Transcript of Mining's New Frontier

I'm Ayesha Rosco. This is the Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today, we're going really deep, and I mean really deep, basically to the bottom of the ocean. There's been a lot of attention lately on a new mineral frontier in the dark depths of the sea. More and more commercial mining interests have their eyes on the seabed floor as an untapped source of minerals essential to powering our green energy future. So far, very few companies have been granted rights to mine the sea floor. But recently, Villa Marks, a reporter in the UK, was invited to witness one of the mining operations in action. Here he is describing a moment standing on the stern of a huge mining vessel as it brought up a massive chunk of ocean floor.

This huge grabbing device, like a a giant metal floor, comes out of the the water. It's traveled a mile up from the seabed. It's filled with tons of rock and silt, and yet you can see the jaws haven't really closed. And I suddenly realized as I see the water dripping out, there are little bits of rock falling out as well, and it's been falling out all the way up on our journey.

Willem Marks joins me now. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Ayesha.

So, Willem, given the sensitivities around sea mining, I have to wonder, how did you get this front row seat on an exploratory mining vessel?

Well, it's a crazy story. It started out last year. I was working on a piece about the Titan. That's the submersible that imploded close to the Titanic wreck. And as my reporting continued, I went to this small island off the south Coast of the UK called Jersey. I met someone there who'd been involved through his company in efforts to rescue that submersible. Over the course of the day talking, he mentioned something which he said at the time, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about this, but it was that he was working on subseas the underwater mining in Papua New Guinea. And so he and I stayed in touch. I was immediately interested in trying to understand what that looked like. And a few months later, he said his vessel was heading out there. He said, If you want to join us, we'll be there for a few weeks, just figure out dates that work. And up to this point, deep sea mining, just to take a step back, has been really pretty theoretical as far as people like me are aware. There's been a fair amount of exploratory work and an effort to try and understand what the economics would look like.

But that's often been done relatively quietly, relatively privately. And so, of course, I did want to join. And so I ended up booking flights, going via Singapore from London onto the capital of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, then catching another local flight to another island, driving across that island for four hours or so, waiting on a beach in the middle of nowhere. And eventually, after a sometime, this catamaran belching smoke out the back, appears over the horizon. It's a local ferry, and it turns up to take me to the vessel.

So you finally get on this giant ship What's happening on board? What does it look like?

Well, it's 270 feet long. It towers above the water when you first bought it. It's got several decks, and you've got a massive amount of machinery. You've got these winches, you've got cranes, a couple of these remotely operated vehicles, these huge, cuboid machines that go 6,000 meters deep if they need to. And they're all on the back of this massive deck, often moving around at times throughout the day, throughout the night. The vessel's a couple of hours away from the shore, as I mentioned, and it's really sticking in one place. The engines, the thrusters around the outside of the vessel are often firing at different moments to keep it to the millimeter, almost, in one position as they work several miles or at least a mile deep beneath them.

But they're not mining, right? They're doing a test Can you explain? What are they doing?

So they're not doing full-scale long-term industrial mining. What they were doing this summer was essentially carving out chunks of the seabed beneath the vessel in dimensions 10 meters by 10 meters to get a cross-sectional analysis of the ore, the rock that they want to mine from at a much larger scale in the future. They were digging out these huge chunks every single day and night, bringing some of them on deck, and then looking to see essentially how much metal was inside those sections, and hoping that that would then translate into a similar level of metal concentration over a much larger area.

So they're bringing some of the, I guess, the sea floor that they're digging up. What are they doing with the rest of it?

Well, this is what was so surprising to me, because They told me they had permits to extract 180 tons of this rock from the sea floor for analysis, which will be carried out in laboratories in Australia, which is not that far away from Papua New Guinea, but It's still a fair old haul. And then probably 5 to 10 times as much as they're bringing on deck, they're digging up and then depositing just a few yards away in these kinds of stockpiles. I said, Well, what are you guys doing that for? And they said, We hope that when we come back, it'll make it much faster to mine it later on. And since this device they're using to pull it up on deck goes up and down a mile or so each time, it makes sense to do a lot of it down at that depth while they're down there before yanking it up each time, which they did every 12 hours or so.

