2024 for deep sea mining was a crazy year. So
much happened. Norway started to
deep sea mine. They were exploring to deep sea mine. Then all of a sudden they're not doing
it anymore. What happened? There was a change in leadership with
the ISA. What happened? All this stuff happened, but
we didn't really know how it all happened. So actually, Dr. Andrew
Thaler, who's been on the podcast before to talk about deep sea mining, contacted me
and said, hey, Andrew, do you want to talk about deep sea mining and everything that happened in
2024? Because so much happened. I want to talk about it. I
said, absolutely. Let's have you on the podcast. So today we're going to be talking about
deep sea mining. What happened in 2024? The good, the bad and the ugly. We're going
to talk about it on today's episode of How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start
the show. Hey
everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm
your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how
you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by
taking action. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about
deep sea mining and everything that happened in the last year. So much has happened.
that Dr. Andrew Thaler, a good friend of mine, is coming on the podcast to talk
about it today. And we're going to find out much more about it. But if you want to know
a lot of stuff about the ocean and you don't know where to go, this is
your resource. Not only is this podcast a resource, but you can go over to our website at
speakupforblue.com and check it out. And you'll find all of
our old episodes. We have over 1,700 episodes
up there. Other podcasts that deal with wildlife and oceans and
sharks and marine mammal veterinary stuff
and veterinary stuff for the ocean. There's so much stuff that goes on there.
You want to check it out, go to speakupforblue.com. And if you want some of that information to
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Let's start the show. Today we've got Dr. Andrew Thaler who's talking
about deep sea mining. All the stuff that happened.
We're going to be talking about what's the best type of deep sea mining. Not necessarily the
best, but what's the least impactful deep sea mining activity
that we can do. And why does Andrew Thaler not
want to sign on to this agreement
and say, hey, you know, this is good to agreement. What's the problem here? What's going
to happen? He's going to talk about that as well. We're going to talk about the dark oxygen
story that came out and what is coming up with that. What's new
with that? And if it's legitimate, if it's still new research, is
it, you know, some more research needs to be done. We're going to find out about a lot of stuff on
this episode. So here is the interview with Dr. Andrew Thaler talking
about deep sea mining in 2024. Enjoy the interview and we'll talk to
you after. Hey Andrew, welcome back to the How to Protect the Ocean
It has been, and we've been trying to cover it. I
cited a lot of the stuff from our last interview that
you did, where you came in and you talked about deep sea
mining and where it was at, and you talked about the newsletter and
the magazine that you did, and all the work that you've done, and we talked about a
history of deep sea mining and stuff. And now, that
last meeting was quite interesting. And even
the meeting after that was quite interesting. So the last two meetings were quite interesting. And
you called me up and you're like, hey, Andrew, let's talk some
DC buy. Let's talk some updates from 2024 and what to expect from 2025. And I was like,
you know what? My audience
loves to hear about deep sea mining, because I think a lot of us are petrified about
what's happening. And there's a lot of news out there. There's a lot of stuff that goes
on. It's really difficult to kind of filter through some
of the stuff that's real, some of the stuff that's not real, and what's happening, and getting updates.
Because it seems like it's changing quite a bit. So we're going to get into
all that. But just to remind some of the audience who
are new to this podcast who you are and what
All right. So hello, everybody. I am Andrew Thaler. I
am a deep sea ecologist and a high seas policy expert. And
my work focuses on how humans use technology to
explore and exploit the ocean, especially the most
remote parts of the ocean. So I have done a lot of work with deep
sea mining over the years. I've been in
the industry in some sort of fashion for almost 15 years
now, maybe even more, 17 years. I
have been out on deep sea mining vessels. I have worked on environmental impact
assessments for deep sea mining proposals. I
have run the Deep Sea Mining Observer, which was the trade journal that covers
the industry. I have worked
with NGOs who are trying to find ways
to stop deep-sea mining, find ways to stop certain kinds of deep-sea mining,
find ways to make deep-sea mining more responsible and more sustainable,
or find ways to just advise on creating the best possible policy
surrounding deep-sea mining. So I have been in the thick
of it from just about every angle you can think of, and it
has been a wild ride. And
I will tell you what I told people in 2008, which is
Yes. That's what we talked about. And I remember when we
first discussed this, it was really far away. It was
like, will this ever happen? I think last time we discussed this, I
think it was at IMCC 2016. That sounds about
right. In Newfoundland. And you were like, probably won't happen till about 2030, to
be honest, like from the technology perspective and the policy perspective. And
we're almost there. And I think it might be a little delayed just
a little bit longer. But there's a lot of scary things going
on, a lot of things that are being said, a lot of things that are happening
where I believe it was Denmark that went out to do some
Norway, sorry, Norway, Denmark's on my mind these days
with Greenland, but Norway that decided to go out and do some exploration, and
a couple of other countries that are dabbling in it. So I
think people are wondering, is it okay for countries to
go out, from a legal perspective, are
they allowed to go out and do it, and in what situation are
they allowed, under what context are they allowed to go and do the exploration?
