31 players, and for the unresolved question of what commercial-scale extraction actually does to an ecosystem that has never been touched.
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