Canada’s DeepGreen Metals, a seafloor mining hopeful that recently announced plans to go public, is hitting back at companies including Google and BMI for committing to not buying minerals extracted from the seafloor until the environmental risks of the activity are “comprehensively understood.”
BMW, Volvo, Google and Korean battery maker Samsung SDI became on Wednesday the first global businesses to support a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) call for a moratorium on mining the seabed.
The signatories have also said they will not finance any deep sea mining companies.
“At DeepGreen, we agree that seafloor minerals development should be approached cautiously and with an exacting commitment to science-based impact analysis and environmental protection,” it said in an open letter to the four companies.
“A precautionary approach has informed our strategy from the outset, including our mission to provide battery metals sourced from deep-ocean nodules that generate zero solid waste, no toxic tailings, and a fraction of the carbon emissions compared to land-based sources,” DeepGreen noted.
Not attached to seafloor
The Vancouver-based company said such environmental benefits can be achieved only through collecting polymetallic nodules, 4,000 meters deep on the abyssal plain. At that depth, life is up to 1,500 times less abundant than in the vibrant ecosystems on land from where battery metals are currently sourced, DeepGreen said.
Nodules lie unattached on the seafloor and DeepGreen says its approach to collecting them differs from other extractive processes that could affect the integrity of the seafloor crust, as explained by the WWF.
Full lifecycle analyses, such as the one commissioned by the company, argue that nodules mining can reduce the ESG impacts of sourcing battery metals on land.
