Seabed Mining Under the Microscope: A Techno-Economic Reality Check – CleanTechnica

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Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with a global expert on minerals processing and battery minerals, Lyle Trytten. We were closing out an engagement to do a technoeconomic assessment of seabed mining and it was a great opportunity to discuss the space and some of the things we knew going in and discovered along the say. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the second half of the conversation on my podcast channel, Redefining Energy — Tech. The transcript and a link to the podcast of the first half of the conversation is here if you missed it.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Hi, and welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. As always, we’re sponsored by TFIE Strategy, assisting firms and investment funds to future-proof themselves in this rapidly changing and decarbonizing world. My guest today is Lyle Trytten, a professional engineer with decades of experience in developing mines and in mineral processing and refining around the world. He speaks and consults as the Nickel Nerd through Trytten Consulting. Our topic today, in the second half of our conversation, is seabed mining. Lyle and I were recently engaged by a group of NGOs to do a techno-economic assessment of the space.

Now, back to seabed mining. This has all been context. You said there are three categories of resources and then there are reserves. How would you characterize, under that taxonomy, the polymetallic nodules?

Let’s take the two zones: the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) and the American Samoa zone.

Lyle Trytten [LT]: The CCZ has been explored more than any other zone because it has the richest density and composition of nodules currently known. Companies have quantified a very significant amount of resources there, and through its pre-feasibility study, The Metals Company has now qualified a small mineral reserve. Fifty million tons is not a lot, but it’s the first declared reserve of its kind. For something to be considered a reserve, the overall economics have to show it can be developed under a specific regulatory regime and economic paradigm. TMC has put those numbers out.

The sheer quantity of nodules in the CCZ is enormous. The world is 70% ocean, and there’s a lot of seabed with nodules sitting on it. That doesn’t mean all of it is economic. In many places, nodules are much less dense and have poorer metal composition. But there’s still a lot of material. Could it become a significant contributor to the global metals economy? Yes. In theory, it could even disrupt the terrestrial mining industry, which worries countries like Canada and several in Africa. If seabed nodules could be extracted at truly low cost, many high-cost terrestrial mines could be forced to shut down.

It’s not like opening a new mine in northern Canada or the US, where you have a finite ore body that can be mapped and extracted over decades. The CCZ resource is not infinite, but it is vast. By contrast, American Samoa is very underexplored. Nobody really knows what’s there in terms of quantity or quality, so its value is still an open question. The Cook Islands have seen more exploration, with nodules found in reasonable quantities, but the compositions vary widely.

That’s important to note. Even though you might think seawater is globally uniform, it hasn’t produced uniform nodule compositions. The formation processes differ depending on local geology and hydrothermal activity. Nodules in the Baltic Sea are very low in cobalt and copper, while nodules in the Indian Ocean are relatively high in those metals. Each region is different. 

[MB]: Once again, you have inferred versus measured resources. What I’m hearing you say is that the CCZ is clearly a resource. At least part of it is measured, so it’s a better grade of resource. American Samoa, by contrast, is more of an inferred resource. But then we come to reserves and the role of a pre-feasibility study.

A PFS says “pre” in the name, which implies something. What are the leading practices for pre-feasibility studies? What are they used for? Do they actually generate something you can call a reserve, or are they simply part of the process that leads to declaring reserves later? 

[LT]: That really depends on the regulatory system under which you operate. In Canada, you declare resources first and then reserves once you’ve proven technical and economic viability. Measured resources—the highest confidence level—can become proven reserves. Indicated resources can become probable reserves. Indicated resources don’t have sufficient geological certainty to become proven, and inferred resources cannot become reserves at all. The US system is different. It allows a category of inferred reserves, which doesn’t align with practices in Australia and South Africa.

At the initial level of study—what Canada calls a preliminary economic assessment—you can declare resources, but you haven’t done enough work to declare reserves. At that stage, you don’t yet have enough confidence in metallurgy, recoveries, operating costs, and capital costs to prove out the economics. You can show an economic case, but you cannot declare reserves. With a pre-feasibility study, you’ve done enough engineering and metallurgical work to demonstrate costs and recoveries and build an economic model with pricing for the intended products. If the economics are better than your discount rate or cost of capital, you can declare reserves.

