Licensee anticipates delay in seabed exploration research

Delays in the seabed minerals exploration and research are expected due to opposition and the efficiency of the regulatory system, says one of the three deep sea mining companies exploring the Cook Islands seabed.

John McIntyre, geology manager at Moana Minerals, said they anticipate delays in the ongoing exploration and research in the Cook Islands seabed.

Cook Islands is currently in its third year of a five-year exploration phase to determine the feasibility of deep-sea mining for polymetallic nodules rich in cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese.

Moana Minerals Limited, Cook Islands Colbalt (CIC) Limited and Cook Islands Investment Company (CIIC) Seabed Resources Limited, which is co-owned by the Cook Islands Government, were granted a seabed minerals exploration licence in 2022 to carry out exploration work. As part of the exploration process, these companies must review the associated environmental risks and if they can prove that mining is viable, the government will award them a mining licence.

Last month, Prime Minister Mark Brown told Cook Islands News that there was a possibility of extending the exploration time frame beyond five years, depending on the satisfaction derived from the data and findings of the three companies conducting the exploration of the country’s seabed.

In an interview with this newspaper during the Underwater Minerals Conference over a week ago, McIntyre said he was optimistic that by the end of that five-to-10-year range, Cook Islands would have enough data and systems in place to make a decision on deep sea mining.

“From a technical point of view, assuming that the regulatory system rolls out in front of us and obviously there will be a few delays because people will have questions, there will be opposition, we will be required to refine our supporting documents and so forth,” McIntyre explained.

“Realistically, I think three years is unlikely, five years is doable and whether it goes out to seven or 10 years depends on how smooth and efficient the regulatory system is.

“One thing I noticed with the Cook Islands is you guys are taking advice from all around the world about how to get a rigorous but efficient regulatory system. So, I tend to be at the optimistic end of that five-to-10-year range.”

PM Brown earlier confirmed that there might be a need to extend the five-year time frame in order to seek a complete report and findings on the seabed exploration.

“It will depend on how long it takes for the companies to provide us with the information that we need and that they need to provide us with as part of the terms of their exploration licence,” the Prime Minister said.

“So their term of their licence is five years, but it could be they might need to extend it in order to complete the work that they need to do, which includes an environmental impact statement, which is not an easy piece of work.”

For Moana Minerals, it’s been a smooth sailing so far in the third year of the five-year exploration timeframe. McIntyre explained how they were carrying out the ongoing exploration works onboard the research vessel Anuanua Moana.

His job is primarily finding new areas of nodule mineralisation and quantifying how much are there and how much metal is inside those areas so that Cook Islands has a sense of its global resource – “where it is, how big it is, and so forth”.

“We start off with sonar surveys of the sea bottom, which gives us kind of a topographic map and it also gives us other information about the seafloor, how lumpy and bumpy it is on a small scale, because the flatter it is, the better it is for nodules,” he explained.

“And from the quality of the echo that we get from the sonar, we can tell what the seafloor is made of. So, if the echo is a hard ping, it’s a hard surface. And if it’s a sort of thud, it’s a soft surface, a bit like when you go into a room. If it’s empty of all furnishings, you can hear an echo in your voice and when it’s not, you can’t.

“That gives us a map which says these are the areas where we should go at first when we’re physically sampling.

“And we then take the ship out for another trip, and we drop two kinds of samplers off the side of the ship. One is on a cable, and it pulls in about a three-quarter metre square coffee table-sized plug of the sea bottom.

“And that is so cool. You are looking at a piece of the Earth’s surface which no one has ever seen before and it’s up there on the deck, and we take samples from it.

“We scoop the nodules off the top of the surface, because they’re concentrated mainly in the first three centimetres, then the environmental people obtain samples of the sediment for chemical and biological studies.”

The nodules are then taken to McIntyre’s laboratory container where the nodules are cleaned, weighed, photographed on a white background, described, and then put into sample bags to be sent off to a chemical laboratory to find out how much cobalt, copper, and nickel they contain.

This process is then plotted on a map and experts in resource estimation turn those points into an estimate of the number of nodules in their metal grade on a geographic scale.

The other part of McIntyre’s job is to ensure that all the environmental experts, such as chemists, biologists, soil scientists and others, have the necessary equipment to do their work.

“Because whenever we go offshore, we have roughly the same number of people in the geo and the bio team and obviously we have different fundamental objectives, but we share the samples, and we have to share nicely,” he added.