The Next Gold Rush: Deep-Sea Mining in the Pacific

Most Pacific Island countries have few options for wealth creation. The remoteness and scale of their economies have left many of them aid-dependent. As such, in recent years they have taken to exploiting natural resources, whether that be commercial fishing or, on bigger islands, mining or oil and gas. Little wonder then, the great anticipation that is attending the promise of multi-billion dollar windfalls from the mining of deep-sea resources.

After a much delayed start, December saw funds begin to flow from the government in Papua New Guinea to the Canadian company leading the world’s first deep-sea mining project.

The Solwara 1 project, operating in the Bismarck Sea some 50 km off the coast of Papua New Guinea, will mine hydrothermal sea floor vents at a depth of 1500 meters. Using techniques similar to cutting grass, remotely operated vehicles will harvest these seabed formations before pumping it to a platform on the surface.

The hydrothermal vents in Solwara 1 are rich in high-grade copper and gold deposits, as well as silver and zinc. Solwara 1 is but one plot however. The Canadian company at the heart of the PNG project, Nautilus Minerals, has exploration acreage of around 500,000 square kilometers across the Pacific. Consequently, the Solwara 1 project, expected to begin production in 2018, will be closely watched. There is significant interest in deep-sea mining in other Pacific Island countries, including Tonga, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In total, Pacific Island countries have granted more than 300 exploration licenses.

But as big state-owned and private companies court small Pacific Island countries, many are understandably cautious. Legal frameworks for the new mining frontier are embryonic and the capacity of individual Pacific states remains weak An effort to develop regional frameworks has long been debated, but it wasn’t until 2011 that island countries received the requisite technical support. Progress is now slowly coming; last year, Tonga introduced the world’s first seabed minerals law.

Unsurprisingly, legal frameworks aren’t the only concern. The benthic zone around hydrothermal vents hold unique ecosystems, often thought to be a possible origin of life on earth, and much of which still remains under-researched. Research conducted to date has found that around these vents are thousands of previously undiscovered species. In January, a paper in Science, an academic journal, by McCauley et al, worried that: “today’s low rates of marine extinction may be the prelude to a major extinction pulse, similar to that observed on land during the industrial revolution, as the footprint of human ocean use widens.” In effect, deep-sea mining could well be that beginning, a sort a deep-sea industrial revolution.

And the Pacific Islands are but the first frontier. Globally, there are 19 licenses for exploration of deep-sea minerals that have been issued by the regulatory authority, the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

Private companies and state-owned entities from Japan, China, South Korea and France are currently involved in explorations In 2014, New Delhi strengthened its interest in deep-sea mining by investing $135 million to purchase a new exploration vessel that could complement its small onshore resources with offshore mining. Space and nuclear energy engineers will help develop India’s offshore mining capacity. Already there is a sense of international rivalry. In 2012, India’s then-Minister for Earth Sciences, Ashwani Kumar, noted that “Countries like China have taken to deep-sea mining with a strategic purpose.”

Late last year, China took a submersible to the southwest Indian Ocean to prospect for copper, zinc and other precious metals. It had been impressed by findings earlier that year in its 10,000 square kilometer patch of ocean, approved in 2012 by the ISA. In December, a Chinese shipyard signed a deal to build the world’s first deep-sea mining vessel by 2017. The vessel will serve as a platform for seabed mining at depths of up to 2500 meters.

In the midst of this competition, the ISA is currently drafting environmental management guidelines and exploitation regulations, drafts of which are due by 2016. Yet it appears, as researcher Cristelle Maurin noted in a 2013 paper for the Institute for Security and Development Policy, that the ISA won’t have “sufficient teeth” to monitor compliance.

Developments in both the Pacific and the Indian Ocean carry their own concerns. The under-regulation of a novel extractive practice will continue to provoke obvious disquiet. Certainly, the under-researched affects on benthic zone ecosystems around hydrothermal vents should be of major concern. For the Pacific, with potential profits so great and public oversight exceedingly difficult at the bottom of the sea, the geopolitics of the Pacific may be about the change. Whether that is for good or bad will very much depend on the emergence of legal and regulatory frameworks to mitigate the risks of deep-sea mining.