The Truth about Deep Sea Mining
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ย. 2022
- Take the Real Engineering X Brilliant Course and get 20% off your an annual subscription: brilliant.org/realengineering
Watch this video ad free on Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/realengineer...
Links to everything I do:
beacons.ai/brianmcmanus
Get your Real Engineering shirts at: standard.tv/collections/real-...
Credits:
Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus
Writer: Josi Gold
Editor: Dylan Hennessy
Animator: Mike Ridolfi
Animator: Eli Prenten
Sound: Graham Haerther
Thumbnail: Simon Buckmaster
References
[1] www.resolve.ngo/docs/mar_tech...
[2] www.nature.com/articles/s4301...
[3] www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...
[4] pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/...
[5] www.isa.org.jm/exploration-co...
[6] www.pewtrusts.org/en/research...
[7] www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
[8] bg.copernicus.org/articles/15...
[9] www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/11/10/...
[10] eprints.soton.ac.uk/349889/
[11] www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
[12] www.deepseaminingoutofourdepth...
[13] www.nature.com/articles/s4324...
[14] www.discol.de/home
[15] www.nature.com/articles/s4159...
[16] www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
[17] www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images
Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.
Music by Epidemic Sound: epidemicsound.com/creator
Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
not gonna lie? i am AMAZED that Subnautica actually depicted those nodules on the sea floor 'realistically'
Oh right, it was from Subnautica! I was thinking all the video that why are they looking so familiar. I haven't watched deep sea documentaries but few times. :D
Do you know how incredibly dumb it is to start a statement with "not gonna lie"?
I immediately thought of Subnautica as well... and I feel like playing it again. Goddamn, that game is good.
@@moonrazk best spontaneous authentic jump scares of any game ever.
deep grand reef
Just so you’re aware, ctenophores, or comb jellies (seen at 1:47) actually are not bioluminescent- at least not in the way most people assume. In fact what you are seeing is almost always just light refracting off of their characteristic 8 rows of cillia, producing the well known rainbow effect. Many ctenophore species are indeed capable of true bioluminescence, but it can only be noticed in very dark conditions and is very rarely observed by those not looking for it. They’re also not true jellies, but I digress.
You just gotta love TH-cam.
Here’s everything I know about the thing seen at [timecode].
I saw ctenophores in the boat slips in Galveston Texas as a kid in broad daylight swimming around near the surface with threads of light coming from within them. They are clear, so it's easy to see the internal illumination. My stepmother was a marine biologist and she told me what they were. Really cool creatures and I remember that the multicolored light pulsed in a flowing cascade from front to aft.
one more correction, :
2:45 "only four crewed missions have been to the bottom of the Mariana trench". This was indeed true, but thankfully with the help of DSV Limiting Factor, we now have over 20 trips in the last 3-4 years.
@Egg Keg Films This is exactly what I'm thinking. Let's stop "wasting" (and I can't stress the quotation marks enough) our time with a hunt for lower emissions and instead full focus on getting off this planet and getting resources from elsewhere. For all we know for sure right know, this piece of rock is the only one with life on it.. We have literally thought of millions of scenarios (called sci-fi) of which a large part include the Earth being dead for some reason, mining being one of them. The responsible thing to do would be to save as much life as we can on Earth, while getting resources from elsewhere. We have enough fossil fuels to last us the time we will need for developing space mining tech. Maybe I'm just optimistic, but I think that without bureaucracy slowing down the process, it could probably happen in the next century or so. We don't need self-replicating, mining nanite swarms, we just need to setup a station with auxiliary mining vessels and a high speed delivery system. There are problems with manufacturing in micro-gravity but for the start, we can avoid them with a reliable way to get the resources down to Earth (not just throwing them off the orbit into the ocean and picking them up..).
@@freiherrvonbraun6942 while we’re at it, the graph of emission reductions at 12:30 or so has a label for “Magnesium”, while the audio states it as “Manganese”.
I like how you’ve done your sources. Numbered and then direct links listed
This! I really appreciated!
We have routinely failed to anticipate the far reaching consequences of our actions in the past. Now many are prepared to ignore more consequences to fix the problems they themselves caused.
The creatures of the deep will not be the only casualties of these operations, and no doubt our meddling with an ecosystem we don't fully understand will only lead to even greater threats to the health of our planet in the future.
Honestly... seeing all this and understanding the forces and scales involved, along with the advances to access in the recent years, it seems almost easier to mine asteroids.
Second only to the theory of evolution, man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated upon Humanity by Earth-worshiping zealots to steal trillions of your tax dollars to fund their false religion and lies.
Conceptually, mining asteroids is pretty simple, it's harder in practice though, because after separating out the richest ore (probably magnetically), you need to either return it to earth (which is not economically viable), or process it in orbit (which is not viable for thermal reasons).
The mining part itself is easy, especially with how lots of asteroids are just loose gravel.
I still want to see asteroid mining in my lifetime, and actual on-orbit production facilities.
@@animowany111 couldn't one way to make it easier be to get them asteroids closer?
We humans are currently trying to set permanent presence on the moon. This day September 26th, we also are trying to move an asteroid.
We should aim to deorbit small asteroids (via impacting or gravity tractor) and crash them on the surface of the moon.
Then a cargo line would be much easier to maintain from the moon than from the asteroid belt.
Crashing them hard enough could even make underground moon ressources more accessible.
That way you can also bring to the moon basic resources such as water, as some asteroids are very rich of.
@@gaelgauth8470 nice idea but i don't think impacting an asteroid and impacting an asteroid to crash or orbit it at an exact location is similar, i clearly don't think we can do that rn (maybe in future tho). for that we should be able to accelerate or deccelerate a object of billion tons , AND reaccelarete it to match a certain orbit. the truth is that in space technology every things cost immense amount of energy (chemical or electric) and we are faaar away to producing that amount rn. And crashing it would be more simple, but now we destroyed hundreds kilometers of moon surface, wich contains also ressorces (not the same but). conclusion: we are staying on earth for mining tomorrow 😅
@@quentinspaeth1757 if you are patient enough this doesn't necessarily need immense amounts of energy. Why having to re-accelerate the object if you pick one which the orbit fits with a single modification ?
Not talking about billion tons objects already 😅 (Dimorphos is ~100 M tons, so smaller than that maybe).
But yeah this is still beyond our current capabilities. This just seems to me "simpler", more logical to do.
As with everything, more research has to be done. Man if only everyone understood how important scientific research is.
I think this is one of those things where scientist should be on staff to study during the mining process.