All right, so that is a great question. Let's start with Norway, because Norway is
kind of like an encapsulation of the last year of deep sea
mining. Beginning of January 2024, Norwegian
parliament comes out and says, we are going to begin issuing exploration
permits for deep sea mining of inactive hydrothermal
vents in our national waters. Countries can do
whatever they want in their national waters depending on their own laws The
big regulations and restrictions are what's happening in international waters
But in national waters, it's national law, so every country's
got its own rule set They can do what they want Norway said we're going to start
issuing exploration permits That surprised a
lot of people because Norway has been, you know, they're a huge offshore
oil and gas producer But they're also a very strong environmentally conscientious
society So there was quite a bit of pushback
from that. It looked for a while like Norway was going to move forward. And
then in December, as the Norwegian parliament was
brokering a deal for their budget for the next year, one
of the stipulations from one of the smaller parties in their parliament that
they needed to get the votes to get their budget done, one of their stipulations was,
we don't want deep sea mining permits. And so that was scrapped. This
entire year for deep sea mining has been a flurry of
activity that has resulted us ultimately ending up kind
Yes. From an environmental perspective, we are slowly working
towards a set of environmental regulations that No
one's going to particularly like, but everyone will probably be grudgingly
consent to, which is the best you can hope for for big
international negotiations. And that process has
been ongoing for decades and is slowly creeping towards
conclusion. Polymetallic nodule mining. Now,
I've been on this show before. I've said a lot of times deep sea mining is three different industries.
Polymetallic nodule mining is different from hydrothermal vent mining. It's
different from seamount mining. They all have their own impacts.
They all have their own consequences. They all have their own
sort of justifications. And when
I left the Deep Sea Mining Observer, the first action I did
as a not-journalist covering deep sea mining was to sign on
to the scientists' sign-on letter for calls for moratorium on
the development of the deep sea mining regulations. And the reason I
did that is not because I didn't think there was a future for deep sea mining. The reason I
did that is because The current policy being negotiated at
the ISA is a unitary mining code that
covers all three kinds of deep sea mining. Gotcha. And so, you
know, the folks who are working on polymetallic nodule mining, they have a
pretty good argument. I don't think they're 100% there yet, but I think there's
a real possibility that they could get to the point where they could have
an environmentally justifiable industry. For hydrothermal vent
mining, for seabound mining, for cobalt rich crust,
I don't think there's any future for those that could possibly have environmental
justifications. And so as long as there's a unitary mining code,
you know. giving permission to the best form
of mining if that also gives permission to the worst forms of mining is
Why do you think they did that? Why do you think they wanted to just spread it around to
So it's really curious because this is the
second set of mining code negotiations that has
happened. And the first set was for the exploration permits. So
exploration for deep sea mining is prospecting. It's
the process of going out into an ecosystem, looking for the ore bodies,
identifying where there might actually be valuable ore, doing
the initial environmental impact assessments and then going back and saying, I
think there's something valuable here. Can we have permission to go on further? And
then you apply for an exploitation permit. The
ISA negotiated separate mining regulations for all three
ore bodies for the exploration permits. So there is
a separate set of rules for exploration for polymetallic nodules
and for hydrothermal vents and for cobalt-rich seamounts. But
for whatever reason, and I think the reason is the people who really, really want to
do hydrothermal vent and cobalt-rich seamount mining know they're not going to be able to
get it through unless they get it all through together. For that
reason, almost certainly, they've decided on a unitary mining code for
Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So your position here
is, and why you signed on, it was the fact that it was the full,
like they were doing a unitary sort of commitment to saying you
can explore whatever type you want. You're like, no, that's not the
way we go forward. Let's move forward in a proper way
and let's look at one specific one that will be the least amount of
Exactly. And part of that is that the most advanced
mining companies right now are all looking for polymetallic nodules. The
financial regime, which is a big hang up that we can get into
if you really want to get into the economics of things, that's currently being
negotiated is looking at projections from polymetallic nodule mining.
