Do we need deep sea mining? With Seas At Risk

Welcome to the second instalment of our mining arc. After covering the geopolitics of critical minerals (check out the episode here), this week we ask a harder question: is deep sea mining a necessary innovation, or a risk we don’t yet understand well enough to take?

Deep sea mining means extracting minerals from the bottom of the ocean, at depths of 200 metres and beyond, no easy feat. It’s often framed as the next frontier for securing the metals needed for the energy transition – batteries, renewables, electrification. But that framing sits alongside a more uncomfortable reality: these ecosystems are among the least understood on Earth, and the consequences of disturbing them may be irreversible.

This is a question of baseline knowledge: whether we even understand what normal looks like at those depths, and therefore whether impact can be meaningfully assessed at all.

Governance remains contested. Negotiations at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – the body regulating the mineral resources of the seabed beyond national jurisdiction – have been slow and fraught, reflecting deep disagreement over whether the industry should proceed at all, or under what conditions.

In this episode, Giulia speaks with Simon Holmström, senior deep sea mining policy officer at Seas At Risk, an association of over 30 environmental NGOs from across Europe. Together, they unpack the environmental risks, the limits of current knowledge,and the evolving policy landscape. 

Simon highlights the economic viability of deep sea mining, the need for precautionary measures, and the importance of sustainable practices in the face of growing demand for critical minerals.

Their main takeaways are:

• The deep ocean is one of the least understood ecosystems 
• The economic viability of deep sea mining remains highly speculative 
• Opposition to deep sea mining is growing across civil society and parts of industry 
• The regulatory pathway, and therefore the industry’s future,  is still unresolved

What emerges is not a simple case for or against, but a more fundamental question: how should we make decisions about technologies where the downside risks are uncertain, potentially systemic and not easily reversible – especially when they are being justified in the name of solving a different global problem? 

In trying to address climate change, if we introduce new environmental risks we don't yet fully understand, how should those trade-offs be evaluated? Who gets to decide what level of risk is acceptable, and for whom?

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram – and why not spread the word with your friends and colleagues?

Transcript

Giulia Bottaro (00:35)
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Shaken Not Burned. I'm your host, Giulia Bottaro. The mining industry is increasingly becoming front and center of geopolitics. Governments are racing to secure supplies of the so-called critical minerals, those minerals essential for the energy transition and, more prominently, defense. In the name of national security, Western countries are taking major strides.

to boost domestic production and clinch deals with allied nations, as they try to decouple from China's dominance on the global supply chain, which can be above 90 % for the processing of minerals such as river earths. This is pushing some companies to look at far-flung locations, namely the floor of the ocean. Deep sea mining is regarded by many as the new frontier of plentiful riches.

But is it as promising as it sounds? And what are the implications for the environment and the industry? We explore this topic with Simon Holmstrom, Senior Deep Sea Mining Policy Officer at SEAS At Risk. Hello, Simon. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Simon Holmström (01:53)
Hello there Julia, happy to speak with you on this very exciting topic.

Giulia Bottaro (01:57)
Indeed.

So why don't you tell me a little bit about your experience and your organization before we delve into the topic of deep sea mining.

Simon Holmström (02:06)
Sure.

So as you say, I work as a senior policy officer at Seas at Risk. We're a network of 38 European environmental organizations working to protect the ocean. We're based here in Brussels. And we are working indeed on a range of issues. I'm the expert on deep sea mining and we engage with EU institutions, governments and others to ensure that the green transition is built on solutions that actually reduce environmental harm rather than just shifting it somewhere we can't see.

too long. The ocean has been seen as a place we can dump our problems in and I come myself from an island where I've experienced that in the middle of the Baltic Sea called Åland, it's part of Finland. And a few years ago then I moved here to Brussels to work more on a European scale of these issues. So basically my work focuses on making sure European policymakers both here in Brussels but also in European capitals understand that the decisions taken today about the deep ocean will

affect ecosystems for centuries and future generations.

Giulia Bottaro (03:06)
Not an easy job I suppose! So why don't we start with the very basics and please tell us what is deep sea mining?