And how boring it is 😛
The sad truth is: at this rate we'll earn our Darwin Award well before the end of the millennium.
@@perp1exed We're probably going to a society that looks like the Expanse, and many of our cities will likely be turned back into swamps. This is technically where a lot of cities are made because of the prevalence of bog ore that dates back all the way to Ancient times.
Scientific litteracy is an underrated skill that the world is lacking
Excellent video giving a sense of the nuance in this challenging conundrum. Thank you!
1. Pump compressed air into the pipe is one way, but requires massive power from big compressors - but the technology/manifolds are there.
2. Lifting pump is a good option and perhaps you can place several lifting pumps in certain depths while you are lowering your riser to sustain a constant-ish flowrate (or discharge rate of material on the surface), I do worry about the durability of the rotor and other moving/rotational parts in the pump
What I recommend is take the existing mud pumps from the Oil & Gas Industry, pump water based mud down your ROV (customise it in such a way that you will have a giant hopper working underbalanced) and then lift it up to the surface. Then use shakers and crushers (like the ones used to crush coal in a coal fired power plant) and then separate your little "nuggets" either by gravity or centrifugal separators (so as to use the existing rotational equipment/power and compressed air used on board).
Be prepared to have A LOT of spare Flanges !!
I used to have salt water fish tanks and a lot of these minerals were critical to coral development. If we harvest them out of the ocean at a massive scale, we might upset the overall mineral balance of the ocean.
Fellow fish guy here, I’m very surprised why your comment isn’t higher. Mining the ocean could either be the savior of our species, or our downfall. Those minerals you’re talking about aren’t much, but a slight disturbance could easily fuck up an already fucked up ocean even more.
We are extracting minerals that have been deposited out of the water. This isn't pulling ions out of the water, so it wouldn't be reducing concentrations of these minerals. Indeed, the biggest problem is increasing mineral concentrations by stirring up the sea floor.
+1 Robert. To boot, it is my understanding that coral do not form in the deep sea zones either. Were these nodules to be found in shallow coral-forming zones, I think the ecological cost debate would be much more complex.
@@colinmd90 Stop liking your own comment. It is sad. Also, that's not how ocean mineral absorption works.
@@Fellowtellurian how does ocean mineral absorption work?
Honestly, you did a nice job talking about this subject.
Ore mining in the sea with oil based technology, to power electric cars .. We all know it's a debate that mankind has to face.
You explained how it would impact the environment (on land and sea) but also how it impacts countries where the rush on battery tech is quietly killing thousands. A conundrum, but a well explained one.
The fact that were are having this conversation about mining the oceans for resources to make new batteries means that battery manufacturers are already running into material shortages.
Batteries are a terrible form of energy storage to begin with, so why keep pursuing them? Why pursue the production of additional battery-powered cars and trucks when we could just replace them with trains and mass transit?
Trains are not only more energy efficient, but they are also more resource efficient as well. Trains don't even need batteries, you can power trains with overhead power cables that go straight to power stations.
Most of the oil based technology can be pivoted to "green" technologies i.e. fracking -> Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS).
@@faragar1791 yeah have fun convincing the US with 100s of established cities built around cars and their infrastructure for the past century and 300M+ people to abandon their cars and squeeze in carriages. Definitellyyy going to work. If cars are here to stay, EVs are the superior choice period. 70% operational efficiency vs 22% for a ICE car with room to become cleaner as the grid takes up more renewables and less fossil fuels
actually we have the technology for organic solar cells, synthetic organic fuel (syngas), and even organic LEDs (AMOLED). If humanity commit toward the organic-chemistry path then we don't need the rare-earth-metal intensive EV batteries and electric propulsion. If mineral resource is scarce then we need to commit toward technology utilising organic (carbon-based) chemistry rather than opting for more environmentally degrading mining operation.
@@xponen synthetic and organic is pure irony LOL. whats the cost to produce syngas? What is it made up of? How do you make enough to completely replace current gas consumption for ICE?
Beautiful production! Thank you for bringing this to us!
Great research and delivery, great stuff!
Correction: The toxic tailings at metal mines are also a product of exposure of metal sulfides and sulfur to air, forming sulfuric acid and metal oxides, not necessarily from processing. You can have naturally occurring 'acid mine drainages' from erosion of metal ore bodies- whence the Rio Tinto. There are no such sulfides in these highly oxidized open ocean marine sediments and not much sulfide in the nodules themselves.
Sulphur
@@davidrobertson5700 only in the UK
@@chir0pteri dont understand good sir
@@johndc2998he’s saying in the UK it’s spelled “Sulphur” where as majority of places it’s spelled “Sulfur”
Started as sulpur, then sulphur, lastly sulfur. Grammar police these days🤷♂️
I don't want to sound like a luddite so I will say yes, batteries are SO important for a greener future. But there is also merit in reduction of consumption too: we need electric cars AND less use of cars, with more efficient forms of transportation being the substitute. I know this is an engineering channel so talk about public policy that doesn't involve engineering wouldn't be as relevant, but I just wanted to include the thought.
Also, this way, the dilemmas about interrupting ecosystems won't be as pressing.
@@leeroyjenkins0 that's the catch though. It's way less efficient
@@leeroyjenkins0 the problem is that energy usage increases every year and you can't stop that no matter how efficient you are. Producing electricity always comes at a cost but if you want electrolysis that is at least better than your average low temp process you can try high temperature electrolysis using waste heat of gas-cooled or similar nuclear reactors
Electric cars will actually increase electrical demand on the grid. But I get the point you’re making with better demand management. Distributed energy resources like household solar and batteries are one way to manage demand, especially during peak consumption times :) And if these household systems could talk to each other and make a “virtual power plant”, they can better serve the needs of the community and the electrical grid. But for all of this we’ll need better battery materials and alternative energy storage systems. Most of all, we’ll need smart and flexible electrical grids which can cope with high levels of distributed energy respurces and inverter based generation like grid-scale solar/wind/battery/offshore wind etc
I love watching Real Engineering... he makes such complex topics seem so simple !!!!
All about the little pinkie ring too funni easy to see why this planet is crying out
I suppose a skip car design like in blast furnaces might be a great method to lift these things. The weight of the bucket cancels out. You spend energy solely to lift the material and a bit to fight friction. One team underwater can collect material into a bucket and hook/unhook full and empty buckets when they get down. They just need to clear the area to not get crushed from above by a falling bucket
Edit: and maybe the buckets themself can be used to transport compacted sludge back down
Along with the sludge we can also pump down new rocks to replace the ones we remove.