The environmental work has all been developed on environmental, not
environmental, on polymetallic nodule mining. And so we're in
a situation where You
know, best is probably not the right word because we're still talking about an extractive industry,
but the least worst form of mining is driving the negotiation forward, but
it's dragging worst forms of mining along with it. And
I think because hydrothermal vents and cobalt-rich
seamounts aren't being considered in nearly the same detail, we're
going to be left with a mining code that preferentially discusses
polymetallic nodule mining with regulations shaped
around that. And we end up in situations where we're going to encounter regulations that
don't address impacts that are happening. at things like hydrothermal vents
and seamounts. Because these are very different ecosystems. They're
very different geologically. They're very different ecologically. They're
Yes, the hydrothermal vents especially. I know usually,
I know in Canada we've protected on our west coast a
huge system of hydrothermal vents on
purpose because, you know, not only for that but just for the biodiversity,
the uniqueness of the habitat is very distinctive and we
even expanded it a couple of years ago or about four or five years ago to
make it even bigger than what it was. Do we
know the detrimental effect it would have if we did hydrothermal vent
The big thing with hydrothermal vent mining in particular is that the
process that builds the hydrothermal vent is the same
process that creates the ore and is the same process that
supports chemosynthetic communities. So you can't have one without
the other. You can't remove one without removing the other. When
you're looking at mining a hydrothermal vent, you are looking at comprehensive removal
of the ecosystem because the ore is the ecosystem. The
chemical processes that drive the vents is the chemical processes that
produce the ore. And so you're really looking at comprehensive total
removal of an ecosystem from the seafloor because it happens to be rich in gold
and silver and nickel. You know, when you look at a
polymetallic nodule field, polymetallic nodule fields are
scattered across the abyssal plane. They cover probably 60% of the surface
of the earth. There's a huge ecosystem. It's incredibly spread out.
Like I don't like to write off any
particular ecosystem, but in terms of resilience, like… There's
a lot more polymetallic nodule field in the world than
there is hydrothermal vents. If you took all the known hydrothermal vent fields
on the planet, the ones we've seen with
ROVs and with submarines and the ones we've hypothesized through looking for chemical signatures,
if you took that total surface area, it's smaller than Manhattan. Wow.
So we are talking about, you know, you're making regulations on
one hand that are regulating the biggest ecosystem on
the planet and also one of the smallest ecosystems on the planet. And
And so you're saying when we, if we mine a hydrothermal vent,
we remove that entire hydrothermal vent that ceases to
exist. Exactly. So we will go through that a lot faster than
Yes, and it's very oar-dense. And
so I think the most valuable one out there they projected was
worth something like $210 million. Dear lord. Which,
you know, is a lot of money, but I don't know if it's enough money to justify losing
Yeah. Now here, you know, obviously you and I and our audience
members understand the value of, you
know, a unique habitat such as hydrothermal vents. But there are a lot of
people out there who are just like, well, if we lose it, what's the big deal?
You know, we just lose this. Do we know the impact that that
would have on the deep sea in general? Or is that still under,
because we haven't really lost them or haven't really known that we've lost them. We
don't know the impact it would have on the rest of the deep sea ecosystem in and
So here is the argument that a
mining company would make that wants to mine an
active hydrothermal vent. Yeah. Hydrothermal vents
are geologically active. They have
their own turnover. In some cases, like if you're in the Western Pacific,
the average lifespan of a hydrothermal vent is 10 years. These
are volcanically active regions. They erupt. Sometimes they get
buried by lava flows. They turn on, they shut down.
They're very dynamic ecosystems. There is
an argument to be made that they are incredibly resilient
to disturbance. That's how they've evolved. There's
an equally valid argument to be made that natural disturbance versus
anthropogenic disturbance, which is an additive function of disturbance, we don't
really know what the consequences of that could possibly be. But when you're talking about
completely removing a hydrothermal vent ecosystem, you're
losing genetic conductivity between different
hydrothermal vent systems. You may be breaking stepping
stones that prevent downstream hydrothermal vent
ecosystems from being recolonized as they turn over. And
hydrothermal vents are nasty. Like these are full of heavy metals.
There's arsenic in them. They're slightly radioactive. You've
got a lot of other very nasty heavy metals
that are produced and embedded within the hydrothermal vent chimney. They're
sulfur rich. And so you go in with a mining tool and
you begin grinding. I mean it's functionally strip mining when you're talking about a
hydrothermal vent. you're creating a plume. You're
creating a toxic metal radioactive plume that spreads across
the seafloor. And so that plume is going to settle out in the surrounding sediment
and who knows how much further it'll perfuse across the
seafloor. So it is going to have knockdown effects on halo fauna
as well. It's going to impact the animals around
hydrothermal vents that aren't necessarily dependent on hydrothermal vents. And
if you're talking about a mining vessel where you're going to have like a dewatering plume,
that's coming off the vessel after the ore returns to the surface, that's going
to end up in the mid-water, and it's going to be impacting things like fisheries. But
that's hydrothermal vent mining. And a thing I want to highlight is that
right now, the real push is for polymetallic nodule mining. And
that's where things are happening at the ISA. And for the most
part at this moment, when people talk about deep sea mining,
with a few exceptions, they are talking about polymetallic nodule mining.
