Companies back moratorium on deep sea mining

A long-running dispute over plans to start mining the ocean floor has suddenly flared up.For years it was only environmental groups that objected to the idea of digging up metals from the deep sea.But now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are lending their weight to calls for a moratorium on the proposals.The move has been criticised by companies behind the deep sea mining plans, who say the practice is more sustainable in the ocean than on land.The concept, first envisaged in the 1960s, is to extract billions of potato-sized rocks called nodules from the abyssal plains of the oceans several miles deep.Rich in valuable minerals, these nodules have long been prized as the source of a new kind of gold rush that could supply the global economy for centuries.Interest in them has intensified because many contain cobalt and other metals needed for the countless batteries that will power the electric vehicles of a zero-carbon economy.Did deep sea mining start with CIA plot?Electric car future may depend on deep sea miningIMAGE COPYRIGHTGEOMARimage captionThe process has been likened to "potato harvesting" on the sea bedDozens of ventures, most of them government-backed, have been exploring vast areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to assess their viability for mining.And several companies have developed prototypes of "nodule collectors", giant robotic machines that would drive over the seabed, gathering the rocks and piping them up to ships at the surface.We witnessed one of these devices - called Apollo II - being tested in the waters off southern Spain in 2019.What's the problem?Claudia Becker, a senior BMW expert in sustainable supply chains, tells me what led the car giant to decide against using deep sea metals."It's the fear that everything we do down there could have irreversible consequences," she said."Those nodules grew over millions of years and if we take them out now, we don't understand how many species depend on them - what does this mean for the beginning of our food chain?"There's way too little evidence, the research is just starting, it's too big a risk."