Simon Holmström (03:13)
deep sea mining is the industrial extraction of minerals from the ocean floor, typically at depths of three to six kilometers. Anything deeper than 200 meters is though...

considered deep sea, but most interest is within this kind of range of depth. As there are different types of mineral occurrences on the deep sea floor, the extraction techniques vary. There are mainly three types of occurrences. We have the sea mounds, which contain crusts. We have hydrothermal vents, these kind of undersea smokers, which have sulfites.

And then we have these kind of large abyssal planes, which is very much talked about at the moment, which contain nodules, these potato-shaped nodules. There are a few others as well being explored, but these are the three main ones. And companies are mainly targeting these potato-sized rocks, just...

because they are quite easy to, according to them, to kind of suck up with the vacuum techniques or picking techniques. And these contain nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and these are the four critical raw materials that are usually sought for in the deep sea.

Giulia Bottaro (04:16)
Okay.

So these nodules The grade is quite high, right? And that is important for the mining industry because if you have a rock with low grade of the mineral you're looking for, then it requires a lot of processing to actually find that mineral that you're looking for.

Simon Holmström (04:40)
Yes, exactly. These minerals in the deep sea, are polymetallic. They have different types of minerals in it. So you might hear in the media that there is a huge push for rare earths, for instance. Yes, of course, they also some places, they contain a lot of rare earths. But the concentrations of these are very, very small. And even the companies are saying that they would be able to extract these and make end use products

Giulia Bottaro (04:53)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Simon Holmström (05:07)
of these rare earths. So it's very important that we focus on the four ones that the industry has said that there might be some economic or is an economic viability to extract and those are nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese.

Giulia Bottaro (05:23)
Okay,

understood. So just to clarify, how would that work in practice? Would there be a boat and you said they would suck the nodules out of the floor? So would there be some long tubes? Can you describe a little bit visually?

Simon Holmström (05:36)
them. ⁓

the main concept involves large robotic collectors crawling across the seabed, vacuum up these nodules and pumping them through several kilometers of a pipe up to a ship at the surface. ⁓ And with this comes a lot of sediment, of course, and wastewater, and this can't be handled. There needs to be a lot of ships for that. So the technology, as it's described now,

Giulia Bottaro (05:53)
Okay.

Simon Holmström (06:06)
involves shipping that down through another pipe. So the wastewater and crushed sediment are then discharged back into the ocean, creating large sediment plumes. And there's a huge debate on the environmental impacts of this, and we can talk about that later. But then there's also this other method that tries to use AI to selectively pick nodules and have many different machines to hover around. ⁓

Giulia Bottaro (06:20)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Simon Holmström (06:30)
not

using this kind of dredging technology and as being promoted quite heavily as well. It's not as developed as the other. And to be fair, neither of them have really been tested at the commercial scale. So tests that have been done have demonstrated several failures. And of course, the industry is not saying that these are failures, but that they learned a lot and they have developed new

mitigating techniques and so on, it's still not in the scale. It's still far away. The industry has said that they've been ready for a few years now and it hasn't really born in.

Giulia Bottaro (07:04)
Yeah.

Yeah. maybe it sounds a bit simple. I just go to the bottom of the ocean and pick some rocks, but the ocean is huge. Maybe we can't comprehend as an individual person how big the ocean is and also how underexplored it is, right?

Simon Holmström (07:23)
the deep ocean covers two-thirds of the planet's surface and yet it remains one of the least understood ecosystems on Earth. That's the reality. what we know, however, is that the deep sea is not a barren desert. if you read books from many decades ago, you know there's these sci-fi books about what's down there and many have their different views about what was there but science

didn't have a clue really which species and habitats were down. But now we know it's a highly specialized ecosystem where many species exist just there and nowhere else on earth. And this is because they have learned to live in a very extreme condition like high pressure, corrosive seawater, low temperatures, pitch dark, no light. And even coming with small things there, small disturbance as we might think,

Giulia Bottaro (07:51)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Simon Holmström (08:15)
can alter the very fragile deep sea habitats such, know, just a little bit of noise and light pollution can create disturbances in the mating and the dispersal and the connectivity of different species. So that's something that has been quite understudied, those small disturbances. What has been more studied is how mining, what happens when the removal of nodules

Giulia Bottaro (08:40)
Yeah.