Typically about half of resources might convert to reserves. In a traditional terrestrial mine, resources span a range of grades, with some qualifying as reserves and others being potentially uneconomic. Economics can shift those categories quickly. If product value doubles, previously uneconomic material can become economic. Companies will restate resources and reserves when circumstances change, but they don’t like to reduce reserves, so they tend to be conservative. They prefer to base declarations on long-term price trends rather than short-term swings.

In TMC’s case, their PFS qualified about 360 million tons of nodules as resources. Only a small fraction—about 10 million tons—were in the measured category, while the vast majority were indicated. Out of that 360 million tons, they declared 50 million tons as probable reserves. These are wet metric tons, as hauled from the ocean, not the dry metric tons used for composition measurement. Broadly speaking, they converted about one-seventh or one-eighth of the deposit into reserves, which is a new milestone for the industry.

They also released an initial assessment for another zone in the CCZ where they hold ISA rights. That amounted to over a billion tons of inferred resources, but very little measured and no reserves yet, as not enough work has been done to establish confidence. 

[MB]: And what are the leading practices for a pre-feasibility study? Who authors it, who reviews it? It’s not a trivial document I could whip up on the side of my desk with ChatGPT and expect anyone to take seriously. What does it take for a PFS to be considered a credible document for investors? 

[LT]: Typically you’re looking for reputable testing and engineering firms that provide the recovery and cost work, and reputable geological firms that underpin the resource statements. Independence is critical, because credibility in this industry depends on it. If you rely on company insiders to make assertions about their own deposits, there’s a tremendous risk of bias or omissions. The leading practice is fully independent studies signed off by professionals. In Canada they’re called qualified practitioners, in Australia certified practitioners. These are experts whose credentials and independence are periodically reviewed by regulators.

I’ve worked on a study where a QP was rejected even though the individual was very capable. The regulators didn’t think his credentials were strong enough to sign off on the economics. We had to bring in someone else to review the work and sign off. That’s how it works: independent professionals must stand behind the results, because otherwise the risk of misrepresentation is too high. In both Australia and Canada, regulations require fully independent QPs. That doesn’t mean companies have no role—they oversee the work, sometimes contribute sections, and engage in debates with the independent experts. I’ve written market sections of pre-feasibility studies myself, then handed them over to engineering firms for review. They had final say and professional responsibility for the content, not me. If there was a dispute, they could rewrite it.

This process provides quality control. In the US, the securities system doesn’t require that level of independence. In this case, the PFS has sections certified by company insiders. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong, but it does raise questions about credibility and assumptions in the uncertified sections. It might all be fine, but without an independent expert signing off, it’s less certain. In Canada, I would expect independent consultants to hold no stock in my company and have no relationship beyond the commercial contract. That’s not the case in every jurisdiction. 

[MB]: Right, and this isn’t something suitable for a final investment decision. It’s a step in the progression. After this comes a feasibility study and then more detailed work. But a pre-feasibility study is still a critical milestone in the life of a resource that might eventually be extracted. We’ve finally seen a pre-feasibility study published for polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. 

[LT]: We shouldn’t understate the importance of reaching a pre-feasibility study. That’s a significant achievement. It only comes with a great deal of hard work and analysis of the different ways a project could be developed, because by that stage you have to settle on one approach for the study. It may not reflect exactly how the project ultimately gets built, since things can change later, but in engineering the goal is to lock down scope as soon as possible. When I ran preliminary economic assessments and then pre-feasibility studies, the scope didn’t change much between them. We just gained better detail and confidence.

The next step is a feasibility study, which is a larger and more defined exercise. At that point you really don’t want to start changing scope, because the feasibility study underpins environmental assessments and is what banks use to assess financing. Even then, it doesn’t always lead directly to a final investment decision. Often there’s another round of early works engineering to develop detailed design, sharpen cost certainty, and reduce risk before sanctioning a billion-dollar or multi-billion-dollar spend. But even with that extra step, the industry track record is not great at sticking to costs defined in studies.

