Europe’s underwater robots ready to rumble

There is a new fleet of robots, built outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK, whose makers hope will not just dim the spectre of mining job losses in England’s North East, but eradicate it completely.

Except nobody is proposing to re-open the region’s defunct coal pits: these robots will dive down to 1,500 metres and claw up the rich minerals and metals carpeting the world’s seafloors.

The underwater vehicles are being built by a firm with a long experience of marine engineering, Soil Machine Dynamics (SMD), for the Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals, which recently won a seabed mining licence – the world’s first – to explore and exploit minerals off the coast of Papa New Guinea, in an area called Solwara.

Another British company, UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, is also making plans to follow the prospectors.

Mining itself is expected to start within five years, once wrangling over terms with Papua New Guinea is sorted out. Two more robots, in the works at SMD, are planned to follow.

For a long time, the idea of mining deep sea deposits was dismissed because of the technological challenge and high cost. SMD's advanced underwater robots, some seven years in the making at a cost of nearly €100 million, aim to overcome these difficulties.

European companies are the flag-bearers. The bulk cutter, a hulking, 310 tonne robot developed by SMD, got its caterpillar tracks from Italy and its pumps from the Netherlands.

The robots, equipped with cameras and 3D sonar sensors, will be driven by pilots from a control room, attached via a giant power cable. The camera on its own will not be able to see enough of the murky sea depths; the 3D sonar will fill in the blanks by making images and passing them back to the controllers.

Advances in technology are not the only spurs behind the push to scour the seas for fresh mineral reserves: in the face of increasing demand many of the world's easy-to-access veins are facing depletion. As the quality of retrievable stock onshore diminishes and the price rises, the relatively rich deposits thought to be waiting below the water help justify the large costs and risks.

Getting the measure of the beast

While some carry the upbeat mood of prospectors on the eve of a gold rush, others are worried.

Mining will open revenue streams for countries like Papua New Guinea, which will take a 15 per cent stake in the operation, but the uncertain impact of seabed mining is already sending environmentalists into a spin.

Marine biologists warn about lasting damage to underwater ecosystems where whole areas may suffer biological extinction. There has been shallow mining before, off the coast of South Africa and Namibia for instance, but in these cases the seabed was only, “a little roughed up and its deposits vacuumed up,” said Nick Ridley, one of SMD’s engineers. The approach taken by the new breed of robots will be a lot more aggressive.

“We did a significant amount of research to understand what kinds of life forms are located at Solwara and have devised mitigation strategies to lessen the impact of our activities,” John Elias, spokesman for Nautilus, told Science|Business. One strategy is to transplant clumps of sea microbes to another location prior to mining.

Ridley suggests the question to ask is, “Is it better or worse than mining on land?" Digging pits on land entails building a veritable city and a tangle of transport services to haul materials, he points out. There's also the accompanying noise pollution.

Elias argues that copper, as one example, is more highly concentrated on the seafloor than it is on land. “Land-based mining requires much more to be removed to obtain the same levels of finished copper, often requiring the literal removal of a mountain to reach the ore body,” he said.

Sea floor mining might also be a safer alternative, maintains Elias, since the robots will be operated remotely, meaning no one will in the firing line in the event of catastrophe.  

The EU position: dig a little deeper  

The many questions posed by seabed mining are being weighed up by the Commission’s maritime department, DG MARE.

To help build a brief, opinions are being pooled from the public, and a civil servant is being sent to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN agency headquartered in Jamaica that issues mining contracts for international waters, to find out what kind of sway the bloc can have on the process.

The ISA has its own quandaries to work through in deciding who should get a mining contract, given that competence cannot be gained without actual mining at a commercial scale, while the same time its rules say mining should not be allowed without prior demonstration of competence.

Establishing some legal codes for deep sea mining would be welcomed, said Alicia Craw, an ocean campaigner with Greenpeace. Currently, “There is no strategy in place to assess cumulative impacts of deep-sea mining and other activities such as deep-sea fishing; and there is a lack of governance to manage and conserve the environments under exploitation,” she says.

The EU is funding two research projects. A consortium called Blue Mining, which began in February, will look at the business case and technology for deep sea mining, while a second project, Midas, is investigating the environmental impact.