Simon Holmström (08:41)
taking

place. Animals depend on those substrates, those habitats with the metals and some researchers say that there might be even species there on the nodules which don't exist anywhere else, so-called endemic species. Then we also have the sediment plumes of course. I talked about the mid-water sediment plume where particles might be thought of as food and impact

Giulia Bottaro (08:57)
Okay. Right.

Simon Holmström (09:09)
fisheries because of that.

There's also this sediment plume on the bottom of the seabed when the extraction is taking place. This can smother organisms, disrupt the feeding. There's been some studies on this, whether recovery occurs or not. This is one of the things that industry says, life will come back.

Giulia Bottaro (09:29)
Yeah, but when?

Simon Holmström (09:31)
Yeah, that's the question, right? So a study examining a test done in 1979 found that the deep seabed did not entirely recover after 44 years. Some things did, others not. And then tests with modern nodule collection equipment.

Giulia Bottaro (09:48)
So sorry, just

to interrupt a second, in the 70s the work that was being done was not collecting modules. What type of technique was being used?

Simon Holmström (09:57)
It was entirely other technique. It was a dredging technique, of course, but it was a huge machine that dragged a huge track in the Pacific Ocean. It was just a test. It was huge. You can't really compare it. And that's fair to say. these disturbances still have...

Giulia Bottaro (10:01)
Okay.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Simon Holmström (10:14)
an impact today. what is important though is that the modern technique when impact studies have been made of recovery

It shows that up to a third of life in the mining tracks disappeared. And this is not insignificant, right? And this was just only a test, right? So impacts are expected to be far greater at the commercial scale, if that would be allowed. So it's safe to assume that recovery could take centuries or longer.

Giulia Bottaro (10:27)
Okay.

Yeah, and as you said, we don't know enough about the ocean to be able to predict at this stage what the consequences are. Is there any other impact on the ecosystem that we haven't talked about?

Simon Holmström (10:52)
There's a lot of different impacts and to be honest, these are talked about in different international fora and a lot of scientists are looking into these. I just talked about a few, light and noise pollution. We have the sediments, both of the toxic elements that might be in the sediments and how toxic elements are then transported into the chain of the ecosystem basically. ⁓

Giulia Bottaro (10:54)
Mm-hmm.

right.

Simon Holmström (11:20)
because these ecosystems are so poorly understood, we risk causing irreversible damage before we even know what we're doing, basically. And that's really the critical element here, that we need to be precautionary.

Giulia Bottaro (11:33)
And also just because these ecosystems are at the bottom of the ocean, it doesn't mean they aren't connected to other parts of the oceans. Everything is interconnected. ultimately, if we want to make the selfish statement, it comes back to us as well. We may impact the bottom of the ocean, but then people will be impacted, coastal communities may be impacted and so on.

You said if it's allowed to do deep sea mining. So can we talk a bit about where we are with policy globally, what our company is doing?

Simon Holmström (12:08)
Yes, I told you that the industry is still pre-commercial. No deep sea mine operates anywhere in the world today. There are at the moment, however, 30 active exploration contracts with an international body called the International Seabed Authority. That is the UN affiliated body that is tasked with regulating the seabed in the water beyond national jurisdiction. So it's the area where

Giulia Bottaro (12:32)
Mm-hmm.

Simon Holmström (12:34)
No country can decide what to do, but it belongs to everybody basically and that's why the ISA was set up. Those kind of exploration contracts are basically looking what's down there and in some cases also applying some technology for different types of studies. There are also a few countries doing exploration within their own national jurisdiction for the same reasons and companies have then through

both international and national exploration activities conducted tests, developed key technologies, looked into environmental safeguards monitoring and also looking of course into the economic viability to extract these minerals and then the entire value chain after that. But I would still say that this is a very high-risk experimental industry and as we have so little data and knowledge about it

It's very hard to regulate, right? So how do you know the safe limits? How do you know whether harm has been done if you don't know the baseline, how it was before? And this is just one part of the complexity. Then there's also other parts. For instance, how do you make sure that this comes...