Professor Flyvbjerg’s work has shown that mining projects are far less reliable on cost, scope, and schedule than transmission or solar projects. There are too many inherent uncertainties when working underground or underwater. Estimators themselves can introduce bias, focusing on the upside and underplaying the downside risks. When I ran a cost estimating department, the practice was to calculate everything you could, then assign a likely range of uncertainty for each area. That builds a statistical distribution of costs. It’s not a bell curve—it’s skewed to the high side because more things tend to go wrong than right. It’s rare to finish early or cheaper than expected, but common to run into delays or overruns.

So even with strong estimating discipline and contingency planning, projects can still blow past budgets. The “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” always loom large, especially when you’re breaking into new areas. 

[MB]: This is more of an area where I have insights from my background. Back in 2001 and 2002, I was reading PhD and master’s theses on robotics from universities around the world for a project on swarm-based robotics. I explored that space, did assessments of sensor sets for autonomous vehicles, published on it, and had my work presented at conferences. I’ve been professionally engaged in artificial intelligence for 15 years and worked with vision systems for several years, both with startups and a major global firm. I’ve also done systems engineering for programs worth up to a billion dollars across multiple continents. I’m a nerd who thinks broadly about how things fit together, and that background informs my techno-economic analyses of startups and technologies. I developed a reputation for doing this well because I was lucky and nerdy, and that’s why they reached out to me to contribute.

There were two halves to the work. One was picking nodules off the seabed, which I could analyze, and the other was processing and refining them, which I couldn’t. Starting with seabed collection, there are two main players. The Metals Company, or TMC, went public through a SPAC a few years ago. Mining has a history of pump-and-dump stocks, and SPACs are almost explicitly pump-and-dump vehicles for their initial investors. That doesn’t mean all SPACs are bad, but the alignment is questionable. TMC’s model is essentially a giant vacuum cleaner on treads. Picture a bulldozer-sized vacuum running along the seabed four to six kilometers down. A riser pipe, about seven kilometers long with buoyancy elements, carries a slurry of mud, silt, vegetation, and nodules to the surface ship. On board, the water, mud, and organics are separated from the nodules. The waste is piped back down and discharged about 1.5 kilometers below the surface in a current.

The nodules then need to be dried, usually by draining on racks. The ship must also manage ballasting carefully since large amounts of water move in and out, changing stability. These are manageable engineering issues. In terms of technology readiness level, this is about TRL 6 or 7. Dredging is well understood, and we already have proof of concept from diamond dredging at 200 meters. TMC even tested their prototype at two to three kilometers, recovering 2,000 to 3,000 tons of nodules. So the basic concept is proven. But readiness isn’t just about components—it’s about operating at scale, continuously, in deep water, for extended durations. That’s where uncertainties remain.

Of the two approaches, TMC’s is the most technically viable. It can probably work at 4–6 kilometers, but the question is economics. I doubt it will be competitive. Their operating expenses will likely be higher and uptime lower than projected. Storms will force them to cut the riser loose, and reattaching it could take months. The bulldozer-like collector will need to be retrieved more often than planned for maintenance and defouling. They’ll need extensive spare parts and repair facilities on board. These are non-trivial factors. They cover some of this in their pre-feasibility study, but none of it looks fatal to the technology itself.

In short, getting nodules off the seabed is not the hardest problem. It’s technically doable. The bigger challenges lie elsewhere. Did I capture TMC fairly from your perspective, Lyle? Did I miss anything? 

[LT]: I think that’s a good characterization. People might assume there’s no way potato-sized nodules could be lifted to the surface, but the reality is you can suspend almost anything in a pipe if you push enough water through it. With sufficient upward flow, the nodules can be carried up. It would require an enormous amount of water circulation to move objects that size. They don’t have the density of pure metals—they’re oxides, ores—but it’s doable. It’s just not trivial. 

