Treasure Hunting

Sometime in late April of this year, a coal-black rock the size of a potato was placed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Known as a polymetallic nodule, the rock had formed over millions of years as minerals accreted around an organic fragment — a shark tooth, a bone — and came to rest, loose and exposed, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Gerard Barron, the Australian CEO of The Metals Company, carried the rock in his jacket pocket and presented it to President Trump as a gift.

The Metals Company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, was seeking permission from the US government to mine the 38 different elements contained in polymetallic nodules. Barron calls the nodules “batteries in a rock” because they contain many of the critical minerals needed to manufacture batteries, including nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

The target for this mining is a 104.5 million acre stretch of seabed between Mexico and Hawaii known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), where US Geological Survey estimates suggest deposits contain more nickel, cobalt, and manganese than all known worldwide land-based reserves combined. The full CCZ is estimated to contain up to 30 billion metric tons of nodules — a deposit, at current valuations, worth up to $18.4 trillion.

The Metals Company plans to vacuum these nodules from the seafloor using robotic collector vehicles, haul them to the surface, and ship them to shore for processing into battery-grade metals for electric vehicles (EV) and battery energy storage systems (BESS), large-scale installations that store electricity for grid use. EV and BESS are the core hardware of electrification, the wholesale replacement of fossil fuel systems with electric ones.

Read more in Arena Magazine.