Giulia Bottaro (13:33)
True.

Simon Holmström (13:49)
as the international ocean is the common heritage of humankind that is enshrined in international law, the UN law of the sea, how do you make sure then if somebody would start that the benefits would also come to the...

to all human beings now and in the future. So there is this benefit sharing mechanism that hasn't been resolved either. These are just a few of the things that are being discussed at the moment in the International Seabed Authority, which is negotiating on rules for exploitation, the so-called mining code, which would allow commercial mining to begin. But negotiations are ongoing, of course, but nowhere ready. That's the status.

Giulia Bottaro (14:29)
Okay.

And yeah, they've been going on for a long time, these negotiations, right? And which countries are in favor and which countries are against?

Simon Holmström (14:40)
small number of companies, prominently The Metals Company, Canadian based company, are pushing strongly for commercial mining. But in international waters, the rules are that the country must formally sponsor and take responsibility for a company's activities. So it's not the companies that would have a license through the ISA. A few island states have sponsored exploration contracts with TMC.

But really the bigger picture I think is China.

through state-owned enterprises, research institutes, China controls multiple exploration contracts more than any other country at the moment and China also dominates, as you know, large parts of the existing mineral supply chain. if deep sea mining were to become commercial, China would likely benefit not just from extraction but also from downstream processing and manufacturing. So this creates an interesting paradox.

deep sea mining promoters in the West, like The Metals Company, about deep sea mining as a way to reduce dependence from China for critical minerals. But in reality, China is currently best positioned to gain from the industry, if it would start. So for me, these kind of arguments is just new way for the industry to fool governments and even presidents like the US, who have not done their due diligence.

Giulia Bottaro (15:49)
Okay.

Okay, this is really interesting and I have to say it's something I didn't know about how advanced was China. And yeah, so basically the entire argument of we must mine the ocean floor for the West completely falls apart. is there another other argument that works in favor? Is this literally like the main point for the Western companies?

Simon Holmström (16:13)
quite...

At the moment,

in the US, that is the main point, right? Everything that can counteract China, Trump likes. And that trumps everything else, right? The reality though is that mineral activities in international waters are regulated by the ISA. That is the body. Right now, there's no set of rules and right now the US...

Giulia Bottaro (16:27)
Yeah.

Simon Holmström (16:41)
who's never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which means that they're not part of the ISA, cannot...

act as a sponsoring state for deep sea mining. following this, there's been applications for exploration and even exploitation licenses in parts of the Pacific Ocean that overlaps with the ISA, some ISA contracts that lie beyond US jurisdiction. And The Metals Company has already submitted applications to the US. This is because Donald Trump signed an executive order last year saying that US authorities need to fast track these kinds

Giulia Bottaro (16:48)
right.

Simon Holmström (17:14)
of procedures. So I mean we have yet a problem here. This creates a major kind of political and also legal challenge because it risks undermining the multilateral system designed to manage the seabed as the common heritage of humankind. And this was why the ISA was set up because the international seabed does not belong to any single country and even the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has gone out and warned that

the deep sea should not be the new wild west. And as the world is drifting towards a race to mine the deep sea, or a race to the bottom as I usually say, before adequate safeguards are in place, this is why we need countries to support a moratorium on deep sea mining.

Giulia Bottaro (17:50)
Ha ha ha.

just to clarify, the US has allowed some exploration in its domestic waters, but some of these overlap with waters that would be under the jurisdiction of the ISA.

Simon Holmström (18:12)
the executive order that was signed by Donald Trump basically asked the US authorities to speed up different processes so that companies could apply both within national jurisdiction and within international jurisdiction or international waters. And previously,

Giulia Bottaro (18:20)
Mm-hmm.

Simon Holmström (18:30)
The US indeed had legislation and still has a very ancient legislation before the ISA came into force that would allow companies to actually get a license in the international seabed. Now with the ISA and the Common Heritage of Humankind principle now having the status of international customary law

There's been a lot of criticism, of course, from legal scholars, but also from countries and from the ISA itself, that we have entire other situation now. You can't use your own ancient legislation as a basis for giving licenses in the Pacific, which is what the companies are eyeing. And you can't just pick and choose from international, the international order what suits you.

