Extreme Mining: Small Deposit And Seabed Mining Threats Growing

While any­one who is aware of the destruc­tive nature of some of the worlds largest mines may think that min­ing is pret­ty extreme already, it seems that as with many oth­er com­po­nents of indus­tri­al civil­i­sa­tion, the only way is down. Frack­ing and oth­er uncon­ven­tion­al ener­gy extrac­tion meth­ods are being dri­ven by a process, extreme ener­gy, which is far from unique. Indus­tri­al civil­i­sa­tion has pref­er­en­tial­ly tar­get­ed the eas­i­est to extract ener­gy resources first, but as those have been suc­ces­sive­ly exhaust­ed the sys­tem has blind­ly moved on to tar­get increas­ing­ly more dif­fi­cult to extract resources. A sim­i­lar process has been play­ing out with­in the min­ing sec­tor more gen­er­al­ly where the con­tin­u­ous deple­tion of var­i­ous met­al ores and min­er­als is push­ing the indus­try towards more extreme extrac­tion.

Small Deposit Mining

At present in the Britain and Ire­land the new min­ing threat which is emerg­ing does not have the obvi­ous threat of these vast open cast mines in oth­er parts of the world. But it is being dri­ven by the same under­ly­ing process­es and head­ing in the same gen­er­al direc­tion. As prices have risen and larg­er deposits deplet­ed, the indus­try is turn­ing eyes to much small­er ones, or even look­ing to re-exploit old mines for their remain­ing deposits. This is so called “Small Deposit” min­ing, tar­get­ing numer­ous small, low qual­i­ty min­er­al deposits in an attempt to replace more con­ven­tion pro­duc­tion from larg­er mines. In some ways this has many par­al­lels with frack­ing where one indi­vid­ual oil or gas well has a lim­it­ed impact, but the cumu­la­tive impact of the hun­dreds or thou­sands of wells required for frack­ing is anoth­er mat­ter. Even more so that frack­ing, small deposit min­ing has the poten­tial to sneak in under the radar, one mine at a time.

In 2015 Wolf Min­er­als opened the first new met­als mine in the UK for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, after a wave of clo­sures up and down the coun­try in recent decades. Drake­lands in Devon is one of the world’s top five pro­duc­ers of tung­sten. But this is just part of a much wider trend. Sir­ius Min­er­als has recent­ly begun con­struc­tion of a poly­halite mine on the North York moors. the deep­est mine in the UK (and the sec­ond deep­est in Europe). The Wood­smith Mine will tar­get largest and high­est grade deposit of poly­halite in the world. Mean­while the Conon­ish gold mine in Scot­land has been reopened by Aus­tralian firm Scot­Gold in the last year.

These projects are just the tip of a loom­ing ice­berg, with a whole raft of min­ing plans at var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment. Cana­di­an com­pa­ny, Strong­bow Explo­ration, has announced plans to acquire 26 old tins mines in Corn­wall and has plans to reopen the South Crofty tin mine in the near Redruth in the future. Mean­while Strate­gic Min­er­als and New Age Explo­ration have begun test drilling in prepa­ra­tion for min­ing tin and tung­sten in Red­moor near Bod­min in Corn­wall.

While a polif­er­a­tion of new, more extreme, tin and tung­sten min­ing is one threat to Corn­wall, a poten­tial­ly even larg­er one is posed by min­ing for lithi­um. Extrac­tion oper­a­tions would be more akin to frack­ing than min­ing; wells would tap hot brine from a depth of between 400m and 800m, before being sent to a pro­cess­ing plant to extract the lithi­um. Extrac­tion usu­al­ly involves evap­o­ra­tion in very large ponds, thou­sands of acres in size, which can have sig­nif­i­cant impact on water resources and ecol­o­gy. A joint ven­ture between Cor­nish Lithi­um and Strong­bow Explo­ration is the main play­er at present, with it being tout­ed as Europe’s largest source of lithi­um.

