HardAssetsInvestor

Written by Tom Vulcan  |

August 17, 2011

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: The Last Commodity Frontier

Details

Plenty of unknowns accompany ability to dive deeper in oceans to mine metals and minerals.

What do the following have in common: Alvin, Jiaolong, Nautile, Nautilus, Mir and Shinkai?

Answer: All, except the fictional Captain Nemo’s famous submarine Nautilus, are real-life deep-sea submersibles.

Designed to dive anywhere between 14,764 feet (4,500 meters) and 21,325 feet (6,500 meters), these vessels have been built by the U.S., China, France, Russia and Japan, respectively, to explore the Stygian gloom of the Earth’s oceans and the seabed at these incredible depths.

At half a mile down (2,640 feet), the darkness is already complete. And at 5,000 meters, the pressure from more than three miles of water above is some 5,000 tons per square meter. (One cubic meter of water weighs one ton.)

Of them all, China’s Jiaolong has most recently been in the news, recording a dive of some 16,591 feet (5,057 meters) in the Pacific Ocean on July 26. According to the Chinese Xinhua news agency, such a capability opens up some 70 percent of the world’s seabed to the vessel. And, if everything goes according to plan, in 2012 the vessel should be able to dive down 22,966 feet (4.35 miles/7,000 meters), opening up 99.8 percent of the global seabed.

In achieving these results, the Chinese look to be fast approaching the records set by Japan, current world leaders in ultra deep-sea technology, and have already passed those set by the U.S.

So, What’s All The Fuss About?

Setting aside any potential defense (offense) capabilities gained through these achievements (the Chinese insist that the Jiaolong is only for civilian use), what China has now provided itself with is a proven tool to explore not only the oceans’ previously inaccessible depths, but also the country’s possibly significant resources, of which various metals on, or under, the seabed constitute some of the most important we know about.

Perhaps significantly, China’s spectacular dives came not even a month after the British journal Nature Geoscience published a piece, subsequently reported globally, describing the discovery by Japanese explorers of major deposits of rare earth minerals under the Pacific seabed some 10,000-20,000 feet below the surface; that is, at depths potentially well within the reach of Jiaolong.

New News, Old News

If the new news was that the Japanese had discovered rare earths under the seabed, the presence of deposits of numerous other metals on, or under, the seabed is certainly quite old news.

It has been known for some time that, in addition to the high concentrations of copper, gold, nickel, silver and zinc to be found around deep-water hydrothermal vents, nickel, together with cobalt, copper, lead and manganese, are to be found in polymetallic nodules (potato-sized, knobbly lumps of material) that sit on the seabed under a number of different oceans such as the Indian Ocean, and the North and South Pacific Oceans.

The first such nodules were discovered as far back as the mid-19^th century in the Kara Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberian Russia.

The potential treasures lying at the bottom of the sea are, however, not restricted just to a number of different metals.

For more than five years now, diamonds have been mined from the seabed off the coast of Namibia. And for the last 30 years or more, it has been known that methane (another hydrocarbon fuel), in the form of methane hydrates (or clathrates), is to be found in ice crystals in oceans around the world, especially in the concentrated deposits to be found under the Arctic Ocean.

At this stage, remarkably few people and companies are making money in this wet field. And there are a number of important factors why.