This has become a very intense debate and also taking up at the international civil authorities meetings. There is a lot of discussions as well within the ISA, should we do if a license is being granted in areas where we have the jurisdiction. So this is said to be a geopolitical debate for some time.

Giulia Bottaro (19:46)
very much. is there a timeline at all of when the ISA might release a decision?

Simon Holmström (19:52)
No, not a formal timeline being developed and decided upon. The council of the ISA is the body that is negotiating the mining code and that mining

has a lot of outstanding issues. There's been a lot of reports about how many outstanding issues there are. Now, in face of the US situation, there are some countries that say that the ISA should provisionally have a mining code adopted so that would counteract any unilateral efforts that companies would come to the ISA rather than to countries like the US.

and that it would be better to do so and then revise standards and guidelines and all those technical details at a later point.

The problem with this approach though is that the ISA allows themselves to get bullied and be bullied by Trump, which is shaking up things. I think the risk is really that if a mining code hastily adopted, flawed, not providing safeguards for the environment, if that would be adopted, that really sets off the global race to the bottom.

And once licenses are given and if irreversible damage has happened, there is no way to reverse that and then deep sea mining as an industry has

I think that's really where we are at the moment There are these forces saying that we should also apply precaution. We should also take the time for science to do its thing, to have a breathing space before we actually start a new industrial activity. And there is where the concept of a more

or a precautionary pause comes into play because that says, and there's at the moment 40 countries supporting it, that we should have this breathing space, we should not stress this. Of course we can negotiate the mining code to do more science, but we really need to have this precautionary pause enshrined in the ISA because otherwise we are allowing ourselves

to be influenced by forces that don't back the same principles that the ISA as an institution relies on, which are the principles that are enshrined in the UN law of the sea.

Giulia Bottaro (22:12)
do you think there is any chance to do deep sea mining that is safe?

Simon Holmström (22:18)
I don't think so personally, with the information available at the moment, there's more science talking about the risks of deep sea mining.

rather than the opportunities. And we also have to think about whether deep sea mining is needed as an activity. If we think it's super needed, then there might be a political opportunity to say, okay, let's override environmental, social and other aspects because this is very much needed. I do think that we have to have that discussion as well, whether these critical raw materials are needed for the green transition or not at all.

The claim about the green transition has been debunked many times now, I would say. Rapid innovation in battery technologies, changing metal markets, expanding recycling, reprocessing of metals from old mining sites. These are already reducing the need for these critical raw materials sought for in the deep sea. So to me, it's hard to understand why we keep piling up more waste rich in critical raw materials.

for instance only a quarter of e-waste is recycled whereas the potential is much higher. So for me it would be much smarter for governments and for businesses to actually invest in the solutions that we know can scale to minimize the need for critical raw materials rather than opening a new frontier which is risky and which we don't know so much about in terms of

the consequences. then you wonder, of course, why is there still an interest in this? And even though some deep sea mining companies have already gone bankrupt,

get this question a lot actually, I'd say much of this appetite is driven by speculation and the first mover advantage, right? Companies want to secure access to resources before regulation tighten and history has many examples of the consequences of this and history has also taught us that the environment is usually the loser in that game.

Giulia Bottaro (24:22)
Yeah. Yeah. And also mining is a very risky activity in general. So I suppose maybe the industry or investors are somewhat less risk averse than other sectors. And it's interesting that you talk about, do we even need deep sea mining? And actually, are there any estimates of the volumes of minerals that could come out of it from maybe from the TMC?

Have they said, we can produce X amount of tons per year.

Simon Holmström (24:51)
There are estimates. There are also estimates on how much money that would translate into looking into the different commodity markets. We also know that these estimates are very speculative. Commodity markets are changing and changing for different reasons.