One little issue with this idea. It is at least 4 km below sea level. The pressure is so ridiculous that there can be no team working there. Everything needs to be done using machines and remote controls. There were very few people that personally went to such depths and it was always done from the safety of a submarine vehicle designed to withstand such ridiculous pressures.
Your explanation of how the minerals condense around a catalyst as an interaction between the sea above and the floor below was sublime.
But...how are these metals formed (created)? Certainly not from dust particles circling the sun and bumping into each other to form planets (which would then lose orbit). Even the Sun can not fuse past very much past Iron on the Periodic Chart of Elements.
The Sun isn’t the only star in existence. Far larger stars created much denser atoms, which formed dust clouds, which melted together, and then formed asteroids. Those then continued to form until eventually hitting the Earth, depositing minerals into the Crust/Atmosphere.
The lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid building an electric train network are astonishing. Obviously like the video discusses, there are environmental tradeoffs everywhere and there isn't a single simple answer, but I'm definitely confused by the framing of this issue primarily around EV batteries when there are other green transit and energy alternatives that don't require precious metal extraction at unprecedented levels.
This is the best video I've seen on this topic, and I've watched quite a few. Thank you.
love what you do and the beauty that you bring me in these videos
At our Canadian mining company's (then INCO... now VALE), R&D lab, we had a small collection of sea nodules that we were analyzing for potential mineral yields. This was in the 1990's and I remember hearing from a couple of our technicians that they had great potential for extraction of high percentages of what we were primarily interested in... that is nickel, copper, cobalt, as well as PMs.
what would be the comparison to perhaps the yield of one of these potential mines, and an asteroid that was rich in these three metals? Not counting the hypothetical cost and invention of technology needed to mine the asteroid.. But just comparing the yields of a deep sea mine to an asteroid the size of a couple city blocks, that would be hollowed out and mined from the inside out? Do you have any personal knowledge of potential deep space mining?
@@raidermaxx2324 All good questions, but I don't have personal knowledge of potential deep space mining, except from what I try to keep up on in futuristic tech. tid-bits & snippits here & there, like what we can learn on this channel.
No way there's Prime Ministers hiding in those pebbles...!
Is it a good business opportunity to mine them 🤔
Second only to the theory of evolution, man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated upon Humanity by Earth-worshiping zealots to steal trillions of your tax dollars to fund their false religion and lies.
As a mining engineer I can testify no one is going to take on a project like this. There are too many risks and the logistics for ore will be nightmare. There are still a lot more resources on surface of the earth that are predictable and profitable.
matter of time. surface resources will depleted
But the only risk is money loss, no man will be sent down there, only robots with AI and partial remote control?
Give it time. We’ll make machines that can gather and process them. I’m thinking 20-50 years until it becomes profitable
@@Menelutorex then we will probably die before we start scraping the ocean floor for resources
Sea mining seems more complicated than space mining
In the Southern Pacific area is a large field of floating plastic debris that could gathered and turned into a substitute to swap for the current sea bottom coverage.
Genuinely great and informative video!
The effects of land mining are well-known and can be managed. We know practically nothing about this ecosystem in comparison. Mining on the seafloor is a disaster waiting to happen and should not be condoned.
The effects of land mining are destroying the environment
Cthulu is gonna come ahhh
How do you know that it's a disaster waiting to happen if we know nothing about the ecosystem?
@@YoungGandalf2325 how do we know its not?
Its never a good idea to do something that you don’t know the complete effects of.
@@YoungGandalf2325 Ignoring the resources we gain from this for a minute, it's comparable to defusing a potential bomb. We don't know the yield of the bomb, the timer it is set to or what the wires do. You'd be a mad man to start pulling wires at random with this little knowledge. And all in an effort to not tackle the actual issues surrounding mining, because putting hope in a silver bullet is a great way to distract from the alternative that is "having to make incremental improvements to existing processes at the cost of a bit of profit".
Your production value just leveled up. I see the effort that was put into this video. Good work on the general graphics, overlays, motion graphics and collection of footages and data.
Awesome video, and also, awesome idea for late game RTS games haha
Thankyou for making this available.
There's so much uncertainty about how this would affect nutrient cycles, even with "proper" disposal of the sludge. Stirring up all this sediment could mean an increased upwelling of nutrients, causing harmful algal blooms or hypoxic waters. We should probably try to stay away from this...
I was thinking about this too, it's never going to end well. Eventually they will start mining in one way or another. You know some really shady companies are going to get involved with illegal mining activities taking place. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Then again most people don't know anything about deep water life so the casual person will not care what happens down there. Many, many species will be wiped out for sure in the coming hundred years once we start with the mining operations and they scale up size. The sea floor where these activities are being performed will be a wasteland of death and no life whatsoever.
We should mention the NEXT part of this whole scenario. There will be other things found down there that will encourage even bigger operations(probably drilling into the sea floor itself). It's not going to get pretty that's for sure. It might even be lucrative to build mining operation bases down in the far depth and have humans live down there. We just don't know what will happen but we know ourselves well enough. If there is money to be made it will be made. Period.
@@huldu The sea is far bigger in area than the land - also suitable nodules are only in certain places. So its' going to be a choice of damage to x% of the land versus damage to < x% of the sea.
@Planet Zero Sick to the back teeth of environmentalists whining. They dont want us to have hydrocarbon fueled cars, so they force us to have electric. Then they complain that the batteries for the cars are no good either. When will they admit that the only way they will be pleased is with the extinction of the human race?
Just leave us alone, let us make our own decisions. Stop using the government to force your will on others.
@@timmurphy5541 Exactly. It's not really about a choice, it's just how it's going to be. Pretending that everything will be fine is a lie some people tell themselves to sleep at night. At the end of the day it's always going to be a *choice* between us(mankind) and everything else on this planet.
@@huldu well, we depend on other things so we don't really want to destroy anything but we only have a choice of different evils and must weigh them against each other.
Very fascinating stuff. I cam across metal nodules growing in water in a game and thought it was weird, but there's actually a real life biases for it.