It's basically a giant claw. I'm imagining one of those machines my kids use where you go down and you're trying to get the toy out of a machine. Those are a scam, just for people to know. But it's like a giant claw, like that?

Yeah, it's like that scene in Toy Story. Exactly that. Where they're sending this down on this huge winch next to the the the claw, the grabbing vice, they've then got this underwater vehicle, and that attaches itself onto the claw to help guide it. And so once they've maneuvered the claw into the position they want to grab some of the sea floor, it just yanks shut. And once they've got it securely fastened inside the jaws of that claw, that grabber, it goes up to the surface a mile above.

But I know with the toys claws, a lot falls out. It doesn't hold. So is this holding all the ground that it picks up, or is there stuff falling out?

It's a good question. And so we had a limited time on board. It's hard for me to talk about every single time this happened. But given that while we were there, This claw was coming up every 12 hours. They spent a lot of time making sure that the load inside the jaws of it were securely fastened before they moved it. But at least one occasion, I saw that it hadn't fully locked closed. It's hard to see down there. It's dark. There's a lot of silt swirling around. And by the time it got to the surface on one occasion, it was clear that the jaws hadn't locked, and a lot of the stuff inside had fallen out on the way up to the surface.

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We're back with Villa Marks talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea to watch a high tech deep sea mining operation at work. You're talking here about disrupting the ground, the sea floor, and stuff potentially falling from the claw as it comes up from the Earth, big mounds of sea floor disrupted, and then they're left in these big piles. So all of this, to me, sounds very disruptive to ocean ecosystems. I would imagine that's a real concern.

It is, and not just amongst climate activists, but also amongst many of the scientists who've looked at the feasibility of deep sea mining. This has been an industry that's been studied for quite some time, even though it's not yet really taken off. There are two ways to think about this. One is the disruption right on the surface. In this deposit, they're looking primarily for copper, bit of gold, bit of silver. The rock that forms the bed there of sea floor is rich in these metals because essentially it's come out of the Earth's crust. Then the second concern is about what happens as this material travels to the surface. If you're working with a mile deep ocean or a two mile deep ocean or even deeper in some cases, there's the scale of that material falling out even gradually over that distance. Then once you have currents, it could potentially blanket large areas of the ocean floor elsewhere wear, and that has the potential, scientists say, to then choke marine life, whether that's coral or other forms of plants or animals.

I mean, you're talking about potential damage, but no one really knows yet what the damage may be. So how do you figure out the impact that doing even just these tests is having on the ecosystem?

They had environmental scientists on board who every time they sent this device up and down from the surface to the sea floor, they would put out these devices, and it allows them to test what's happening in the sea water at different depths beneath the ship. The intention of these environmental scientists was to figure out exactly how damaging this may or may not be. So this will all be part of the examination, the data analysis this company does, in theory, alongside regulators and government officials from Papua New Guinea to decide whether this is something that can move forward.

You say in theory alongside regulators. So I'm wondering, are government officials in Papua New Guinea monitoring what's going on in their waters?

Well, to be totally honest, I found it to be pretty messy. No one really seemed to know the fact that the vessel was there. I went looking back in the capital, Port Moresby, for some answers and a bit of a better understanding about how this entire industry was shaping up and being regulated in Papua New Guinea. I tried to chase down the head of the country's Environment Agency, but I eventually got hold of a man called Gerry Gary on Zoom. He runs the mining regulatory authority for Papua New Guinea, and he told me that any mining vessel that was operating in Papua New Guinea's territorial waters would definitely have officials from his agency on board to monitor what they're doing. I pointed out I'd just been on a vessel a couple of days earlier. None of his officials had been on board, and this is what he said.