With this type of mining, how is it done? You talked
a little bit about the hydrothermal vent, how it's just basically you're grinding it
Polymetallic nodules are very weird
rocks. We're not 100% sure
the exact geochemical process for how they form, but
the kind of broad strokes is that a small nucleating agent, some
kind of a hard object, it's often like the test of
a diatom or a radiolarin, but it's sometimes something as big as
a shark's tooth, when it sinks into the deep sea, very
slowly over the course of millions of years, heavy metals from
the surrounding seawater accrete around this
hard nucleating agent. And basically
it's a rock that grows and it takes four, five, six million years to grow,
but it's a rock that grows. A weird thing about
it is they don't sink. So
they sit on the seafloor, but you don't ever find them buried in
the sediment. So there's some long-term process that
we're not really sure. There's one hypothesis that burrowing animals
underneath them are causing uplift. There's another hypothesis
that the process of forming a nodule is biogenic,
so there's microbes that are part of that, and that the nodule
is actually breaking down as it contacts the sediment and then reaccreting
on top. But these are all hypotheses. There's also the
possibility that just the topology of the seafloor and the movement of
sediment across the seafloor causes them to remain on the surface. So
they're weird. They're a rock that grows. And
they're a rock that grows into an object that contains the
things we need in an electric vehicle battery. So they're
rich in cobalt. They're rich in nickel. They're not super rich
in copper but they have some copper and they're rich in manganese, which
are all elements that go into next generation renewable energy
technologies. So there is an
environmental argument to be made. that if
we want to get off fossil fuels, if we want to electrify the world's automotive
fleets, if we want to shift towards renewable energy, we
might have to go to sea to get the metals necessary to build that technology. I
don't find that argument particularly compelling anymore. I used to find it
much, much more compelling. But technology has
moved on. Only 20% of
the electric vehicles being made in China right now are using
batteries that contain cobalt. They're using next generation batteries.
They're using lithium iron phosphate battery chemistries that
are cheaper and more stable. … and don't require this incredibly expensive
metal that's hard to access. And
so I think the technology itself has moved faster than deep-sea mining
has progressed to a point where I'm not sure – and I'm
not an economist, so what the heck do I know? But
I'm not sure the economic argument for deep sea mining makes a ton of
sense anymore. And I think the commodities market has played that out.
So cobalt and nickel right now are in kind of historic ruts. They're
both in a major surplus. They're both trading at kind of their
historic minimums. projections
for deep sea mining. In the summer of 2023, they
revised the model for a hypothetical
polymetallic nodule mine based off of metals values
at the time. And since then, they've lost about $400 million a
year in value. Just a little bit.
So the economics are not really shaking out in deep sea mining's favor
at the moment. On the other hand, There's
another issue at play, and you've almost certainly
heard me do this line before, but I say deep sea mining is
three industries. Deep sea mining is really four
industries. And that fourth industry is geopolitics.
Deep sea mining is deeply embedded in
kind of great power struggles, geopolitical, diplomatic
brinksmanship, that kind of thing. Countries use
deep sea mining as a tool to argue for the expansion
of their outer continental shelf. which expands their EEZ. They
use it to assert sovereignty over different areas of the seafloor. They
use it for prestige. And they use it to access
metals when we have things like security issues. So, you
know, cobalt is in a historic surplus,
but cobalt is also 90% produced by the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, and those mines are largely controlled by China. If you're
a country like the United States that suddenly is very adverse to trading with
China, there is a geopolitical argument to
be made for accessing other sources of these critical minerals. And
so we've seen that with the major private companies
who want to do deep sea mining pivoting away from the
environmental argument and the sustainability argument and towards the
national security argument, the critical minerals argument, the resource
independence argument. And I think, you know, I think
that has some staying power for a lot of people. That's certainly a compelling argument,
I know, for a lot of the national security hawks that I talk to. So
on that token, this has been like the biggest year in a long time
for the U.S. getting involved in deep sea mining. And I'm even talking about
before the Trump administration kicked off. Right. So
early in the year, Congresswoman Miller of
West Virginia introduced a bill to incentivize polymetallic
nodule refining on the U.S., on U.S. soil, which
is kind of an interesting case. So the U.S. doesn't deep-sea mine, and
the U.S. isn't a signatory to UNCLOS, the U.N. Convention of
the Law of the Sea, which means the U.S. is
not beholden to the rules of the U.N., but we also don't get
to negotiate, and we also don't really get to access the
mineral resources of the high seas. But
we can refine them and one of the things the US can do that the
other countries who are signatories to the UN Convention on the Law
of the Sea can't do is create privileged markets. So
if you are Canada, if you are Great Britain, if you are
China or Russia or Singapore and you deep sea mine, the
metals you mine have to go into the same market as terrestrially produced metals.
You can't say we're only going to mine the deep sea and sell deep sea
minerals. You can't privilege the source of the metal. And
that's in place so that developing countries can't be bullied out of existence
by deep sea mining. And if those countries, if
their terrestrial industries are negatively impacted, they have to be compensated.
