Marine

Impossible Metals demonstrates its super-careful seabed mining robot

Impossible Metals demonstrates its super-careful seabed mining robot
Impossible Metals Eureka 1: a proof of concept prototype of a super-careful way of extracting vital metals from the ocean floor
Impossible Metals Eureka 1: a proof of concept prototype of a super-careful way of extracting vital metals from the ocean floor
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Impossible Metals Eureka 1: a proof of concept prototype of a super-careful way of extracting vital metals from the ocean floor
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Impossible Metals Eureka 1: a proof of concept prototype of a super-careful way of extracting vital metals from the ocean floor
The Impossible Metals team with its proof-of-concept Eureka prototype
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The Impossible Metals team with its proof-of-concept Eureka prototype
Polymetallic nodules, formed on the deep sea floor over millions of years, harbor billions of dollars' worth of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper
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Polymetallic nodules, formed on the deep sea floor over millions of years, harbor billions of dollars' worth of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper
Polymetallic nodules pepper the seabed in their trillions, but there's plenty of life down there, too
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Polymetallic nodules pepper the seabed in their trillions, but there's plenty of life down there, too
Impossible Metals is developing buoyant autonomous underwater robots that will selectively grab and remove polymetallic nodules with the minimum possible disturbance to the sea floor
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Impossible Metals is developing buoyant autonomous underwater robots that will selectively grab and remove polymetallic nodules with the minimum possible disturbance to the sea floor
Cameras and and AI systems attempt to identify nodules with visible life forms on them, so they can be left alone
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Cameras and and AI systems attempt to identify nodules with visible life forms on them, so they can be left alone
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The green economy desperately needs huge quantities of battery metals, and they're sitting right there on the deep ocean floor. Here's a device designed to harvest them with the minimum possible impact to one of the world's last untouched ecosystems.

We've known for decades that billions of dollars' worth of battery-relevant metals like copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel are literally sitting around on the seafloor out in the deep ocean, in giant fields of "polymetallic nodules" that look just like rocks, no bigger than potatoes. These nodules are believed to be formed by a number of the slowest geological processes known to science, including the precipitation of metals out of seawater in the presence of high oxygen levels. Researchers estimate it takes several million years for a nodule to grow by a single centimeter.

Humanity badly needs those metals as we try to steer the ocean liner of modern civilization away from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy that give us a better chance of long-term survival. Terrestrial resources are starting to look strained and problematic, and while it's possible to recycle metals in a closed-loop system, the green shift in the coming decades will demand mountains of new materials. There are many companies developing plans for seabed mining, arguing that picking up these rocks is a better way of feeding the decarbonization beast than scarring the surface any further.

But mining these deep-sea metallic spuds is not just technically difficult, it's extremely controversial. The sea floor is a gigantic biome, one of very few on the planet that remains largely untouched by humankind. Early proposals for seafloor mining tended to involve dredging or vacuuming the area, sucking up the rocks along with everything else into machines the size of combine harvesters, then spitting anything that wasn't metal out the back as a plume of sediment.

Polymetallic nodules, formed on the deep sea floor over millions of years, harbor billions of dollars' worth of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper
Polymetallic nodules, formed on the deep sea floor over millions of years, harbor billions of dollars' worth of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper

This kind of approach was tested in 1989 for its environmental impacts. The DISCOL experiment raked clear an 8-meter-wide (26.2-ft) channel in the middle of an 11-sq-km (4.2-sq-mi) patch of the Pacific ocean. Life in that piece of seabed has never recovered, and the test also revealed that the sediment kicked up by a dredge-like machine will settle back on the seafloor and smother marine life in a potentially enormous radius stretching thousands of miles around the mining zone.

So seabed mining, if done irresponsibly, is almost certain to be a mass extinction event for countless species as yet unknown to science. Even if it's done without dredging, it'll be fatal to species who make polymetallic nodules their homes.

To be fair, the nascent seabed mining industry has shown far more consideration of these environmental effects than any industry before it. Under the stewardship of the UN's International Seabed Authority (ISA), which is charged both with protecting and exploiting the seafloor, there have been a handful of exploration licenses granted, and no commercial mining permits as yet.