If they are in country and if they have not informed us, then I don't think one of our officers would be there. That would be a concern.

Right now, do you know that the vessel is in the country?

I am not aware of the vessel in the country.

And yet you're managing director of the Mineral Resources Authority. You're right.

I will deal with the on it now that you told me.

Now, the company is the investors involved in this, they say, Well, of course he knew about it. All of the officials in Papua New Guinea know about what we're trying to do there. All of them have signed off on it. But he wasn't the only person who said they weren't aware of that vessel. I had a similar interaction with the man called Allan Bird, also in the capital city. He's the governor of one of the largest provinces in Papua New Guinea. He's been opposed for years to the idea of underwater mining. So I asked him about this permitting issue.

Well, we have not permitted any new mining operations. On land, though.

On land.

What about offshore? We don't have any offshore operations. Allan, we've just been on a vessel in the Besmark Sea that is pulling up the ocean floor.

Seriously? How do you feel about that? Shock?

I had no idea. I thought the whole thing was mothballed. You're a senior governor in this country, and the fact that you don't know about that, how does that make you feel?

Deeply worried.

Okay, so what's your take on this? What's going on?

It depends, right? You've got people who have an obligation to regulate an industry like this, whether that's the Environmental Agency or the Mining Regulator, the Fisheries Authority. Really none of them claimed to know anything about it or were willing to talk to me. Then you have people like Alan Bird and another senior governor I spoke to. In Papua New Guinea, if you're the governor of a province, you're also a member of the country's parliament, at which point you're meant to obviously have oversight into particularly controversial industries like this one. The fact that these people who for years, have publicly opposed the idea of deep sea mining, the idea that they say, Well, they didn't know about it, is in a sense not surprising. And the shock when I spoke to some of them about this was really very genuine from where I stood.

I mean, so here we've got a developing nation. As an outsider, it seems like this is that story that's often told of really exploitation, a resource grab from these foreign companies coming in and just trying to get materials and wealth. Is that what it looked like to you?

Well, I guess what was really striking was you get off this vessel on this island in the middle of this ocean, and you've got these officials saying, Oh, we didn't know it was happening. You've got senior members of the government in some cases, senior governors of other islands who've been very engaged in the subject saying, We didn't know about it.

You then go to a nearby village is on the nearest island to where the mining operations are taking place. And people there had no idea that just over the horizon, 20 miles south of where we were sitting, talking, there's a vessel that's taking the first steps in starting deep sea mining operations. When they found out about this from us, they really were not happy.

People are surprised. They're shocked.

This is Jonathan Massilam. He's a former teacher. He spent years trying to stop mining from happening off the Coast of Papua New Guinea, and particularly this island, New Ireland. Massilam helped fight against a previous incarnation of this deep sea mining venture. He, in the communities he worked with along the island, thought they'd won that fight because the company went bankrupt.

Because all our efforts on campaigning against stupid mining, we thought it was a dead issue now.

This in turn was pretty surprising to me because it showed that the company involved in this effort, it may have been meeting with government officials, maybe the local governor, maybe the Prime Minister, but it doesn't seem to have really met with local people, the communities that maybe have the most to lose in terms of their livelihoods, particularly around fishing, being threatened. People that really rely on fishing just off a few yards from where they live on the coastline, the idea that their fish might be impacted by the industry was really surprising. You've got pretty powerful people involved in this particular effort as well. There's a Russian oligarch who's helped to finance this company. He currently is under EU and US sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You've got another very powerful and wealthy mining magnet from a country called Oman in the Arabian in Gulf. And there was this really poignant moment where this man, Jonathan Massilam, the anti-mining activist, he was really upset that this vessel was back in those nearby waters, he told me. It's essentially, he was saying, local people who will be the ones that suffer the consequences over the long term.

