These Deep-Sea “Potatoes” Could be the Future of Mining for Renewable Energy

upstart writes:

Battery materials dot the ocean floor. Should we go get them?

To transform our world to address climate change, we need a lot of stuff: lithium for batteries, rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium for wind turbines, copper for, well, basically everything.

We're not exactly going to run out of any of these key materials: the planet has plenty of the resources we need to build clean energy infrastructure. But mining is a huge and complicated undertaking, so the question is whether we can access what we need quickly and cheaply enough. We won't run out of key ingredients for climate action, but mining comes with social and environmental ramifications.

Take copper, for example. Demand for the metal in energy technologies alone will add up to over a million tons every year by around 2050, and it's getting harder to find good spots to dig up more. Companies are resorting to mining sites with lower concentrations of copper because we've exhausted the accessible higher-concentration spots we know about.

Because of the impressive array of metals they contain, at least one company has likened each nodule to a battery in a rock. That's why over the past decade, companies have begun to explore the possibility of commercial mining operations in the deep sea, mostly in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

The ocean could be a new source for copper and other crucial materials. Seabed mining could happen in a few different ways, but the stars of the show are potato-sized lumps called polymetallic nodules. These nodules dot the ocean floor in some places, especially in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which lies between Hawaii and Mexico in the Pacific Ocean.

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