Real Engineering, I'm a huge fan of your videos. As a medical school student I love learning about the future of engineering and physics. I'm very interested in modernizing my home and if I can invest enough to start an engineering based business. I think it just goes along with understanding the world and learning as much as we can. Medicine is now interacting with engineering more than ever. While you can't fix everything with engineering, especially molecularly speaking, I believe medicine is now a hyper focused version of engineering. It's engineering hyperfocused on taking advantage of the preexisting complexity of preexisting life. Sure, at lower levels biology is just learning about life. However, my medical school classes are surprisingly similar to engineering classes, and we learn a lot about biological engineering. I'm disappointed with my undergrad science degree, because they should be teaching the level and/or specificity of my medical school to some extent. If you ever have any in person meet ups I would love to just discuss things with you. We could even zoom, and you could meet my classmates as well if you'd like to know more about engineering in medicine. It's held back by old school dichotomy that engineering and medicine are two different things. I also would like you to make a video on water witches. I want to know if there's any reasonable explanation for it, as many professionals in the trades claim it works. Here is a short video from a very reputable plumbing expert on TH-cam who never lies or Exaggerates: th-cam.com/users/shortsYFE8ahwZ5oI?feature=share . Please try to clear this up. Lots of people want to learn more about it and I really believe your video could be a big deal. I can't find anything on the topic that's on your level of trustable. Keep it up!
Man this is such a hard dilemma.
"Is potentially destroying an unknown ecological system worth it to save the ones we know, for a fact, are in decline.?" There's also the fact that everything on the food chain is connected, you destroy an ecosystem and the downstream (upstream?) consequences could be catastrophic. Especially because it is unknown, it could be a lot more connected than we realize.
I like the fact it could reduce emissions, but my gut feeling (which obviously wouldn't really hold any weight) says to leave the oceans alone as much as possible.
I can't even begin to imagine the damage this will do to the ecology down there
like any of us actually gives a fuck about "the ecology down there". it's capitalism all the way down.
@@NaumRusomarov No, it's turtles
Capitalism wont save you when the food runs out, when the coasts flood, when the weather becomes more extreme or when billions will be uprooted and have to migrate. Capitalism is cancer.
I bet you love your iphone and want cars to be electric.
@@DroneStrike1776 No, I have a Samsung Galaxy S9 and think that electric cars are bad
12:30 It says Magnesium in the chart, not Manganese like in the audio. Those two elements are quite different.
Any chance that slurry we are pumping can be used as a fertilizer on land, instead of pumped back down? I’m curious of the mineral and organic makeup of that soil.
Good idea
Wouldnt an archimedes screw be a much more elegant solution to the trasportation issue?
The screw would have to be over a km long and not energy efficient
These videos are so well made! Thank you for all the work and information!
The animation of the mining makes me think only about Dune 😅
You Can Pretty Much Substitute Any Valuable Thing That Has To Be Mined With Spice...
@Markxyz for me it’s the movie Underwater starting kristen stewart.
It sounds like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone could possibly be the North American version of the Spratly Islands.
Amazing video, thanks so much for sharing!
I find the 'kill ecosystem we don't know or kill the ecosystem we do' dichotomy at the end there overly simplistic. The lack of consideration of other options like cutting down car use altogether, seeing what technologies can make do without batteries, or even just finding less harmful battery designs, seems representative of this endemic of trying to find solutions that just maintain the status quo rather than actually changing our societal lifestyle and order. I find this subject really interesting, but that framing at the end really just leaves me with the impression that this is just another avenue for screwing ourselves over in the long term.
Underrated comment. More people need to see this sentiment; this should be pinned.
Agreed, every time there's talk on renewables being the future it always seems to focus on mass producing batteries, which are generally pretty awful for the environment and end up being toxic waste after a few years. For all the problems with ICE the actual engine is just super cheap and common iron that doesn't need exotic materials that can easily be recycled, this fact is very rarely mentioned in these kinds of videos.
@@Eric-gq6ip Yeah but *the problem with ICEs is that they produce carbon* - a lot of it, their accessibility is a problem too since that means you can have tons of these things unnecessarily. *The engine blocks being recyclable and non toxic is moot point.*
The real solution to the climate problem is a major shift in our mode of transportation - basically, to change our way of living; build robust transit systems and redesign the cities to be more walkable. Apparently, *the number of automobiles driving around the world is one of the major contributors to air pollution,* you can see that in the first year of the pandemic when there were less cars driving around - the sky got clearer and life improved briefly. Lessening the need to drive an automobile can come a long way to helping not just the Earth but also people's sanity.
@@Eric-gq6ip Also: OP's point is that we shouldn't be too hyper focused on renewables like what this video seems to be on about, and consider actual solutions - non car-brained and non tech-brained which only serves the auto and fossil fuel industries and nothing else, as counterintuitive as that may seem.
@@regulate.artificer_g23.mdctlsk Absolutely, pin this up.
The major problem with the whole "we could make x number electric cars" idea is that electric cars are more a distraction than a solution. When you are talking North America, EU, Japan, and China, the heart of the problem is shitty infrastructure and poor structural design. In other words, renewable energy sources are better, but electric cars are like a band-aid on a severed artery; it is better than nothing, but it won't save anything. We need to work towards a car-less, high-efficiency society. At this point, anything other than that is a waste of time and resources.
It is probably outside my lifetime before we will face societal collapse and mass die-off, but the fact that those things are likely under our current path should be worrying enough.
Great! You can be the first person to give up your car, warm showers, and meals at your favorite restaurant!
I hope you see where the problem in your thinking lies. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you'll need one hell of a marketing campaign to make your plan work.
Another question is whether or not they could seed these nodules and grow them in "farms" in the ocean. And whether or not they could speed the layerying/depositing up. And with the issue of decreased or zero biodiversity in the mined areas on the sea floor would it be possible to seed artificial reefs in the mined areas after nodule extraction to ensure that the flaura and fauna species have habit again
Why not have a tube lined w/ moving conveyor belt by a rope machine that the conveyor belt is pressed into a tube and its a flexible tube, so the conveyor belt can be engineered where the belt is always trying to stay at a certain circumference so when the rocks go up the tube w/ a little wider opening, the belt can basically grab onto the chunks of mineral & theoretically not scoop up the debris since it’s too small
Never have I ever seen such a holistic approach to a topic. Thank you SO much for this!!!
the biggest challenge in deep sea mining is that humans still know too little about the ocean overall.
The biggest challenge in deep sea mining is dealing with people that have decided that they should dictate what other people do with "their" planet. Once people adopt a belief supplanting religion with their planet, they become impossible to placate. It is the fascist Lefties that consider Humans as a cancer on the planet that constipate any real progress. There will always be more things we don't know than we know...always. The more you know, the more you know that you don't know.
I am curious about the study of returning the sediment that is brought to the surface with the nodules. There is certainly the aspect of shading out sunlight from lower levels but mid ocean areas appear blue because there is so little algae and plankton due to low levels of nutrients in the water at levels that receive sunlight. If nutrients from the sea bed were distributed at the surface, would the nutrients not promote blooms of algae and plankton? The increased growth at the surface would increase the "snow" falling to the lower depths increasing available food there.
