Lee Heidhues 6.27.2023
Another incipient environmental disaster in the making is barely causing a ripple in the mainstream media.
Who would have thought that Norway, ancestral home of composer Edvard Grieg and locale of the classic Beatles song “Norwegian Wood,” would be conducting deep sea mining. And, for what?
Dig up the components for electric car batteries among other environmentally destructive uses.
Excerpted from The Financial Times 6.8.2023
“If someone gets there first it should be us,” said Walter Sognnes, chief executive of Loke Marine Minerals, which plans to mine Norway’s metallic crusts and recently took on two UK-sponsored exploration contracts in the Pacific. “We are a big fishery nation, we live by the sea, the ocean is our biggest resource . . . We would not be reinventing the wheel.”
Norway’s government is readying plans to open an area of ocean nearly the size of Germany to deep-sea mining as it seeks to become the first country to extract battery metals from its sea floor. The country’s energy ministry is racing to submit to parliament in the next two weeks a proposal to open the vast area to applications for exploration and extraction. The plan would then face a parliamentary vote in autumn.
But Oslo faces a battle with fishing businesses and environmentalists over the proposals, and risks opening a dispute with other nations as it pushes to enable mining close to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic.
Norway argues it commands exclusive mining rights over a larger area of water there than Russia, the UK and the EU contend it does. Volcanic springs up to 4,000m deep that surge from the Earth’s crust on fault lines between tectonic plates in the proposed area contain an estimated 38mn tons of copper, more than is mined around the world each year.
Of the region earmarked for potential mining, the most contentious part would be the area close to Svalbard. The Svalbard Treaty, which gives Norway sovereignty over the islands, also gives other countries the right to mine on land and in the territorial waters around the archipelago. Russia, the EU and the UK are at odds with Norway over how large an area of water this treaty covers.
Amund Vik, state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, told the Financial Times that deep-sea mining would help Europe meet the “desperate need for more minerals, rare earth materials to make the transition happen”.
The government would take a “precautionary approach” on environmental issues, he added.
The fluid that emerges from hydrothermal vents such as those in Norway’s waters also contains other metals used in electric car batteries, including cobalt.
https://www.ft.com/content/44855d32-82c2-4f4c-b77c-1c21d3c1279f
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