Mining the Deep Sea and Outer Space for Mineral Bonanza

LONDON â€" Whatever happened to manganese nodules

As newly announced plans to mine the mineral wealth of asteroids generate a mixture of excitement and skepticism, it is worth recalling the fate of an earlier craze to exploit a potential metals bonanza somewhat closer to home.

From the early 1970s, the prospect of hauling up a boundless harvest of metal rich nodules from the deepest ocean beds was touted as the answer to the world’s increasing hunger for diminishing resources.

The potato-size rocks that carpet the deep seabed â€" commonly known as manganese nodules â€" also contain a mix of other elements, including copper, cobalt and nickel.

Governments and private companies joined the treasure hunt as explorations were launched to determine whether projects to vacuum the nodules from miles below the ocean’s surface were commercially viable.

Lockheed Martin led a consortium of companies in an effort to develop a commercial mining operation, collecting thousands of nodules from an area of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico as part of an effort that would today cost more than $500 million.

Howard Hughes, the reclusive American tycoon, fueled the frenzy with the launch of the Glomar Explorer, a 618-foot ship he said was built to mine the manganese nodules. (It was, in fact, cover for a secret C.I.A. project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine.)

The potential “gold rush” was a factor that led to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that aimed to ensure that the seabed’s wealth outside territorial limits would be shared between developed and developing st! ates.

However, a collapse in the international nickel price between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s shattered the prospects of instant wealth from the billions of tons of ore that lay just beyond the limits of technology available at the time.

The lure of the manganese nodule faded from public consciousness. As an article on the University of Texas’s Science and the Sea website stated in 2009: “A fortune is sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans. And for the foreseeable future, at least, it’s likely to stay there.”

Interest has been revived, however, by the increasing demand for so-called rare earth metals that are used in many modern high-tech products such as fiber optics, memory chips and liquid-crystal screens.

Studies by Lockheed Martin and others have determined that seabed nodules could provide a alternative source of such metals in a market presently dominated by China.

A Chinese embargo on rare earth metal shipments in 2010 was described by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, as a “wake-up call” for the world to find new resources.

Interest in manganese nodule exploitation may have subsided since the 1970s but it never quite disappeared.

In the latest initiative this month, G-TEC Sea Mineral Resources, a private Belgium company signed a 15-year contract with the International Seabed Authority to prospect the central Pacific Ocean. The contract was backed by the Belgian government.

The Jamaica-based global body, which organizes and controls exploration of the seabed beyond national territorial limits, has granted a dozen such contracts since it established its Nodule Regulations in 2000.

Three months before, it signed a similar contract with Russ! ia for pr! ospecting and exploration in the Atlantic Ocean.

So, as nodule fever appears to be making a comeback, how about outer space

Deep Space Industries, a California-based company has just announced its plans to inspect small asteroids that pass by Earth as potential mining targets.

That followed the announcement of plans by another company, Planetary Resources, to send an unmanned robotic mining mission to the asteroid belt, as my colleague Kirk Johnson reported from Washington State last month.

The prospect of mining asteroids was a sci-fi dream of the 1970s, just around the time of the manganese nodule craze.

Its revival has excited space fns but others are skeptical about the projects.

In a down-to-earth column in The Economist entitled “Fool’s Platinum”, the business magazine suggested the economic case for asteroid mining was far from obvious.

“A doubling of supply from space might, for instance, exert such downward pressure on the price of platinum on Earth as to undermine the whole business case for the venture,” it wrote.