All of the increased biological growth would be consuming carbon and possibly having a measurable effect on reducing ocean acidification.
Very informative, occurred to me what about using magnets to attract the medals without raking across the surface and floating the materials to the surface so the sludge isn't created? Would need to understand how this would impact life but theory wise seems perhaps better that scrapping and pumping?
Sounds like theoretically viable and much more environmentally friendly with the oceans and the deep sea ecosystems to me, which now we know are much richier than we thought. If not, my 1st impression was: "Great, let's fuck Up the last untouched place on earth, let's see what unknown problems for all live organisms unveils 50 years ahead."
I would love to see a video about underground vs surface vs deep sea mining methods. from what I can tell, easily accessible surface deposits are getting rarer, so we will have to mine deeper underground.
Also the environmental impact of an open pit mine vs an underground mine would be interesting. There is also in situ mining which pumps a chemical slurry through a deposit to extract minerals
if i'm remembering it right, the name of the game in deep underground mining is chasing the vains. so over all less material is removed but it needs concentrated material. where as surface mining is gathering up everything and sorting it.
i would say underground mining is better because there is nothing really down there to ruin
@@artski09 that's what I'm thinking. Worst case scenario is a bit of sinkholes?
Also check out the Block Caving mining method, it's crazy! It's like an upside down open pit mine....but underground
Surface level deposits aren't getting rarer, they just want to mine in unregulated areas for more profit.
@@belldrop7365 They really are. Or well to be more precise viable ones are. As technology improves and prices change the viability of resource reserves change.
I've got something to add that I really think needs to be stated explicitly: As you can see in the video, a great deal of Cobalt we extract on land is mined *using child labor.*
Yes it would indeed be a problem to take away those jobs from the children.
It's my understanding that the brine from desalination of ocean water, which will likely become more and more common and important, contains all of the aforementioned elements and could provide all we could ever use.
I'd also like to point out, that there is evidence that these nodules can grow much more rapidly than previously believed. There have been nodules found that grew on metal cans, parts of ship wrecks etc. There has been next to no study into how they're formed. And since it is a chemical process, I wonder if it would be possible to artificially grow these nodules out of seawater since there are minute amounts in sea water.
Should update the video with regard to The Metals Company project in CCZ using that exact rover and an old oil drilling tanker.
Could one option be to embrace the antropocene and recreate the seafloor ecosystem as we harvest it? Sunken ships become seeds for reefs and aboriginal slash and burn practices in the Amazon have created some of the lushest jungle regions. Could we produce synthetic nodules that fulfill the same biological purpose so we can have the valuable material while leaving behind an ecosystem recreated with cheaper material? Could be worth study.
That's an intriguing idea. Perhaps that could be a way to re-purpose certain waste or scrap metals from decommissioned infrastructure. It could be similar to how lumber companies re-plant trees after harvesting an area.
I was thinking the same thing, there'd need to be some experiments run to find out what's the most cost effective solution while still providing the best results as well as things like deployment but it should be feasible.
i think you can find the answer to that in the forestries today. artificially forested areas have had significantly lower biodiversity than natural forests. so I will assume the same will hold true for the deep sea. once you destroy an ecosystem, you will have to recreate the entire ecosystem, every spicies, every little detail. it's like taking a look at a painting and recreating it from memory. and considering coral reefs are alot easier to research, and the creatures there are alot easier to preserve than deep sea creatures are, once we wipe them out, they are likely not coming back.
On the scale it would take to make deep sea mineral mining economical you'd end up destroying the biodiversity on an unimaginable scale. With the ocean biome at as much risk as it is today with global warming and reefs dying as much as they are it'd be best to just leave the ocean alone
@@kaplanbahadir2301 that's actually something the forestry industry has been taking notes on recently! Took them long enough but they tend not to plant monocultures very often anymore and have adjusted to planting greater varieties. The issue still persists that most of the trees are the same age, but even then the forestry industry has identified the importance of "mother trees" on promoting the growth of younger trees throughout mycorhizal fungi networks. Takes a while for the industry to shift gears, but a better method for preserving biodiversity is becoming more common. The end result is not only more sustainable, but higher yield too!
AMAZING, that one can make an entire 14m video about mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor, and not even mention the interesting history of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was a deep-sea drillship platform built for Project Azorian, the secret 1974 effort by the United States CIA to recover the Soviet submarine K-129, with the infamous cover story that the ship was mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor.
I wonder if it'd be worth replacing the nodules with gravel, and what the different would be compared to just scouring the bottom.
I would suggest to use magnets to attract the nodules, since they are mostly Fe/Iron. And use an tubular electric coil to bring them to the surface.
This 100% has already been considered and is not feasable due to x reason.
Water is dimagnetic, which means that it exerts a weak magnetic field, and repels other magnetic fields. If a magnet is suspended over water, the water's dimagnetism will repel the magnet. This weakens the magnet's effect on other objects. When salt is added to water, it weakens the water's magnetic field further, so that it ceases to have any significant effect on other magnetic fields. However, salt water conducts electricity better than non-salt water, so magnets placed near it can cause significant turbulence in the water.
Simply said magnets are not feasable.
Iron oxide is not magnetic anyway
Thank you for the level-headed, informative video. Are there deep-sea mining solutions that aren't track-based and are less impactful on the local ecosystem?
@@moroteseoinage poor baby, is reading too hard?
ngl it's probably already the least damage you can do within reasonable efficiency
idt just hovering on top of the surface is gonna be tenable on large scale
Undoubtedly, yes. They may not have been built due to trying to optimize efficiency, but if optimizing least environment impact I'm sure we could come up with something better; perhaps modeled after a long-legged type crab. It would need to work with other robots to gather material to a concentrated point for lifting to the surface.
Or... we could focus our energy on asteroid mining, which is the only really scalable source of rare materials without limit.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if a channel about engineering topics actually spent a majority of its time talking about just those sorts of issue rather than geology and ecology?
