Cobalt, copper, nickel, zinc. Precious materials necessary for an increasingly technology-driven world. Deep sea mining could be the key to keeping pace in the future of technology. The challenges, however, are many: an overwhelming darkness barely understood, which hosts deep-sea fish and ancient microbes. A world apart, more suited to autonomous underwater vehicles (real underwater mining robots) than human submarines.
These autonomous robots are already revolutionizingunderwater exploration and they could also be used for deep-sea mining.
Plant Energy Systems, based in Brooklyn, may have a robot potentially suited for the job. The company is working to turn its Velox robots (which resemble a headless Manta ray) with wavy, flexible fins that run down their sides into underwater mining robots, autonomous deep-sea mining machines.
C-Ray, the new generation
Pliant is collaborating with MIT to make a new generation version. The new underwater mining robots will be called C-Ray, will be larger than Velox, and will use metal detectors, camera suites and algorithms to navigate and explore.
The long-term vision for deep-sea mining and the future of technology is a swarm of C-Rays communicating through a “hive mind” run by artificial intelligence. They will scour the seabed looking for surface deposits of precious materials (called polymetallic nodules) and place them in special cages that will rise to the surface.
We need new laws
The institutional framework for deep-sea mining is already starting to come into focus. The International Seabed Authority consolidated its mining code last fall, the first step in commercial deep-sea mining. Thirty exploration permits have been issued, most for the type of polymetallic nodule skimming that C-Ray plans to do.
Deep sea mining as it will potentially (I hope) be less harmful to the environment than land surface removal (and less exploitable than, for example, Congolese cobalt mines)? Perhaps also because the deep seas provide unique environmental challenges. Or will we devour the planet like piranhas with "schools" of underwater mining robots?
Precious metals in the future of technology
“On the one hand, we need these metals to electrify and decarbonize,” he says Peter Philard, founder and CEO of Pliant Energy Systems. “On the other hand, people fear that we will destroy deep ocean ecosystems that we know very little about.”
