This oceanographer wants you to consider deep-sea mining

No, he’s not on the payroll of a mining firm

Earlier this month, oceanographer Seaver Wang kicked the hornet’s nest with an essay (and Twitter/X thread) calling for “open-mindedness toward seafloor mining.” The idea is anathema to hundreds of marine experts who oppose deep-sea mining (DSM), due to likely harmful impacts on marine biodiversity and ecosystems. Wang, who co-directs the Climate and Energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, argues that—yes—DSM could damage ocean life somewhat, but it could also obviate far worse ongoing damage from terrestrial mining. Especially if the world can figure out how to produce and enforce strict environmental regulations on DSM. (Jury’s still out on that.)

Wang’s arguments sometimes echo DSM industry talking points. And he leans heavily into techno-optimism. (Indeed, the Breakthrough Institute has been criticized for its embrace of technology as a cure-all for our environmental woes.) But the essay is a thoughtful sketch of how Wang, once an “avowed opponent” of DSM, changed his mind through a review of how the science doesn’t always align with popular perception.

Regardless of your views on DSM, Wang’s essay is provocative and worth a read. He spoke with the Spotlight about it. Our conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

And again, here’s Wang’s piece: Sparing the Land by Collecting Minerals at Sea.

Seabed Spotlight: Why did you write this essay?

Seaver Wang: It's been an interesting journey. I actually started out, like many oceanographers, as an avowed opponent of deep-sea mining. Over the last few years, I've learned more about both deep-sea and terrestrial mining. I came to realize that much of the public debate around deep-sea mining was unrooted from the scientific discussion in a way that made me increasingly uncomfortable.

That was one motivation for me writing this piece—to really communicate that, in many cases, polymetallic nodule collection is very different from what people would imagine upon reading an article in the media on deep-sea mining.

And at the same time, I learned a lot more about terrestrial mining and came to understand just how inevitable that trade-off is. Previously I'd been of the mind: Maybe we don't need these minerals. Maybe we can recycle our way out of it. But then, having published on energy transition mineral needs myself, I realized the math—the scale of the energy transition and the pace we need to go, the need for new minerals is unavoidable.

Seabed Spotlight: But why should we get new metals from the ocean? The title of your essay includes the phrase ‘sparing the land.’ Wouldn't deep-sea mining just open a new frontier in addition to what we're already doing to the land?

Seaver Wang: There are always cost curves for these commodities. If your demand [for minerals] is increasing, you have two scenarios: one in which you meet demand entirely through terrestrial mining, and another in which you meet demand through both deep-sea and terrestrial mining. In that second scenario, the economics of supply and demand mean some terrestrial mining would either not proceed or would cease operation, because they'd be left out on the high end of the cost curve. If deep-sea mining shows itself to be commercially viable at this early stage, it could really dissuade future operators from pursuing terrestrial projects, because why would they when there's a more economical option?

Seabed Spotlight: You said the public debate about deep-sea mining is “unrooted” from the science. What did you mean by that?

Seaver Wang: I heard a lot of claims from opponents [of deep-sea mining] about impacts like metals toxicity, impacts on pan-Pacific fisheries, that it would release large amounts of carbon from the seabed, or that it would send noise hundreds of kilometers across the ocean.

And then I started actually reading some of the underlying literature that Greenpeace advocates or the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition were promulgating on this. And I realized there was a discrepancy between the results in the published studies and what was being told in interviews to journalists or advertised on advocacy sites.

For example, on the distance that the noise is traveling. The value in that paper was actually the distance at which noise would be above ambient, naturally occurring background noise—not the harmful threshold for noise. But that distinction was missing in the opponents’ leveraging of that paper.

There was another paper on the potential impacts of deep-sea mining on tuna fisheries. It looked at habitat overlap [between proposed mining areas and projected tuna distribution under a climate change scenario], but it didn’t directly study the interaction between deep-sea mining and tuna. But the paper was being used in this other way. A lot of the rhetoric around the risk of biodiversity loss and cascading ecological impacts in the ocean wasn’t matching up with the scientific discussion.

Seabed Spotlight: Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, endorsed your essay in a tweet. What was your reaction to seeing that?

Seaver Wang: It doesn't surprise me. My goal with this essay is to shift the conversation past the first-order. It's just been going in circles around what people imagine and speculate about deep-sea mining. I'm trying to shift the conversation towards the next level—about how we're actually doing this. What standards are we going to set? What will the regulatory framework look like?

It doesn't surprise me that aspiring seafloor nodule operators approve of that switch, because they think if the conversation shifts in that direction, it will only favor them. And I'm glad see it, because the conversation becomes a lot more substantive. That may actually involve holding industry more accountable, in addition to holding opponents [of deep-sea mining] more accountable rhetorically.

Seabed Spotlight: The International Seabed Authority (ISA) has a series of meetings this year to continue drafting regulations for commercial-scale mining operations on the High Seas. What are you watching for at those meetings?

Seaver Wang: The [environmental] impacts I'm most concerned about are the direct seafloor impacts of the collector vehicles and the sediment plume. I'm curious to see the direction of discussion specifically on those two impacts.

I'm also interested in the ISA’s progress on its benefits sharing framework. That's an innovative, one-of-a-kind mechanism in international governance. We're administering resource extraction in a dramatically different way—collecting fees from seafloor economic activities, then redistributing them to countries and peoples around the world. That’s one of the interesting promises of deep-sea metals. There's this fundamental mechanism that could result in a much more equitable sharing of the benefits from these activities than is typically the case for private mining operations on terrestrial soil.