@@Billsbob tbh tho, even though he's an engineering channel, he's only one person, he can't really make stuff up by himself, he can only present what other company have made, and since it's a very new subject, details are scarce
This whole video is based around the idea that massively increased battery production is necessary for a greener future, but is that actually true? We can work to minimize the battery use without sacrifice on cutting fossil fuels. Gravity or heat based energy storage systems can be used to store wind or solar electricity and an electric train system could run on overhead wires rather than needing the batteries that an electric car would.f
Also Flywheel Energy Storage (of which “Amber Kintetics” and also some more Uninterruptible Power Supply (rather than Grid Storage) oriented companies represent COMMERCIAL OFF THE SHELF OPTIONS), and Power-to-X technology
(Hydrogen, Ammonia, Methane, Dimethyl Ether, Fischer-Troph fuels/chemicals, hydrogen or methane eating microbe/reverse microbial fuel cell mush for fuel, chemicals, or even food/flavors!
FES is, as stated, an off the shelf option (and mainly uses more normal materials short of maybe control circuitry, most/all of which is more recyclable than batteries (granted citation needed)
Power-to-X can use existing/mildly modified ICE powered (hybrid) vehicles, and industry.
All the while aiding in the transition of the chemical/pharmaceutical industry, and making perfect FCEV Fuel etc
Small Batteries, Large Flywheel Arrays for Middle/Short Term, and Pumped Hydroelectric/Power-to-X, and *maybe* Flow Batteries, Compressed/Liquified Gas, and some of the other stuff you mentioned for long term.
That’s my rant lol.
Also utilizing alternate battery chemistries, Sodium-Ion instead of lithium (preferably from waste brine, rather than more salt mining…), some of the novel chemistries not using Cadmium etc (although i am no expert in all that + catalysts etc so I can’t speak to this aspect too much), Iron-Air batteries etc.
Even if they are less efficient/cost effective, i think the Environmental savings would be well worth it!
(And subsidies+legislation can help)
@@Peaches.Gonsalez Metal Recycling (vs (Non-Lead Acid) Battery Recycling) makes the case against more batteries *BETTER*, and how does the need for jobs justify anything given that is a false conflict; we can have jobs and no grid scale batteries/pile of BEVs?
I’m rambling, but *What are you trying to get at?*
So we are gonna build trains that stop at everyones houses now? The solution isn't to revert to high voltage overhead lines that can be damaged by tree limbs falling in storms. The solution is new battery tech, not taking away peoples freedom to drive where they want to go when they want to go.
@@DanielRichards644 *Freedom to be stuck in eternal traffic / have their house be demolished by the state to make highways for “freedom” due to shitty urban planning
I wonder if they considered use some crab cage like deposit boxes. A crane suspended, propeller stabilized vehicle can drop the cages onto the collector. The collector can then eject the cages onto the floor when full, for the crane vehicle to eventually pick them up. Also this way most of the slurry will be released closer to the sea floor.
why not use a vertical conveyor belt for the rigid part of the rigid riser the "platform" of the belt cud also be grated allowing things to peel of as they reach the surface, the rover probably have the most impact but i don't have a good idea on how to reduce it's impact.
What about artificial habitat restoration--replacing these anchor points?
Less useful, harmless materials could be distributed after mining (ideally being dirt cheap and trivial to transport thanks to ship efficiency). The 11:12 1989 coast of Peru experiment could be reused to test restoration of an area mined decades ago. Meanwhile, a new experiment could replicate those seabed disturbances in a similar ecosystem, but restore the area immediately after mining. Undoubtedly, this mining would still damage the ecosystem, but the known marine populations may recover much quicker.
If these experiments prove promising, a third experiment could be conducted using a new mining pattern: destroying strips of the ecosystem before restoring them, as opposed to vast, unbroken swaths of the seafloor (which the 1989 experiment's "two nautical miles in diameter" collection sounded like). The idea here is to distribute the areas in need of repopulation between local, surviving marine life. This is to further reduce the time necessary to repopulate, leaving mature organisms as close as possible to these areas.
Real Science: *Makes a video about how important is to preserve deep sea biosphere in the Arctic*
Real Engineering: "This is how cool engineering will ruin deep sea very slowly"
We deserve Cthulhu and Leviathan to wake up together and deal with them.
Good Job. What is the lovely cello background music? - credits please :-)
Excellent!!! Very Interesting!!!
This maybe a little simplistic and I am unsure of any potential issues but maybe they could insert similar sized rocks leftover from terrestrial mining with the return slurry and just let it fall back to the seafloor. You may be that would work as a replacement for the nodules?
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I think we need to spend more time studying these ecosystems and trying to see how we could minimize our impact before we begin mining in Ernest down there. I'm not completely opposed to it but we should know what we are doing first.
I feel like we need to look for less resource-intensive solutions like storage with more available materials (something you have made a video about), reducing car traffic in general through better public transit and city planning, and so on. It seems that lithium batteries are so popular only because they have been around so long and therefore have market dominance
Yes exactly! I feel like this doesn't get brought up enough. Lithium is not the be-all en-all of climate change solutions.
Grid interconnection, different types of storage, better city planning, more heat insulation, they get overlooked so often.
Let’s focus on what society can change in our day to day life instead of raping the planet for its resources
Good documentary!
You are a very good videographer.👌🏻❤
Would you be able to add a second line going down for the sediment, even using the downward force to help bring material up? Then essentially just dispersing the sediment back at the lower floor in a spray equivalent to the traversed area of the miner. Basically a robot vaccum cleaner that expels out the dust we want to leave there. Additionally since we are down there anyways could we use it as a secondary means to long term bury certain materials that either are detrimental to us, or beneficial to the environment. Things coming to mind would be dispersing black carbon
If you shovel the sediment back down there, you're killing the entire ecosystem. Highly concentrated particles will suffocate every animals that needs to breath through gills or filter feeders and it was even shown that the bacterial colonies do not regrow once the soil has been disturbed by mining operations.
Yeah i was thinking that too! Could *maybe* make carbon nodules from something resembling Charcoal/Carbon Black, or something fancier like carbon glass.
Granted nether of those may work if the biome depends on the mineral content not just the structure of the nodules!
Would be worth a look though in my opinion.
Could maybe even speed up the healing process by Inoculating the Slurry and/or Replacement Nodules with the various microbes that live on them.
Sort of similar to some of the Coral Reef Breeding programs.
(Granted COST (although this could be done to get the minerals, even if the cost is a but too high because it’s the right thing to do or something, but eh capitalism) and also again *would that even help/work?)
Just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should do it ! We are so obsessed on how to do it instead of asking ourselves 'should we do it' .
Not really, the discussion of environmental price is a BIG part of whether we "can" do it.
No, this is 100% a case of asking should because we could literally just drag a "rake" across the sea floor and pull them up for dirt cheap and cause insane environmental damage.