[MB]: This technology has raised a lot of concerns because it’s worse than deep-sea trawling. It scoops up everything on the seabed and brings it to the surface. Organisms evolved to live at four to six kilometers down die when brought up. That raises strong concerns about ecosystem damage at a scale that may be unsustainable and unacceptable. Neither Lyle nor I have deep expertise in marine biology, and NGOs have PhDs dedicated to that, but the concern is real.

The plume of slurry released at 1.5 kilometers depth is another unknown. Its impacts are still to be determined. The alternative solution, proposed by Impossible Metals, avoids that plume in theory, though the “in theory” part is doing a lot of work. Their approach uses a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles that descend four to six kilometers and pick nodules individually with robotic claws. Each vehicle is essentially a shipping container turned on end, equipped with arms, lights, sensors, and propulsion. Their design target is to carry 12 wet tons of nodules per trip, collecting three-meter-wide strips 300 meters long before resurfacing for unloading and recharging.

Their claims are aggressive: one nodule plucked every 1.5 seconds per arm, five-minute turnarounds at the surface, and four-hour round trips. Based on my professional experience, I think it’s closer to one every four seconds, six to seven hours per round trip, and at least 30 minutes on the surface for unloading and maintenance. That drastically changes vessel requirements and costs. Instead of a cheap solution, you would need highly automated racks and handling systems, adding billions. I suspect they’ve underestimated robot costs by a factor of four, making their business case unworkable. In my view, this technology won’t be technically viable for 20 to 40 years.

Positioning is another challenge. GPS doesn’t work underwater, so the industry relies on Ultra Short Baseline (USBL) sonar. At depths of four kilometers, USBL loses accuracy due to thermoclines and signal degradation. Impossible Metals doesn’t want to place transceivers on the seabed, which makes things worse. Scaling to 90 simultaneous robots would require advanced multiplexing and signal processing technologies that don’t currently exist. Add to that the difficulty of machine vision in silty, deep-sea conditions—distinguishing clean nodules from biologically encrusted ones at speed is highly improbable.

Integration is the hardest part. I’ve spent much of my career on complex systems integration, and here you’re talking about integrating highly complex individual robots, fleets of them, sonar positioning, shipboard automation, and material handling. It’s decades away from reliable production. Even existing ROVs are deployed one or two per ship and spend most of their time undergoing maintenance, not in continuous underwater operation. The notion of 90 autonomous collectors running 24/7 is simply unrealistic.

It’s a futuristic idea that sounds appealing, but it’s not going to work at scale. For TMC, this wasn’t the showstopper, but Impossible Metals’ approach really does look impossible. It’s not worth pursuing, and I don’t believe their extraction economics could pass even a pre-feasibility study.

Lyle, back to you on processing the nodules. 

[LT]: This is a new type of ore. Let’s just think of it as ore. If we were mining it on land, what would we know? There is no single facility today set up to process this material. That leaves two options: build your own physical plant and develop your own processes, or hire others with the expertise. Is this material processable? Yes. As a metallurgist with 30 years of experience, I can say there are a couple of viable approaches. My background is hydrometallurgy—water-based solutions using acids and bases. You could put these nodules in acid, dissolve the metals, and recover them as valuable products. That is ultimately doable.

Some metals are easier than others. Copper and cobalt are relatively straightforward. Manganese is more challenging. Still, we use pressure acid leach to treat similar ores today, such as the nickel laterites in Australia, Madagascar, New Caledonia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. These ores are nickel cobalt oxides that are dissolved and processed successfully. With nodules, you would have to grind them up and contend with their unique composition, but it is broadly doable.

The more likely method, promoted by TMC in their pre-feasibility study, is a blend of pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. This means smelting the nodules—drying them, then melting them at 1,300–1,400°C. At that temperature, the minerals break down and the elements dissociate, producing two molten phases: a heavier metallic alloy that settles at the bottom, and a lighter slag of oxides and silicates that floats on top. In a refractory-lined smelter, you tap out the alloy—iron, nickel, copper, cobalt—and the slag separately. The alloy is then converted into a matte by adding sulfur, creating a nickel-copper-cobalt sulfide similar to what’s processed today in smelters across Canada, northern Europe, and South Africa. These mattes can be refined into valuable end products, though every matte is unique, and treatment depends heavily on composition.

