Cover Story
Treasure Trove Below The Waves
Hidden data stops islands tapping
Three decades ago the Pacific Islands began to become aware that treasure troves in the form of copper, cobalt, zinc, gold, silver and manganese lay on the bed of the ocean beyond their shores.
Since then some of the ocean science’s most elaborately equipped ships have cruised the Pacific constantly to assess the extent of this potential wealth and develop theories about how it got there.
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Japanese, German, United States, British, French, Russian and Korean research ships have criss-crossed the region. Nearly all these cruises are being accomplished in the name of pure science. Some research is commercially motivated.
Is there enough down there to warrant creating the technology to mine seabed minerals from depths as great as 6000 metres and make a satisfactory profit?
After 30 years of research and investigation no one has so far made commercial dollars from seabed mining in the Pacific. It has yet to be attempted. United States scientists began experimentally recovering mineral-enriched nodules having a largely manganese base in the 1970s.
A Norwegian consortium made quite loud noises about mining nodules said to be lying in quantities of billions, not millions, but billions of tonnes near the Cook Islands, but earlier this year backed off the idea.
There are several reasons why mining hasn’t begun. Firstly, the technological challenge and cost of seabed mining at great depths is daunting. Secondly, the metals that could so laboriously be retrieved from the seabed can be mined far more easily and cheaply ashore.
But according to Nautilus Minerals Corporation Ltd, an Australian-owned company that says it is close to becoming “the first company to invest multi-million US dollars in offshore mining of copper-zinc”, there is another significant obstacle that blocks Pacific Islands states from turning on the taps that would pour offshore mining revenue into their exchequers.
Nautilus holds two exploration tenements in offshore areas of Papua New Guinea and has applied for tenements in Fiji and Tonga.
Hardly any of the huge amounts of data and samples collected by research ships are supplied to the islands governments that allow them to explore seabed areas of their 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs), says David Heydon, an exploration geologist and Nautilus’s chief operating officer.
Heydon, addressing a session of the annual meeting of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) in October, predicted that the first island country to cash in on offshore mining would be the first to take “decisive steps to extract maximum value from this data”.
The United Nations Law of the Sea Convention requires researchers to furnish, at the host nation’s request, all the data and samples collected.
Heydon asked: “Where are all the rock samples taken from your EEZs or territorial waters? How many samples are under the control of the host nation?”
Samples were gathering dust in stores around the world and not being used to further assess mineral potential.
“We question what happens to these samples when (a research institute) cuts its budget, completes its studies, or the professor who prompted the research retires? These are the assets of the host nation and need to be secured for the benefit of the nation.”
Heydon complained that samples weren’t accessible to exploration companies like Nautilus that wished to gauge the size and richness of mineral deposits rather than the scientific side of the processes that formed them.
A lot of what marine science researchers collected remained confidential at their request for one or two years until scientific papers were published. That was fine for scientists, but not for a commercial company working within the time limits of the exploration licences granted to them.
Heydon said all data should be immediately available to a host nation so that it could be passed on to exploration companies, “perhaps under an agreement to use it but not reveal it for up to 12 months”.
SOPAC’s director, Alfred Simpson, said the dilemma for islands countries entitled to receive marine science research was how to handle and store it. “The storage for samples is pathetic and inadequate,” he told the SOPAC meeting. “The first step is to find where the samples are.”
Simpson told Islands Business that while in theory islands governments were entitled to receive data in a language they could understand, “in practice, it is very impractical. Some require special storage, and how do you divide up the samples?”
Normally, a post-cruise report is supposed to be supplied immediately after the cruise. “Even if you gave them the samples most of them will disappear — countries don’t have the facility to store it.”
In Fiji, mining laws require any sample from any mining company to become part of the national asset. But it would be impossible for the Fiji Government to store every sample from, for example, the Vatukoula gold mine.
“The big issue, the crying shame with offshore stuff, is that it’s such a costly exercise for scientific research,” Simpson said.
“There’s a need to work smarter and save money and not repeat what’s been done. It’s like pin prick samples. The ocean’s so huge that you really need to keep building up the picture. If you can have access to what’s already been done, then the next cruise that comes along is properly co-ordinated. You can ask them to build on what’s been done in the past. It’s difficult doing that with one country, but when you have many countries it’s nigh impossible.
“After the funding for scientific institutions disappears people say ‘it costs me money to store this. If somebody doesn’t come and take it we will dump it’. The next thing you know the information is lost which in truth belongs to one of the countries of the Pacific, you never know. May be 10 or 15 years later someone comes back and picks it up.”
Simpson said only one Pacific island government, Papua New Guinea, had a scientific committee and Kiribati was establishing one. Unless a government had “real in-house expertise” these scientific research people would continue to do what they want. A government without technical advice does not know what to ask researchers.
“There is a real opportunity when a vessel is coming in. They have their own scientific objectives, but there is always an opportunity for a country to say ‘can you do this bit of work?, and while you are in transit can you turn on your equipment?’ Unless you get involved in the early planning stages it is always very difficult. Because of the cost, they plan these processes down to the last day, the last hour, and to make late changes is nigh impossible. A lot of opportunities are missed like that.”
The International Law of the Sea Convention (ILOSC) — now an established fact — was in the early throes of negotiation at the time marine research scientists began to realise the magnitude of some seabed mineral resources. The convention allows coastal nations to claim legal ownership of all resources, notably fish, but also minerals, inside a boundary drawn 200 miles from their shores.
Ocean scientists first discovered the extent to which nodules composed mainly of manganese but also copper, iron, zinc, gold and other minerals, lie on some parts of the ocean floor in accumulations measured now near the Cook Islands in billions of tonnes. Next came the detection of strategically important cobalt on the upper slopes of seamounts — mountains rising from the seabed with summits that don’t quite break the ocean’s surface near the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and at some other locations.
In the early 1980s scientists became interested in “black smokers” — volcanic ocean floor vents that emit streams of mineral-enriched matter that cools to become crusts around the vents.
Heydon says the trouble with pure research is that it is focused on active “smokers”, hydrothermal vents, not on the ore bodies in inactive mounds formed by fallouts from the vents.