So the US, because we didn't sign, we can do that. We can say we only want to put deep
sea metals in our cars. We don't want cobalt from the Congo. And
so I think the argument for having the U.S. be
a refining center for polymetallic nodules, so they'll be
mined on the high seas by an international company and then landed
in the U.S. to be refined, you know, I think that
argument has some weight to it. And I
think from an economic standpoint, there's a lot of people who want to see that
happen. And quite frankly, like,
you know, the US isn't great on refining metals, but like,
we're an awful lot better than some countries. So like, you
know, that environmental impact is going to happen somewhere, you know, the US isn't
the worst choice. Yeah, for sure. Maybe
it doesn't have to happen at all, because there's no economic value in
Well, I think that's a question I have for you too, because last time you
were on, I remember you saying that even if we were to start mining,
say today, like full-fledged mining, it would take 50 years
for it to really come into production and be in an actual
So it wasn't that it would take 50 years for it to come into production and be in
a battery. It would be, it was that it would be, you
know, 30 year minimum for it to reach the scale where it's even
remotely competitive with terrestrial mining operations. Gotcha. Okay.
So it's, you know, and I think the line I was giving then and it's the line I
still do now is that, you know, deep sea mining may be a possible
a route to sustainability to reach 2050 or
2100 targets, but it's certainly not going to help us reach 2030 climate targets.
And I think I probably said that in 2019, and now we're at 2025. It
definitely is not going to help us meet any climate
targets for 2030, and probably not for 2050 either. It
might be a solution for 2075. And
so for that reason, you know, deep sea mining has time, which is one
of the reasons why I think it's kind of silly to do this unitary mining code when, you
know, we can take our time and get it right. This is the first time in human history where
we've negotiated the rules for an extractive industry before
the industry has been able to extract. And so, like, why not
make it the example for resource extraction?
Yeah, it's such an opportunity, right? It's such an opportunity. Now
with that said, you know, like we're talking about the advancements of
battery technology and that it doesn't need as much cobalt and
you mentioned, what is it, 20% of Chinese batteries
that are being made for EVs are not even using cobalt or
Is there a possibility that you know, they won't
Absolutely. So, you know, the two battery
technologies that are really starting to come online that are exciting to
me, in terms of not being anti-deep sea
mining, but in terms of getting us off our need for minerals at all, are
solid state batteries, They use graphene and
they use an acid gel as
their electrolyte so that you have these batteries that are very
stable, very fast charging. They're basically gigantic capacitors. You
can dump all the amps into them all at once so you don't
have to do that whole sitting and charging for 45 minutes thing.
When you're fast charging and driving across the country, you can just dump all the
juice in all at once and they're perfectly stable and they run fine. They
don't need any heavy metals for the most part, at least the best chemistries
I've seen. And that's really appealing because that makes them
much, much more accessible with a much lighter
footprint. Sodium batteries are, they're
not as fast discharging. They're incredibly stable
and they can store an awful lot of energy. They're not really a good
electric vehicle battery, but for like municipal power storage,
as we start building a more sustainable renewable grid, Sodium
Or home storage, exactly, yeah. Those sodium batteries will really
take off. So I think – and neither of those particularly need the
metals that we derive from the deep sea. Right. So
I think it all really depends on which battery chemistry wins.
It's like the USB wars. Is it going to be micro USB or mini
USB or USB-C or Blu-ray or
DVD? Now we're in the battery wars. Which battery chemistry
is going to win? The battery chemistry that wins is going to decide whether or
not we really have a strong economic argument to
There was a story that I covered over the last year. And it
talked about these nodules. I think they were probably metallic
nodules that were emitting oxygen. And they
were wondering, is this part of the deep sea ecology? Could
this be something that we could use in
the future as an argument not to, or be very careful
if you're going to take these nodules, because it could be
providing oxygen to the animals and the
So that is the dark oxygen story. Yes. That was
a paper published about polymetallic nodules from the Clarion-Clipperton zone,
where people want to mine. And I think the actual initial research
was funded by a deep sea mining company. So it
is 100% tied to deep sea mining. It is a very preliminary
study. And the results are incredibly tantalizing.
I'm not 100% convinced that they've actually detected
oxygen production yet. And it's hard
to tell what the mechanism is. And
it's one of those things where it's probably, there's probably some kind of, if oxygen is truly
being produced in the volumes they're talking about, it's probably a biogenic process
involving microbes interacting with the nodules. Right. But
that is absolutely – it's an incredibly tantalizing piece of research. It's definitely something to
watch. It's definitely something we want to know more about before we go and
wholesale – Of course. Remove these nodules from the seafloor. So
I think that's a really interesting story that we
definitely need a lot of follow-up on. And that actually kind
of highlights one of the weird paradoxes of the entire deep sea
mining story, which is that these mining companies for
the most part, they're
I won't say they're green companies, but they want to be green companies. They're environmentally motivated
companies. Their fundamental value proposition is that
we need to get off fossil fuels and we have a better way of
getting the metals we need from the seafloor versus from land. Yes.
So there has always been an environmental motivation behind fossil fuels.