The real challenge is economics. A company that wants to go this route would need to build a smelter and a refinery, with well-defined capital and operating costs, covering the entire supply chain from seabed extraction to refined products. If the sales price exceeds the full costs plus capital recovery, you can make money. TMC proposes a different market structure: paying others to smelt nodules and return matte to them. But this model doesn’t really exist today. Most smelters, especially in Indonesia where capacity has surged, prefer to own ore outright, buy it cheaply, and keep the upside. They don’t usually act as toll processors. TMC did test nodule smelting with PAMCO in Japan, signing an MoU for one million tons a year, but their plans envision ten million tons annually. Where will the other nine million tons be processed? That remains unresolved.

On refining, the world doesn’t have enough nickel and cobalt capacity to absorb this material. TMC has proposed building two refineries in the US at around $2 billion each. Technically feasible, yes, but cost and timely delivery are uncertain. The nickel industry has a long track record of failures on first attempts at new processing facilities. There’s a saying: nickel laterite plants make money for the second owner. The first usually goes bankrupt. My own experience bears this out—projects I helped design in Madagascar and Australia struggled or were written off by major firms like BHP, Vale, Anglo American, and Glencore before eventually finding stability under different ownership.

Chinese companies, by contrast, have been more successful in Indonesia. They build multiple similar smelters like Lego sets, standardizing equipment, procurement, and construction. They use their project ecosystem to deliver quickly and cheaply, staffing plants with thousands of expatriate workers until operations stabilize. Western companies haven’t replicated this model, and it’s unclear if they can. Sumitomo has managed technical success in the Philippines with pressure acid leach facilities, but even they report losses.

In our industry, research by Terry McNulty since the 1990s has shown that projects succeed when using technologies teams already know well. Step-outs into new territory have much lower success rates and longer startup curves, which often sink companies financially. Metallurgical plants typically need to run at 80% capacity or higher to be profitable, but reaching that level can take years. Financing cash drains over extended startups is very difficult. Large companies like BHP have abandoned projects such as Ravensthorpe, while Chinese-backed Ramu in Papua New Guinea persisted for six years before achieving stable production—something that would have sunk a Western firm.

Can seabed nodule processing be done? Yes. With enough time, capital, and persistence, you can build and operate facilities. The US pulled off the Manhattan Project. But in reality, metallurgy is not easy or fast. It requires patient investment, standardized designs, and a tolerance for early failures. Those are traits not often seen in the current Western mining sector. 

[MB]: There’s a key point I’d like to lean into, and I first became aware of it during a speaking tour in New Zealand. I happened to be down there as a digital nomad when the Australasian Minerals Association reached out and asked if I could speak to their members about the coming electrification of the world and what it would mean for demand in their sector. As I visited four cities and spoke with mining and minerals experts, it became clear—and they confirmed this in conversations, including with Gavin Mudd—that mining, minerals, and metallurgy programs in Western universities have been shutting down in significant numbers.

The vast majority of programs training the engineers and chemical processing specialists who make this work possible are now in China. For the past 40 years, the West has not treated minerals, metallurgy, or supply chain resilience as critical or strategic, despite the language of “critical” and “strategic” minerals. Instead, most of it was ceded to China because it was cheaper. As the West now tries to rebuild resilient mineral supply chains, whether seabed nodules or terrestrial sources, there is a sharp shortage of skilled resources and intellectual capital for modern, relatively clean processing and refining outside China. Joint ventures with knowledge transfer may be possible, but the costs will be much higher than many assume—if they are even available. China holds an enviable geopolitical position, essentially holding the keys to the minerals castle, and electrification depends heavily on its processing capabilities.