In the modern age a huge part if the "can we do x" is asking how to do x for "acceptable" environmental costs. (Acceptable being determined by the government or stricter by the company either altruistically or most often for its public image)
@@jasonreed7522 well said
but but how will every person live in a mansion and drive a luxury electric car unless we burn the planet to cinders? Its CLEARLY the only way.
@@jasonreed7522 "company" and "altruistic" don't go together, especially regarding the mining industry.
Thanks, very informative.
There is another option for mining the oceans, pulling lithium directly from the sea water. Its fairly low concentration and if I remember correctly, we wouldn't be able to really pull enough out in a meaningful time to effect life. But we could pull enough out to make batteries at scale. But it has a similar technology issue.
Lithium is only like 2% of the battery by weight. Its cobalt and nickel thats the bottleneck
We found a way to make renewable energy non-renewable
(From a non-expert person) I just hope those companies were to spend the required money to do the research and be able to do the least damage to environments with a sustainable strategy for the native species rather than quick and expensive-to-cheap extraction.
Great explanation, and also I'm amazed by some of the comments! Very informative.
Research? Come on, money rules the world. If there is enough incentive we'll wipe out the entire sea floor for the "greater" good. There are plenty of shady companies that would do this without breaking a sweat, legally and illegally. As more "research" is being done it also opens the eyes, reduces prices to even begin an operation as this as demand increases. It'll be a complete disaster eventually. History has shown over and over again when we humans interfere it never turns out good. This will be no different. Just like when we start mining operations in space, it will be no different. You just have to accept that to make money you need to break a few eggs. We've been doing this for such a long time that it's a second nature. We can pretend we care but in reality, bills need to be paid, money has to be made. That's the cycle of life.
"Company" and "less damage" are opposit words, every technological disaster it because companys want make more money
The Metals Company has been doing research with the ISA (international seabed authority) for years... its better than land-based mining with the regulations being put in place. It's estimated that 300+ new mines need to be opened to meet the demand for the electrification goals. TMC will harvest not mine the ocean floor and have enough materials to supply the entire US EV fleet. No solid waste, no open pits, no deforestation, no toxic tailing, no child labor, and less CO2. It's a solution not a new way to take advantage of the earth for greed.
@@ifyouonlyknew22 But they're destroying the sea, in a way that they're taking away the hideouts and houses from different fish, octopus and other species, and leaving the tracks which doesn't dissapear in decades, also made areas to be inhabitable for such species as shown in the video.
If they somehow clear those traces and leave something (non-contaminant) to replace the rocks, there's a chance that it would be somewhat sustainable and would call back the life to the areas they're harvesting.
@@ifyouonlyknew22 Once the deep sea floor has become more accessible we'll be seeing far more than just nugget collecting. This is just a "first step" to something new to be exploited. There are a lot of treasures down there beside the nuggets, which we will find. I can see it already, maybe in a hundred years(probably less), there will be mining stations down in the depths doing *something*. By then maybe we have figured out a way to deal with all problems or the world has declined so much nobody cares any more. Better get those colonies going on the moon or Mars!
Lifting the modules to the surface is done with an airlift system. Used also in construction for deep piling.
Following this closely as I am a (very small) shareholder in TMC.
Very insightful video. Thank you.
Out of curiosity would it be possible to design ballast containers that get loaded up with materials then sent to the surface passively to be collected via crane? The main issues I can see with this is designing them to survive that much pressure and preventing them from drifting out of range of the flotilla.
I would have appreciated a video that attempted to discuss just such engineering topics. Seemed like more of a geologic and ecologic video instead.
Yeah that's a difficult one at that depth because the material that can withstand the pressures is quite heavy so it needs to lift its self as well as the load so to lift 1T of nodes you might need 2T of buoyancy. Another option is a crane on the ship to lift it from seabed however this can take 1-2 hours to lift to the surface at that depth.
i think they may resort to conveyors and cables for cheapness and easy replacement. problem is corrosive salt water but steel is cheap
I quite like the sea as being a relatively untouched area. As much as I want humans to progress, I feel the sea should be a unique place that we try to stay away from. The video of how shipping vessels affect whale movement comes to mind when ever I see anything about sea mining.
@E Van Video on YT showing the toxic waste dumping ground off the west coast.
All 🐋 will burn when the 🌞 melts the 🌎. U need resources. Just don't pollute the species into extinction.
#REALITY
EVs and renewables will need all the deposits they need since existing ones will not cut it and recycling them is unsustainable and compromise reliability.
I say, declare war on the sharks and invade
The whole naturalist "we need to protect things" doesn't work. We need to become one with mother nature and seek to adopt our technology so that it becomes indistinguishable from it.
equip the collecter rovers with compressed air, enough to fill ballast balloons,enough to float them to surface when they are fully loaded. Gold dredgers float huge boulders using these methods,it just needs to be scaled up to fit the application.
I'd love to have a drink with this guy
I vaguely remember a Carl Barks or Don Rosa Donald Duck cartoon where Scrooge, Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie tried a similar thing.
It was something about filtering out gold from ocean water using some sort of giant carpet tugged behind a boat.
They pretty much already do a similar thing: they pump with hoeses water and sediment from the seabed to up the ship and then it is filtered throught sifts and carpets keeping the gold (especially from the alaskan sea) and diamonds (near south africa)
Thank you for your excellent videos. Quick correction: your graph from 12:27 has a problem on the horizontal axis
In particular, you say "Manganese", but the chart says "Magnesium". Since you haven't said "Magnesium" at all in this video up to this point, I assume the chart should say "Manganese".
We should be mining bentonite deposits, great new deposits discovered, and Scaling up a ship or two ...I can think of retrofitting an old icebreaker, or cruiser....
And a few modified oil tankers to move product to either southern cali, or Gulf coast
Would using magnets potentially lessen the impact on the seabed, as opposed to sifting the floor and sucking up sludge to the surface and back? Like tilling the ground for farming, we know that this kills all the worms and insects underneath.
I think using the dirty sludge that were left with could be used to help pull the good ore up. Using it like a lever it would assist are raising it, and once it’s at the bottom, it can then release the sludge on the bottom of the seabed; where it came from.