For instance, if we have other battery chemistries tomorrow than during the time when these estimates were done, chemistries that perhaps don't use nickel or not use manganese or cobalt, why would there then be a need for this extraction?

and what would the prices be in the future then? There's been some sensitivity analyses done on what happens if there's just a slight decrease in prices for cobalt, manganese, nickel and copper and how would that affect the deep sea mining industry and these show that the industry would be super sensitive to these small changes and super sensitive to small cost overruns because we also have to

talk

about the cost of extracting it. mean, there might be a lot of trillions down there, right? But if the costs are higher than the potential profits of selling end-use products, what's the reason of going down there in the first place? And you know, this is not an entirely new field. There's been a lot of studies and reports from economists, very renowned economists that have

debunked all the myths that come from the industry about the availability, about the profitability and also about the costs. These show that costs are usually under reported and the potential value of the reserves are overestimated. And then add

What happens if there's a regulation saying that the companies should also restore damaged environments in the deep sea? Well, today we don't have any restoration techniques to speed up the recovery of the habitats. And if we would have, they would be super expensive.

So who would be liable for that? Would that be taxpayers? Would that be the companies? There's so many questions there that the ISA is still discussing and nowhere ready to respond to, which just makes the case that this is an industry that we should not greenlight at this time.

Giulia Bottaro (27:17)
Yeah, I think that the point of the cost is very important because the prices of minerals are extremely volatile for many, many reasons. And so when you have such a high cost industry that then depends on the fluctuations of price of the mineral, it just sounds like, extremely risky and...

I mean they're putting like kilometer long tubes in the sea, it's crazy. Like just the sheer scale of it is mad. Anyway.

Simon Holmström (27:47)
Yeah, I think this has

dawned on many people. I mean, it's not just lay people that are looking into the news reporting and thinking, what the heck are people doing? You it's also financial actors, it's also companies like car manufacturers. It's not only 40 countries that support a moratorium precautionary pause. So this has really become a huge movement and the momentum is really growing, I would say. We have...

80 financial institutions, according to a report that are against deep sea mining in some way or another, that they would be very cautious in investing in different companies that would like to start deep sea mining.

in the financial sector, what I'm seeing is that deep sea mining is more and more considered as one of these exclusions, like oil and gas, like tobacco, like weapons. And I do think that these kind of myths that the mining industry is coming out with...

are really scrutinized by the financial industry. what they have found, and increasingly so, is that the maths don't add up and they wouldn't like to ensure it, they wouldn't like to invest in it, they wouldn't like to be part of it. And that's why deep sea mining is not just an environmental topic, it's also an economic and scientific, right? Because...

Many stakeholders recognize that the risks outweigh the benefits. And I think that is also as much an important thing. It's not an environmental campaign. I represent an environmental NGO. But to be honest what I talk about mostly is economics and what the green transition is really about.

Giulia Bottaro (29:23)
Yeah.

Simon Holmström (29:26)
that's also what makes my work very interesting. There's so many angles in this debate, geopolitics, environment, economics, science, and there's so many different aspects and so many arguments against it. So I still wonder why are there so many people that still think this is a viable option.

Giulia Bottaro (29:47)
say in the scenario where the ISA does, give in to the supporters of deep sea mining and the mining code is released and everybody can go and mine the seafloor. So there could still be lots of financial actors that then decide not to invest in it. And I suppose that offers a little bit of hope.

Simon Holmström (30:06)
Yeah, in that very hypothetical scenario, which we of course need to also prepare for, it is very true that the financial sector is a huge actor, a facilitating actor.

or an actor that could also stop this. So we have the end-use consumers, we have the car manufacturers, we have the different metal purchasers and so on. Will they actually buy this? And especially will they buy it if it comes from The Metals Company under a US license, bypassing the ISA? That would make it very hard for them to sell it in markets

Giulia Bottaro (30:40)
Mm.

Simon Holmström (30:45)
where the countries are part of the ISA as members, because there's also international obligations that these countries should not, shall not help bypassing the ISA. And I would say helping that is to allow these minerals to enter the markets of these countries. So there are regulation risk for financial actors to support the industry.

And I think this is probably one of the strongest arguments for financial actors to actually not involve themselves because they might open themselves up for litigation and for legal action in some way or another.