For us, we don't want to be used as guinea pigs for trial and error because these metals that are going to be dig out of our ocean will not benefit anyone from it because nobody here is using electric cars or this green energy and all this. You are taking minerals from the poor people and you go and enjoy your luxury life. But these people are going to be affected in a long term destruction to the marine ecosystem. And that is something that we are very concerned about. So to me, it's really emotional discussing this issue. It's our place. It's our home. We have to defend it.

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We're back with Villa Marx talking about deep sea mining and his recent trip to Papua New Guinea to watch a high-tech deep sea mining operation at work. So you have a government in disarray, a local population fighting to save what they see as their way of life and a company looking to exploit these resources. It's really messy. Does Papua New Guinea have a strategy moving forward?

Well, in some ways this will depend on what this company involved decides to do. If they think this is not going to make them money and therefore isn't worth it, they may walk away, but that seems unlikely. The government has a financial stake in this effort, and that's really important to be aware of. They invested money many years ago in this idea, and officials there are concerned about recouping that investment in a country that doesn't tend to have a huge amount of spare money. Elswhere in the world where this has theoretically been given approval, countries like Norway, Japan, and the Cook Islands, things are moving really slowly. The effort in Norway has been tied up in litigation for many months. In Japan, they're They've been really cautiously looking at the science before moving ahead, and that will be essentially a Japanese state entity involved in that. In the Cook Islands, they're still quite early on in terms of their analysis of whether this will be a good idea or not. Those are really the only places on Earth where this is being considered genuinely at the moment.

So let's step away from Papua New Guinea and these other countries where mining in territorial waters is possibly on the horizon. I understand that most of the actual interest in seabed mining is in international waters. Now, why is that?

Yes, you have these parts of the ocean worldwide that have these massive and rich amounts of rare minerals and metals. Some of them are like these deposits in Papua New Guinea. Then you have other types of deposits on the sea floor, these nodules that sit around on the sea floor and can be relatively easily picked up. They're very rich in some of the minerals and rare metals that are of interest to companies worldwide. Until really recently, we didn't have the technology to reach some of these places that are miles deep in places like the Pacific Ocean. But now, because of the advent these remote control vehicles, these incredibly strong winches that can move things like these grabbing devices down there, this is all becoming a lot more accessible.

With everything that you've learned from this reporting trip that started from someone telling you, I shouldn't be saying this, but we're doing this thing, how are you thinking about deep sea mining right now?

There are arguments for and against many of these things. We need, as a species, to reduce carbon emissions, right? No one really questions that. One way to do that is to transition the way that we generate and use energy into techniques that are less likely to emit carbon molecules into our atmosphere. And one way of doing that is using electric vehicles, let's say. They need huge amounts of material, more than we know we have on Earth right now. So if everyone is going to drive an electric car one day, let alone everyone in developing nations that don't even have cars yet, and I'm talking 30, 40, 50 years down the road, how are we going to develop those technologies without stuff, material, metals, minerals? If that is needed, where is it going to come from? But then you balance that with this idea that these activities could have huge damaging impacts on environments we don't really understand in the deep sea, and we don't really understand what those deep sea environments mean for our broader atmosphere, for instance. That really is concerning. This was a story, again, about powerful people and powerless people. You go to these local villages, those people don't feel they have a voice.

They don't feel like they're being listened to. They don't feel like they're even being seen. Then you have outside investors, outside engineers, outside companies operating over the horizon, doing work that's not being broadcast or published or talked about, and is certainly not sharing their information with those local communities, or even necessarily with all of the local government officials. You end up having that, what I think of as an informational inequality. It really does strike me as something that needs strong global coordination, particularly if we're going to move into international waters, deep sea mining. And part of that will obviously focus on ensuring that local communities benefit from this activity, if it does go ahead as much as some of the billionaires involved in it.

Well, Willem, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us today.

Thanks so much for having me, Asia.

This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Quaisi Lee was our engineer. It was fact-checked by Greta Pittinger. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yann and Kim Naderfeind-Petersa. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Rosco. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.

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