Gold min­ing, the ulti­mate is waste­ful excess, also has mas­sive expan­sion plans with Ire­land and Scot­land in the fir­ing line. North­ern Ire­land is claimed to have the sev­enth rich­est unde­vel­oped seam of gold in the world. At present there is only active gold mine in the whole of Ire­land, run by Galan­tas Gold in Omagh, but it has per­mis­sion to expand and many oth­er plans are on the table. For instance rur­al com­mu­ni­ties in the Green­cas­tle area of Co Tyrone are cur­rent­ly fight­ing plans by a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny, Dal­ra­di­an Gold Ltd, for a gold mine and cyanide pro­cess­ing plant to sep­a­rate the gold from ore. Mean­while south of the bor­der Irish gold min­ing firm Con­roy Gold and Nat­ur­al Resources is tar­get­ing four new gold zones in Coun­ty Mon­aghan.

Oth­er threats include zinc-cop­per-lead min­ing at Parys Moun­tain in Angle­sey, zinc min­ing near Tara in Coun­ty Meath, Ire­land and min­ing for cok­ing coal (dis­tinct from ther­mal coal which is in a price slump at present) near White­haven in Cum­bria, as well as on the Scot­tish bor­der around Gret­na and Canon­bie. These are not iso­lat­ed, one off, projects, but just the most attrac­tive of large num­bers of small/low qual­i­ty deposits which the min­ing indus­try will be look­ing to exploit as larger/higher qual­i­ty deposits around the world are deplet­ed. While indus­tri­al civil­i­sa­tion con­tin­ues on its destruc­tive path, the pres­sure for more extreme min­ing is only going to grow.

Seabed Mining

Ener­gy resource extrac­tion (i.e. oil drilling) start­ed on land but has move off shore, and is now mov­ing into deep­er and deep­er water. For sim­i­lar rea­sons, until now min­ing has been most­ly con­fined to the land. Excep­tions have includ­ed tun­nel min­ing for coal which began stray­ing out under the sea from the 18th cen­tu­ry and dredg­ing for sand/gravel in shal­low water, which rel­a­tive­ly easy to tar­get and extract. With prices ris­ing and bet­ter option deplet­ing fast, the min­ing indus­try is turn­ing its atten­tion to min­er­al deposits on the ocean floor.

Some seabed min­ing is already under­way in shal­low water, for instance De Beers is sour­ing the seabed for dia­monds at depths of around 150 meters in a 2,300 square mile licence area off the Namib­ian coast. The first seri­ous deep sea min­ing effort is expect­ed to begin in 2019, in the Bis­mar­ck Sea near Papua New Guinea. Cana­di­an firm Nau­tilus Min­er­als plans to use three giant robots crawl­ing machines (each the size of a house) to grind up rocks rich in cop­per, zinc and gold at a depth of 1,600 metres and pump the slur­ry up to a cus­tom-built sur­face ship at a rate of over 3,000 tonnes a day.

Seabed min­ing would cer­tain­ly kill off most organ­isms liv­ing on seabed that would be exca­vat­ed, but will cre­ate sed­i­ment plumes dis­rupt­ing the nat­ur­al move­ment of ocean water, and poten­tial­ly smoth­er entire eco­log­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties on the seabed, intro­duc­ing nutri­ent-rich deep water into sur­face waters caus­ing algae blooms and dead zones and releas­ing heavy met­als once out of reach to shal­low-water organ­isms, which can accu­mu­late up the food chain — poten­tial­ly harm­ing the health of humans con­sum­ing fish as well.

The UK is heav­i­ly involved in the seabed min­ing push. UK Seabed Resources Ltd, a sub­sidiary of US defence con­trac­tor Lock­heed Mar­tin, is one of the main com­pa­nies explor­ing for poly­med­tal­lic nod­ules in the cen­tral Pacif­ic Clar­i­on-Clip­per­ton Frac­ture Zone. Mean­while the min­ing machines for the first attempt a deep seabed min­ing by Cana­di­an com­pa­ny in the Bis­mar­ck Sea near Papua New Guinea, have been built a Soil Machine Dynamic’s facil­i­ty in New­cas­tle Upon Tyne. Clos­er to home Marine Min­er­als is even con­sid­er­ing seabed min­ing for tin off St Ives, Per­ran­porth, Portreath and St Agnes, while Tre­liv­er Min­er­als is plan­ning to mine St Austell Bay for tin.

See Extreme Min­ing: Small Deposit And Seabed Min­ing Threats Grow­ing for all the details includ­ing map of grow­ing threats across coun­try.