Some of these companies, I mean, some of them just want to make money, but most of them are fairly
environmentally motivated. And they funded a lot of research. They
want to do the environmental impact assessments right, to
an extent. They also want to mine, so they don't want the environmental impact assessments to
say no go. But they're funding this
research. A lot of the big research that's come out in the last 10 years
that suggests maybe we shouldn't mine the high seas has come from
funding from deep sea mining companies. And I'm actually one
of the examples of that. I worked on the environmental impact assessment for the Sulwara
I mining project. When I went into that project, I was
pretty persuaded by the argument that this is a dynamic ecosystem that
it turns over on. Sulwara I especially turns over very fast. That
the site itself is underneath an active submarine volcano,
so it's constantly already getting buried by the same chemically
enriched plume that would be produced by the mining tool. They
had a good argument. And so that was one
of the reasons why I felt comfortable working with them
on the environmental impact assessment. And as we progress, and I did my PhD thesis
with them and did a lot of environmental work and did
a lot of connectivity work on the systems, as I progressed through my research,
I slowly came to the conclusion that I don't really
think we can do this kind of thing anywhere without having a
permanent negative impact to the ecosystem. Even in that area? Even
in that area. I think Sul-Warun was probably the best case scenario. And,
you know, it's like the polymetallic nodule argument, right? You know, if it's the least worst,
if you're still opening the gates to the worst, then it's not helping anyone. Exactly.
So like that, I've seen that transition happen among a lot
of a lot of people. And like, you know, the mining companies are,
you know, not every mining company, obviously, like, capitalism is
a thing that drives and motivates people for reasons other than the environment. But
like, The people I know on the ground who do the environmental
work for these companies, who are writing the environmental impact statements, who
are leading their initial research programs, they care about the
environment. And they learn things, and they fund environmental research,
and they fund a lot of environmental research that ultimately says, don't mine here.
Right. Yeah, it's an interesting concept. It's
really weird in this position that we're in where
it seems like, as you mentioned, Norway starts off
January saying, hey, yeah, we're going to explore. And then by the
end of December, the government's like, as they put their budget through, no, there's
a small contingent that says, no, we don't want it in there. And they have to pass the budget. So
that's just the way it goes. Then the other side, as you mentioned, there's
a geopolitical side to it. And that can
drive a lot of movement on a
side for, say, the US or anybody else to activate
some deep sea mining or at least refineries and see how
that works. It seems like because
it's such a global issue, How
do you expect people to react and what do you expect them to do in
this situation? The audience members here, just
like me, are really scratching the surface of deep sea mining and
just really understanding. Obviously you coming on really helps in finding out
the three main different types of ways to mine it and
what's the least amount of harm and then the
most amount of harm that we see. And so we get that knowledge
in there. But for the audience member who's listening to this and
just being like, OK, so now I'm educated on
how this all works. I'm educated on the different things that can play
a role in whether this goes forward or it doesn't go forward. What
do you suggest that people do with this
So it's tricky because it's not the kind of thing where
you can write your congressman. Well, especially not
because we're not part of UNCLOS, so our congressmen are useless. More
useless than usual. If
you are a citizen of a country that is a signatory to UNCLOS, which...
Honestly, most of your listeners probably aren't, because I'm guessing you have a pretty big
But, you know, if you are the citizen of a country that is a signatory to
UNCLOS, you write your representatives, however
you're represented, if it's an MP or a parliamentarian or
a congressman or, you know, an alderman or whatever, you write whoever represents
you in the highest level of government. and urge
them to adopt the position that either
you do or do not want to support deep sea mining. Because ultimately, this
is international negotiation. It's happening at the level of
a State Department. And so whatever is your
most direct line to the State Department of your country, which
is usually through your elected representative, if
you're in the U.S., like the U.S. does go to the ISA and
that we do have representatives that intervene there that we can't vote on
ISA issues, you can write directly to the US State Department and be like, hey,
I'm worried about this. Right. But in terms
of like direct action, it's a trickier one because it's not like
you can oppose it in national waters. Yeah. If your issue
is primarily with deep sea mining and national waters, which very
few countries are looking at deep sea mining in their own waters. Japan is
doing a little bit of work on that. China is doing development
on that, but mostly to test technology for high seas work. India
is kind of in the same boat. They have nodule fields
in their territorial waters. They do a little bit of work there,
but they're not In those cases, it's less about
the commercialization and more about testing of technology before
they go out into the high seas. New Zealand is a very active
back and forth in their parliament over deep sea mining and some of
the shallower water mining projects like Iron Ridge Sands. So
for national waters, it is, I mean, in all cases, it's right your representatives. You
know, there's not like, it's a small industry, it's a small world. So
it's not hard to keep track of who's trying to do deep sea mining. It
is hard to get involved unless you're a subject matter expert. If you're a scientist, if
you're a practicing marine scientist and you're opposed to deep sea mining,
there is a scientist sign-on letter for support of
a moratorium that they are collecting signatures for.