This will take 20 years of strategic effort for the West to rebuild resilience. Part of that will mean acquiring strategic reserves of key minerals, particularly those with small volumes but high importance. Part will involve groups of allied countries dividing responsibilities and working together for the long term to create supply chains that don’t depend entirely on China. It will also require rebuilding educational programs in the West and creating new intellectual capital. That means a massive social push to make mining and metallurgy attractive to young people. Right now mining has a bad reputation. It’s striking to me that fossil fuels still have permission to operate while minerals are treated as dirty. Fossil fuel companies realized their problem earlier and threw money at building a social license to operate. Mining hasn’t done the same, and it shows.

You need social license, public support, and educational infrastructure, and then you need to build midstream capabilities and domestic demand. The Biden administration focused on building midstream and downstream industries like EV factories, but less on extraction. Trump focused on extraction while ignoring metallurgy and downstream industries. In fact, he has actively attacked the downstream, including the battery and electric car industries that are the primary demand drivers for these minerals. He has targeted wind and solar, both of which require large volumes of minerals, reducing domestic demand. He has also undermined education and avoided building coalitions for resilience. In short, he has not created the conditions for a resilient supply chain.

[LT]: A few things on that. Quoting some statistics from an op-ed I wrote for the Oregon Group earlier this year: US mining graduates declined by 39% from 2016 to 2020. Across all the mining and mineral engineering schools in the US—fifteen in total—fewer than 350 graduates came out in that period. Meanwhile, over 100,000 computer and engineering science graduates entered the market, which is why Silicon Valley thrives. The focus is not on hard tech and building the materials that enable the rest of the economy. Degree programs in these areas have dropped 40% from the 1980s to 2023. There are only fifteen programs left, and just one US program ranks in the global top tier. Canada has four, Australia has four, while the US lags.

I would argue that those numbers are probably inflated, since China has more of the top 12 than we recognize. Clearly, the talent is no longer coming through the US pipeline. If the US wants it internally, it will have to bring it in from elsewhere, yet immigration has become more difficult and many people simply don’t want to be there. That poses real problems. I’d note that both the Biden administration and the Trudeau government have worked hard to incentivize downstream consumption of these materials through EV factories and related industries. Neither has really figured out how to address the upstream side—the extraction itself. Now the conversation is shifting back upstream, but neither country has cracked how to incentivize downstream at scale.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem. If you build downstream facilities that secure their supply chains offshore, it’s hard to get them to invest in domestic extraction and processing. If you build midstream processing without upstream mines or supply, you have a gap. And without secure demand and supply, no one wants to risk capital on the midstream either. The same goes for mining and extraction—without guaranteed downstream markets, investors hesitate. It’s a thorny issue. Governments are working on it, and I’ve been involved with the Transition Accelerator and various academics trying to figure out how to build a complete supply chain. Nobody has solved it yet, but we’re getting closer. Talent, though, is going to be a major part of the equation.

I’d also push back a bit on the idea that the fossil fuel industry has had a free ride. Yes, they throw money around and are very good at that. Hiring for similar skill sets in the metals world while competing with the oil industry in Alberta was always a big challenge for me. Where we succeeded was in attracting people who wanted a different lifestyle or didn’t want to work in fossil fuels. But the University of Calgary shut down its petroleum engineering program because it had no intake. Students weren’t interested. Young people are no longer saying, “I’ll go into fossil fuels for the money.” They’re betting with their ethos about where they want to spend their lives. They’re not betting on mining yet, but they’re not betting on fossil either.

When I was running metals engineering, I was hiring globally, and the oil industry was always taxing. We need a more receptive environment in North America to bring talent into these streams and organizations. The industry also isn’t delivering the excitement people want. That’s partly on us. But at the same time, nobody wants to stand up and say, “Look more closely at my business, I’m a miner.” Doing so invites scrutiny, and often unwelcome consequences. It’s a dilemma. 