Giulia Bottaro (31:26)
So the risk is that you have produced a very expensive product, but then you're automatically shut out of many, many markets because of regulation. Okay. Again, doesn't sound that attractive.

Simon Holmström (31:35)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not very attractive, right? And

then we have the US and Trump pushing for it and The Metals Company saying that we need to have these processing facilities, these smelters, these kind of industrial value chain in the US. But to be honest, there's no such...

Giulia Bottaro (31:50)
yeah, of course.

Simon Holmström (31:56)
⁓ value chain in the US for these deep sea minerals. They can't use the same smelters,

refining facilities and if they would get a lot of money to do so this is not something that you can just do now. It takes many years and then think about all the investors you have to find for the other aspects and other levels in this value chain and think about how many years it takes for just a permit to build something that huge to be able to actually

process all these seabed mineral resources from something that hasn't been done before. So it's not a quick fix to any problem whatsoever. It doesn't come at the time when we would need that strategic autonomy. It doesn't come at the time when we would need the green transition. And it might be the case that if this would come about and if all these steps in the value chain would

in some way or another appear that the battery chemistries have changed so much so that we don't need these products. So there's so many question marks in this equation that just don't add up. So that's why I'm saying we are nowhere ready to solve any problem with Deep Sea mining. I'm not sure we're gonna solve any in the future either.

Giulia Bottaro (33:11)
That's really interesting that you mentioned the processing aspect because I didn't realize that you would need a separate refining process, but it obviously makes sense because the nodule from the seafloor is not the same as ore from an underground mine. And actually it takes a long time to come out with a refining process that is economical, that doesn't waste

too much material. So yeah, as you said, we're talking about years and years of work and experiments, which, from an economic perspective are risky because if they don't work, then you've lost the money.

so what are the reactions to your campaign?

Simon Holmström (33:52)
So as I said, I think we have a momentum in the moratorium campaign at the moment. told you 40 countries now support a moratorium or a precautionary pause. We have major businesses, international businesses and technology companies committed not to use deep sea minerals. We have these financial institutions that are increasingly cautious.

it's just inevitable that even though there's some noise, some geopolitical noise today, this strong force has been mounting now for many years, will in some way or another prevail. It's just that we need to gather more momentum.

And we need to stay informed. The deep sea feels distant, but decisions are being made right now. And we have to mount pressure now when these decisions are being made. And second, think also a democratic issue, right?

We should mobilize representatives, governments, support organizations working on ocean protection, push for a green transition that truly reduces harm rather than exporting it to the last untouched ecosystem on earth. And also in our own lives, I'm thinking about myself. Can I use products with less materials? Can I buy fewer mobile phones? Can I use

shared mobility more than public and private costs and could I support policies focusing on recycling and vote for parties who would like to do more circular economy and to reduce demand. So there's many things that we can still do and this will be still important even though deep sea mining

Giulia Bottaro (35:29)
Mm-hmm.

Simon Holmström (35:33)
would not be a solution that the world enters into. We need circular economy. We need to build jobs, create value chains that are resilient in Europe, but also elsewhere. We need to recycle more. We need to lessen the stress on the planet. And I think this is the alternative that we come with. We just don't say stop to deep sea mining and no to deep sea mining, nothing else. We need to have other solutions in place.

to lessen the press and the stress on natural resources, but also local communities, indigenous communities that are affected also on land. this is a common campaign, it's a campaign together with other organisations so that we don't create other problems on the other end when we stop something. And that is why I see such risk, I'm very happy that we as an organisation are part of also those networks.

networks and having solidarity with the fights that happen in other parts of the world. So the fight is very much common.

Giulia Bottaro (36:36)
Absolutely. think mining feels distant from most people, so many objects we use every day contain minerals. You mentioned the batteries and how many objects we use with batteries every day. So absolutely, This is a fight on many fronts. Thank you so much, Simon, for the great episode. We will leave all the...

links to the research you mentioned in the show notes. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in once more. We are currently doing a series on mining, so if you're interested in the topic please check out the other episodes. And we have a newsletter, we are on social media, we have a website, so yeah, just follow us everywhere. Thank you so much and see you next week!