I think it's hosted by the IUCN right now, or possibly the Worldwide
Fund for Nature. Can't remember who's currently hosting it, but if you Google
scientist sign-on letter. I'll put the link in the show notes, yeah. So
there are things to do if you are a practicing scientist that carry
Okay. Now, one more question about
what people can do. So is it bad to
have an EV right now? Just knowing, you know, like from
an ethical standpoint, you know, we look at how cobalt
is mined now, as you mentioned, in the Democratic Republic
of Congo. But but plus with the possibility of
deep sea mining, if you are an environmentalist, or
you want to do something good for the environment, and you are buying a car, is
it bad to have an EV? Is it bad to have
a hybrid vehicle? I mean, it's good for the environment. We know that. But
then there's also the fact of what goes into it. And
this is an ethical point. I guess it's more of your opinion kind of
piece. But what would you say for people who are
like, well, why would you get an EV with all this
So no, absolutely not. There is no projection that
has EVs coming out worse than a new gas car. If
you are shopping for a new car or a new used car, EVs
are always going to be, hands down, a better choice for the environment. The
best choice for a car is always the car you currently have. Drive
it till it dies, make it last as long as possible, and then replace it
with the most energy efficient car you can. My family
has had to do that twice in the last two years. We've had two cars
totaled. I drove mine until it died. My wife drove hers until
it died. We got hundreds of thousands of miles out of both of them. And
now we have two EVs. So we went the EV
route, and we went with a Hyundai Kona,
and we went with a Ford Escape plug-in hybrid. So
depending on your personal politics and other motivations, there are certain
car companies you may want to avoid. Um, and
I, you know, I have a, I have a personal beef with Tesla that is not related to
politics, but it's related to how they do battery storage and how they do, um,
uh, access to, um, uh, the hardware that
you've already bought. So if you buy like a base level model Y,
there's more battery capacity in that model Y than you're allowed to use.
And you have to pay Tesla for permission to use
an extended range, but that, that battery, capacity is
already built into your vehicle, which means you are driving around with
a third of an electric vehicle's worth of cobalt and
nickel that is not being used. So in
that case, and that's changing too because Tesla has switched its
battery chemistries to lithium iron phosphate for those vehicles. So
that was more of an issue four years ago than it is today. So
there are, if you really wanted to get into the nitty gritty and look at
battery chemistries and compare battery chemistries, and OK,
you want to avoid the potential for creating demand
for deep sea mining. There's no battery on the market right now that uses metals from
the deep sea. But if
you want to avoid creating that demand, you can look for batteries that use lithium iron
phosphate rather than lithium polymer
or nickel-based or cobalt-based batteries. So
you can do that. But at the end of the day, The
car you have, drive it until it can't be a reliable car
anymore and replace it with a used car that is
as efficient as possible is almost always going to be the best choice. Electric
vehicles, especially the used electric vehicle market is great right
now. This is a fantastic moment in time to get a used EV.
A used EV is going to be hands down always the most environmentally
Yeah, true, true. Awesome. Is there anything, I
know a lot happened last year, is there anything that we missed talking
We have barely scratched the surface. Oh my gosh! I
have not even talked about the usurping of the Secretary General of
the International Space Agency. Yes, yes, let's talk about that, let's talk about that.
So I think this is important because I think this is the biggest a
policy change to happen in the ISA in the last eight years.
So Michael Lodge was the previous Secretary General of the ISA. He
took over in 2016. And he
was very pro-mining. He
really saw it as his mission to get the mining regulations done.
and to get deep sea mining started under his watch. It
seemed like he wanted that to be his legacy, which of course, if you're the Secretary General
of the ISA who's tasked with creating a deep sea mining industry,
of course that's the kind of legacy you want to create. His
leadership was mired in a couple of scandals, which – all
of which are like allegedly at this point, and
the new secretary general has said that there will be investigations. We'll
see how far that goes. There were accusations that he was
cozying up with specific mining companies. and
preferentially favoring them. There were accusations that he was passing privileged
information on to third parties in those mining companies. There
was accusations during the last election that he was attempting to
bribe his opponent by offering her a job within
the ISA if she would drop out of the election. And there
were overall a lot of moments of dissatisfaction with
his leadership, I think is probably the most diplomatic way to say it. His
handling of the COVID pandemic wasn't particularly inspired.
He actually, you know, I was at the very last in-person ISA
meeting before the pandemic shut everything down. And
the delegation for, this was February of 2020. The delegation
from China had a long intervention where they basically said, this
is going to be bad. We need to put provisions in place to have remote meetings. And
the secretary general said, we are not equipped to have remote meetings and we will not do
No, it was happening. The first cases were out. They knew. It
was blowing up in Wuhan. They were like, this is bad. The first
cases in Italy had hit, so they knew. And
so because of that, they basically shut down negotiations for two years,
obviously. And they put some provisions in place to
have like sort of remote, but not really kind
of sustaining meetings. But like, you know,
I think generally speaking, a lot of delegations were dissatisfied with
his leadership. And so there was a vote on the new secretary general
at the last ISA meeting of 2024. Everyone
thought it was going to kind of be a nail-biter and it was going to come down to like the
pro-moratorium countries versus the pro-mining countries. But
it actually ended up being a blowout and Secretary General Lodge
was voted out of office and Secretary General Letitia Carvalho
was voted into office. Secretary General Carvalho is
going to be the first oceanographer to leave the ISA. She's a
scientist. She worked for the
UN Environmental Program, so she's a very seasoned administrator
with these kinds of programs. And she's the first woman and
the first Latin American to lead the ISA. So it's a very – MR
PALLADINO She's from Brazil? MR KIRBY She's from Brazil, yes. So
it is a very significant change in leadership that will really
shape how the next four years of ISA negotiations go. I
don't know how they will be reshaped yet because she's
Started at the beginning of January. So we will see at the first ISA
meeting what kind of changes we can expect to see.