[MB]: So I have a tl;dr for an hour and a half in. I don’t think anyone needs to worry about the environmental concerns around seabed mining. This is a blip. A couple of firms with nonviable business models haven’t solved the hard problems of processing or of continuous 24/7 extraction from four to six kilometers down. They’re not going to reach final investment decision, and they’ll become the latest round of collapsed firms and lost money. Lyle, you’ve been a bit more measured than I have on this call so far.

[LT]: I would liken this more to hydrogen vehicles. They had a long runway, attracted a lot of money, and many companies built massive facilities to support the industry. In the end, it didn’t exist because it couldn’t compete economically in the evolving world. That’s how I view the seabed mining industry. It’s entirely doable, you can make it work, but will it be economically competitive? I struggle to see how, at least without using the Chinese supply chain. If you want to route everything through China, maybe you’ve got a shot at making it economic, but I think that would be a mistake, giving them even greater dominance.

If you think seabed mining will create world-beating technology, I think what you’ll see instead is that the next country to move will throw far more people and money at it than we have in the West. They’ll figure it out faster, do it cheaper, and make it a commercial reality, because they won’t care as much about the provenance of materials as some Western countries and companies do. The idea that we’re going to supply the electric vehicle market through seabed minerals is questionable right now. A lot of carmakers have already said they don’t want seabed minerals in their supply chain because their consumers don’t want it. They might retrench on that, but it’s not a certainty that they’ll accept these materials.

I think it’s still quite a ways off, and a lot of money will be raised and eventually lost in the process—whether that happens before or after hard assets are built, I don’t know. 

[MB]: And on that note, Lyle and I agree that the current crop of seabed mining is just that—the current crop—and it’s going to end the same way the last three did. Lyle, we’re at the end of our time together for this call, and I always like to give my guests an opportunity to say anything they want. It’s open-ended. You’ve got an audience that enjoys nerdy topics. You have a particular position and experience in thought leadership. What would you like to leave people thinking about? 

[LT]: I think there are a lot of good things happening. Electric vehicles are going to grow. A report out this morning showed 31% year-on-year growth to date. That doesn’t sound like stalling. We’re also getting more clarity that wind, water, and solar with storage can supplant the fossil fuel world. The recent op-ed and podcast by Michael Liebreich on the need for a pragmatic reset is exactly right. There’s been too much hype. The transition will be slower than many want it to be, and it will require more materials than people would like. It’s going to take longer.

That will slow the rise in demand. Ongoing material substitutions will change the demand curve, allowing more time for the supply side to react than many expected. All of that suggests we can do this with terrestrial minerals, but at the same time we need to accelerate terrestrial extraction. We’re going to need the metals. Unless we want to go back to the Stone Age, we need more metals. We cannot recycle or urban-mine our way out of this in any reasonable timeframe.

Condemning the poorest parts of the world to life without electricity is not a future I’m going to suggest promoting. One of the things I’ve always looked at in international relations and in the structure of society is the choices we make about where to get goods and what to spend our finances on. You can argue that wherever we use solar power is fine, but if we use it for things like making green hydrogen instead of directly electrifying transport, we’re wasting it. I would argue the same for using clean power to make LNG in British Columbia. Using BC’s great hydropower for that seems misguided. They’re going to burn the natural gas anyway, so why not let them use fossil gas to run their liquefaction and save that clean power for more important uses like electrifying homes, transportation, and industry.

The mining industry is a large consumer of electricity globally. We need to make careful choices about what we use our materials and resources for in a finite world with significant impacts. Those are the discussions we should be having at a societal level and with our elected representatives. 

[MB]: That’s a great set of thoughts to leave people with, Lyle. On that note, this has been Michael Barnard, host of Redefining Energy – Tech. My guest today has been Lyle Trytten, the Nickel Nerd. Reach out to him at Trytten Consulting for the range of work he does around due diligence, policy, and other explorations. He is a tremendous resource, and I’m privileged to know him and to have worked with him on the techno-economic assessment of seabed mining of polymetallic nodules. I learned a lot. Thank you, Lyle.

[LT]: Thank you, Mike. I learned a lot from you in this process as well. It’s been a pleasure.