The Impossible Metals team with its proof-of-concept Eureka prototype
The Impossible Metals team with its proof-of-concept Eureka prototype

Impossible Metals is one company trying to find ways to harvest polymetallic sea spuds with the minimal possible impact on the surrounding biome. This North American company has developed a robotic picker-upperer that floats along near the sea bed without actually rolling on it, searching for the right kinds of nodules with camera vision, using AI to determine which ones have signs of visible life on board, leaving those alone and carefully yoinking the rest off the surface with little claw grabbers.

It's designed to operate at depths below 5 km (3.1 miles), deploying from a ship at the surface and sinking until it's right above the seabed. Once it's full of nodules, it'll use a custom-designed buoyancy engine to return to the surface and drop them off.

Unlike dredge-style operations that would strip-mine the seafloor, pumping product up to the surface, these robots would pop up and down visiting different spots each time. The process would be vastly slower but, on the other hand, Impossible can simply deploy more and more robots to increase yield.

Cameras and and AI systems attempt to identify nodules with visible life forms on them, so they can be left alone
Cameras and and AI systems attempt to identify nodules with visible life forms on them, so they can be left alone

The company has now demonstrated a proof of concept, by testing a fridge-sized Eureka 1 autonomous underwater vehicle prototype at a depth around 25 m (82 ft). It identified and grabbed relevant rocks, and brought them up to the surface.

Impossible Metals plans to have its robots developed and ready for large scale deployment by 2026, although any actual mining operation would presumably be contingent upon ISA approval. This kind of mining will unavoidably disturb the deep-sea ecosystem and kill some marine life, but it's hard to imagine how you could get these metals to the surface in a more careful and responsible way than this. And at the end of the day, humanity might have to accept some consequences on the seabed if it wants to keep the surface or the oceans habitable.

Check out the Eureka 1 prototype in action in the video below.

Successful Proof of Concept for Sustainable Seabed Mining of Critical Minerals with Eureka 1 AUV

Source: Impossible Metals

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5 comments
5 comments
Mivoyses
It occurs to me that as the article states, "we try to steer the ocean liner of modern civilization away from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy that give us a better chance of long-term survival", that electrical power generation and storage of that energy in the forms of battery's needs to be totally re-thought. Current methods of generating electricity haven't changed in centuries, still utilizing armatures and magnetic fields. Batteries also need to be completely re-thought as the materials needed, the processing of such, and the construction, design, eventual recycling of them bring their own issues that are just as bad, if not worse than, so called "fossil fuels. Totally new ideas and concepts should be explored because replacing one polluting system for another isn't really solving the problem, and is ultimately a waste of time and resources.
CHRSKO
We all need to accept that anything we do will have an impact. Eating our cake and having it too is just not possible. Doing it responsibly and with careful review makes sense. Saying you can only proceed with projects that have zero impact means nothing will ever happen and nothing changes.
Spud Murphy
Seems they are primarily targeting nickel and cobalt, stating that these metals are needed for battery storage, when that is in fact not the case. Yes, a lot of lithium batteries currently use NMC or similar chemistries, but the industry is moving away from these towards LFP due to lower cost, greater durability and the elimination of those two metals from the chemistry. Add in all the other options for large scale storage that already exist, such as pumped hydro, flow batteries, and chemistries now coming online like sodium ion, and the demand for nickel and cobalt should actually level off or start to fall in the next few years.

No sensible storage company should be looking at NMC and related chemistries for a long term future, they are the most expensive and least safe chemistries and will eventually become uncompetitive - indeed, they already are, which is why some of the biggest battery companies on the planet (CATL, BYD) are moving away from them and towards LFP and sodium ion.
IkaikaW
Ok. So we're going to carefully pick around the nodules currently hosting sea life. That's great. But where are their kids going to make homes when we've cleared out all the empty nodules that took millions upon millions of years to form? The seafloor is a massive underwater desert: if we take almost every cactus out of the desert, where are the animals going to live?

That factor definitely needs to be part of the equation. We could plant artificial nodules like we do artificial reefs, but much research would need to be done on whether the sealife down there would even take to artificial nodules as homes.
pbethel
Millions of years to grow to that size yet they remain on top of the sediment deposits.
By what mechanism is that possible?