There seems to be, because she's an oceanographer and her experience with
UNEP, there seems to be a bit more of a positive
outlook when it comes to, as you mentioned before, of taking
advantage of looking at policy before this
extraction happens. and being proud
of putting together a very comprehensive strategy and
policy before we go out, especially because she's
a science-based leader. Is that a
fair assessment of what we're looking at? Do you feel the
I think it's fair to say that she has a much better
grasp on what the science is than the outgoing secretary-general. I
think she is – and he was a private sector lawyer,
so he had a very different skill set. She is a
seasoned administrator with the UN, so I think there is
going to be a much higher focus on science. the
norms and protocols of UN programs that
some people felt was lacking under the last leadership. I
don't think she's a pro-moratorium person. I don't think she's, like, trying
to shut down deep-sea mining. I know some people are like, oh, yay, the environmentalists
won. I think she is going
to be the kind of secretary general where we're going to see the best possible mining
code get codified under her watch. And a
lot of people won't be happy with the best possible mining code because they didn't want any
mining code at all. But the best possible mining code is a heck of
a lot better than what was coming out under the
How many times have you and I and other scientists have looked
at previous extractive activities or other extractive
activities and be like, oh, if we only… you know, had these types of
regulations before it started, then it would have been
– the precedent would have been there and we could fine-tune
So this is … Here's something wild. Here's something that we've never
seen before with the new industry. There's an environmental fund
Well, the companies, and so, you know, it's weird because there's
private companies that deep sea mine, there's also countries. Ah, gotcha. And
so they're both kind of working in tandem. And also the ISA gets to have its own
mining company too, which is a whole other story. Yeah, that's
interesting. Okay. So there's a lot of entities that are
doing the mining, but if there's a pre-funded environmental fund,
that means when accidents happen, there's already money available for remediation. And
that's not something we've really seen before at this scale ever. So
just simple things like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
it's penalize them after the fact, not pre-fund. So
those are the kinds of things that I think they lead
to a better – and I'm not like – I'm not
a super big industry naysayer and I'm also not super rah, rah,
rah, let's go mine. acknowledge
begrudgingly that there may need to be a path forward that involves the
deep ocean if battery chemistries don't catch up and
if we do genuinely need these metals. And
like, let's do the best thing we can. Yeah,
if we can make the regulations as good as possible. And if you
know the negotiation to get those regulations as good as possible takes so long,
the battery technology catches up. Great. Yeah.
I love this. So this was huge. We'll
stop the interview here. I'd like to invite you back for a part
two, because there's more information that we're going to be talking about
with deep sea mining. And I would like to invite you back, to
be honest, Andrew, on a regular basis. because there's so much going on
in the world right now, especially in the US, with ocean policy
that we're going to be covering at least over the next four years and
seeing what's happened. And of course, we did an episode previous
to this on your article regarding all the different policies
that were changed in President Trump's first day after
the inauguration. So we're going to be discussing a lot of that over this
time and the effect that it'll have Not only on the deep sea, but
just on the ocean in general and on people as well. And we'll have a number
of different experts that come in to discuss it, but we would love for you to
come back and help us out to detangle everything. So that'd
be really great. So thank you so much for coming on this time. Appreciate it. You're
very welcome and thank you for having me. Thank you, Andrew, for joining me on today's episode
of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. So much stuff happened, we
didn't even get to cover, we're just scratching the surface. So we're gonna have
him back on to get another update on what happened in 2024 and
what continues to happen as we go along. New leadership, which
is great to see, only 22 days in, so we're gonna see what
happens having an oceanographer. as a leader uh and
and to see like what's going to happen are we going to take advantage of this and
say hey we can come up with the best type of uh
of policies the best type of regulations before we start this
extractive process if we're going to start it and if we're going to see if it's even
worth it with the advancement of batteries the way it
goes so much is happening so quickly we're going to keep you up
to date in the future But until then, if you have any questions or comments
about the episode, you have questions for Andrew that maybe the next
time he's on, he can answer, I can ask him, please let me know.
Just hit me up on Instagram at HowToProtectTheOcean. And
if you have a question or comment and you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, just
put your question and comment in the comment section
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Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. Enjoy. This
is the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm your host Andrew Loon. Thank
you very much for joining us on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have