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A newly issued executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump advocating for investment in deep sea mining operations raises significant environmental concerns, according to an expert from northern Ontario.
On April 24, Trump launched an initiative titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources.”
The objective of this order is to facilitate the growth of deep sea mining by simplifying the permitting process and channeling funds into technologies for extraction of essential minerals such as nickel, cobalt, and manganese from metallic nodules found on the ocean floor.
Nadia Mykytczuk, who serves as the executive director of the Goodman School of Mines at Laurentian University in Sudbury, expressed concerns about the untested nature of deep sea mining and its potential detrimental effects on marine ecosystems.
“Our limited experience with this means that we are uncertain about the technologies and extraction methods we might use and how these could lead to significant and possibly irreversible environmental damage,” she noted.
As CEO and president of MIRARCO Mining Innovation, Mykytczuk emphasized the importance of critical minerals for advancing technologies like electric vehicles. However, she urged that existing terrestrial mineral deposits should be further explored before venturing into deep sea mining.
“As we aspire to build a more sustainable future, it would be imprudent to achieve this at the cost of our environment,” she remarked.
U.S. Critical Minerals Shortage
Mark Selby, CEO of Canada Nickel, remarked that the new executive order highlights the pressing shortage of essential minerals within the United States, which are typically found in deep sea locations.
Selby indicated that Chinese companies currently dominate the global supply of nickel—largely sourced from Indonesian mines—along with cobalt and manganese, which are mined in various regions of Africa.
Following the executive order, the Chinese foreign ministry claimed that such actions could infringe international law, given that many deep sea mineral deposits are located in international waters.
Selby expressed little worry that deep sea mining would affect his operations, which include a nickel sulfide deposit located north of Timmins, Ontario, as the necessary technology remains largely untested on a commercial scale.
“While pilot-scale tests have been conducted, there has yet to be a commercial operation,” he stated.
He highlighted that the extraction of critical minerals from underwater nodules would likely be prohibitively expensive due to the requirement of developing new technology and their distance from processing facilities.
The nodules, which can be located at depths of up to 4,000 meters, pose additional challenges compared to the deepest nickel mines in Sudbury, which reach approximately 2,000 meters.
“We will need to assess what the actual costs of mining at such profound depths in open ocean conditions will turn out to be,” he concluded.
Source
www.cbc.ca