Inside Germany’s Bold Plan to Tap Deep-Sea Resources
Thirty-five hundred meters beneath the surface of the ocean, hydrothermal vents are spewing minerals from mid-ocean ridges, creating billowing plumes of photogenic “black smoke” and providing chemical energy for one of the most unique and unexpected ecosystems on the planet. This flocculent flow ultimately settles on the seafloor, producing metal-rich sulfide rock deposits that have begun to attract attention from mineral-mining companies.
Peter Herzig is the Executive Director of Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel (GEOMAR), one of the world’s premier institutions of oceanographic research. He is firmly behind the mining of deep-sea sulfides, which could provide economically viable quantities of copper, zinc, gold, silver, indium, germanium, and gallium. A rock deposit equivalent to the volume of the Houston Astrodome could have a current market value of $5 billion, according to Herzig. The highly concentrated nature of the resource makes it a much more attractive target than the harvesting of manganese-rich nodules, whose sparse distribution would necessitate the oceanic equivalent of strip mining. “I personally cannot see manganese mining happening without very innovative new technologies,” he cautions.
Hydrothermally deposited sulfides are a different story, but Herzig is quick to acknowledge that mining must be done in an environmentally sensitive way. Only inactive sulfide systems – whose hydrothermal plumbing has turned off – should be on the table. “It would be a major mistake to go into those active systems,” he says, “and that would not be tolerated.”
Resource Exploitation is just one of four ways that Herzig has focused GEOMAR’s resources on the potential monetization of the ocean, a platform he highlighted during an address at the Falling Walls Conference, a scientific jamboree held each Nov. 9 in Berlin.
Herzig is also looking to tap into gas hydrates – vast sub-seafloor deposits of difficult-to-access natural gas. Within a narrow envelope of particular pressure and temperature conditions, molecular-scale cages of water ice enclose methane, leading to the disconcerting curiosity of flammable ice. Methane hydrates are extensive in the deep sea, but their structural instability makes them a potentially volatile resource; widespread destabilization could spew vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, enhancing the greenhouse effect.
But Herzig and his GEOMAR scientists have a plan. They propose an exercise in molecular sleight of hand, extracting methane molecules and replacing them with carbon dioxide before the structure becomes unstable. “The trick is that the carbon dioxide is not deposited as a gas,” he points out, “but in solid phase. This way, for each methane that comes out, three carbon dioxide molecules go in,” producing a mining operation that is, on balance, carbon-negative. He’s already seen immense interest in Asia around methane hydrates, and Herzig is trying to position German industry to get in on the ground floor of what he believes is a coming boom.
GEOMAR is also looking to capitalize on natural substances – such as antibiotics or therapeutic enzymes – and lake-based aquaculture. “We need to get farmed fish off of fish-based diets,” Herzig explains; “otherwise you’re not producing a net increase in human-consumable food.” The plan is to do so with a “closed-system approach,” in which various trophic levels are cultivated and fish are fed algae or nematode worms.
Herzig’s stridently pro-business steering of GEOMAR is a distinctive approach to deep-sea research, but he views his job with a heavy dose of realism. “As a society, we need to transfer basic knowledge into applications in some areas,” he maintains. “In a future where we have 9 billion people on the planet, the land area won’t grow, so we will be putting major pressure on the ocean for energy, food, and raw materials.”
“It’s just a matter of doing the resource math.”