Along with that, what if we are to construct solid object that we send down with these sludge loads. This would return solid objects for life to cling to. They’re not using the metals, they’re using the physical form of solid structures. I feel this could help a lot; while not perfect, it may just be worth a shot.
rising a load with a bucket on a rope in water takes very little energy, and they really want to do it with a pipe and make the ore flow like a liquid for some reason
how do you use dirty sludge as a lever if both of them start on the seafloor you dumb arse? Also, they both exist in the WATER so any sludge would have some level of buoyancy by nature and intermix with the surrounding water until there is no gravitational force downwards onto this imaginary lever of yours. Further, you would need any weight downward to be greater than the weight of the shite you wanted to pull up in the first place - otherwise the lever would just balance halfway down to the bottom of the ocean. Jesus you're so dense. The only thing I agree with is dropping hundreds of rocks but even then it's impossible to say what pharmacological or biological mechanism these organisms have to detect what is and isn't a metal nodule and it's impossible to say how this would affect the organisms. But i don't care, I don't know why we even bother saving god damn blob-nose octopuses when they are ecologically separated from the vast majority of life on earth by trillions of tons of inhospitable darkness and brine.
@@jamiebarr3118 such anger… Jesus
What I mean by using sludge as a lever is by using it on it’s decent back down. This wouldn’t remove the energy required to pull new ore up, but it would make it so that the energy we do use to pull raw ore wouldn’t be used on pulling garbage up. You take 1 ton up, and let 1,800lbs back, it’d make it so your net energy cost to only be 200lbs. (Ignoring friction, and material lost on its decent back to the floor)
It’s by no means perfect, but it’s more efficient than doing nothing.
That's it, that's the solution. Create a pressure closed circuit, drop the sludge through tubing at the top boat, as it falls it will create a vacuum in it's wake which can be used to pull up material from the sea floor. A closed loop. That's it.
As I watched, having previously never hard of ANY of this, my stress level rose as I pondered the environmental effects and impact on ecosystems. I then appreciate that as this documentary went-on, those impacts are taken into account and discussed at length. However, if history has proven anything over and over, virtually without exception, if there's money to be made, they'll shamelessly exploit those resources in the most cost-effective way possible (IE to hell with the environment, to hell with the future). Oh, and one nitpicking detail: at 2:47, you say "only four crewed missions have been to the bottom of the marina trench". A marina is where people keep their boats. The Mariannas are a chain of thee main islands (Guam, Tinnian and Saipan) that give their neighboring trench its name. Omitting that one syllable makes quite a difference in the meaning got the word.
Same. We shouldn't disturb this last bastion of nature u touched by humankind. And the last place holding mysteries of life we haven't discovered. We'll destroy them before we can even observe them
I’m curious whether an electro magnet like at the recycling center can pick up the nodules?
1. What about potential value of nodule's nucleuses for paleontology? Can we actually use it as plain resource?
2. Why don't replace nodules with hard plastics, so that we can both utilize it, and give seabed animals a places to attach thamselves?
I'd want a couple extra decades of environmental impact studies before any entity is allowed to pursue deep sea mining.
At some point sooner than later, we need to stop digging up new materials and reuse what we got!
We really shouldn’t be looking at li-ion batteries for grid storage anyways, or perhaps grid storage at all
We should be looking to exploit space for raw materials not the ocean, ocean should be studied.
The depths at which the nodules form is too deep for an airbag floatation device to be feasible. A freshwater floatation device will work better and does not require pressure dumping as the elevation increases. In many places, the slurry is loaded with rare elements that we need, like scandium, (which is a strategic element,) so there won't be any dumping of slurry because it might be more valuable than the nodules. Mitigation of the debris removed will be necessary because bald scars will reduce habitat. Maybe volcanic rubble and sand would make a suitable replacement?
The oceans constantly change. For example, the rivers that run into the ocean, change in quantities from year to year. The Arctic and Antarctic add salt as the sea ice melts. Evaporation has a big effect and all of the volcanoes, like Kilauea and Loihi add many tons of minerals at extreme temperatures. There is no mineral balance, the aquatic life either adapts, moves or dies.
Great video on this subject! Frankly, we need more research on the environmental impact of deep-sea mining if we are to minimize if not avoid harming marine ecosystems. At this point in time, there is still much left unknown on the connections between marine life on the seabed and those closer to the surface, meaning that irreparable harm to seabed ecosystems might cause catastrophic changes to marine life that we rely on or enjoy. Unfortunately, with the island nation Nauru invoking a two-year deadline forcing the International Seabed Authority to finalize deep-sea mining regulations, it is almost certain that this sort of mining will be carried out before substantial research on the deep sea can be performed.
I love your videos Brian! And can you make a video about using methanol as a fuel in vehicles?
If there's a fixed part from the ship to the sea floor, can't they use a tube with a screw inside? It would raise only the nodules and keep the sludge down. It's like drilling, but inside a tube.
Thx for the video!
Another alternative is to accept that constructing millions of EVs might not be viable and to pursue more efficient public transportation and city design.
THIS 💀
Maybe *the boring company* can get into this mining and *save the earth* /s
Maybe the boring company could dig a hole so deep, Elons ego could fit inside of it? :O
Honestly, this is the best answer. Instead of destroying entire ecosystems to build batteries to haul around a ton of metal everywhere we go, we could just stop hauling around the metal and use our legs (or wheels, for those who are mobility impaired)
This is something we really shouldn't be doing. We've demonstrated continuously throughout history, but especially in recent times, that we understand nothing about the effects our actions will have on the biosphere until many years after it's too late to go back.
Furthermore, it's likely we soon won't even need these rare metals for batteries. Aluminum-Sulfur and Aluminum-Ion batteries don't use them, and look like ideal technologies to replace Lithium-Ion in the near future. Failing that, asteroid mining will be orders of magnitude more efficient and less ecologically destructive; the moment that becomes viable, the idea of mining metals from the dirt will seem absurd.
This! Also adding Sodium-Ion, Iron-Air, and all the crazy Flow Battery designs out there to the list.
Also just *not using a pile of BEVs*, and instead using *Transit Oriented Design*, Hybrid ICE/FCEVs where transit can’t be used, and Power-to-X Hydrogen/Methane/DME/Methanol etc to power them. Also Not Use Grid Scale *Lithium Ion Batteries* because they were designed for lightweight mobile applications and in all manners except cost are dumb af, instead use FES/Pumped Hydro/Compressed or Liquified gas (and the aforementioned Power-to-X technology) for storage.
The only reasonable way to mine these is with RPV's The weight is the big issue - my idea is an attached ready-to-deploy expanding balloon - once full floats gently to the surface and retrieved by a modified oil tanker. These are valuable metals already concentrated into nodules, it can be done profitably. The other benefit is that they are sitting on the surface ready to harvest, scooping not mining.
One could well find that the released sediment plumes may promote algal growth by supplying iron for increased carbon sequestration.