Unlocking the Potential of Deep Sea Mining: With Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of Impossible Metals
welcome to dig deep the mining podcast in this podcast we go deep into mining news hot topics and live interviews with mining professionals and leading figures in the mining industry introducing your host Rob Tyson founder and director of mining International and Mining International executive a leading Global mining Recruitment and head hunting agency hi mining Community welcome back to another episode of the dig deep the mining podcast and today's guest is Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of Impossible Metals, whose mission is to preserve the deep ocean ecology whilst they unlock the potential of the seabed critical Metals to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy they built an underwater robot uh which selectively picks these battery rocks without harming the environment Oliver is a business leader he's over 30 years of experience encompasses three of the major technology Trends in Mobile Computing cloud computing and multimedia Technologies and he's on the podcast today to discuss impossible Metals approach to deep sea mining using underwater vehicles that collect metals critical minerals and metals for EV batteries without harming the seabed ecosystem so lets welcome Oliver to the podcast and let him tell us a little bit more about about the company and about their technology so how you doing Oliver yeah I'm good I'm I'm super happy to be here yeah and I appreciate your time you're over obviously in Silicon Valley at the time of obviously recording these podcast so I just wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about your career about your background um and obviously we we were just discussing before we uh before we went live you move over to originally from the UK moved over to Silicon Valley um 18 years ago so I just wonder if you can just give our audience a little bit of background about yourself to sort of current day yeah um grew up in the UK did electrical electronics at at school uh I was fortunate to join uh the small startup in Cambridge UK called arm that does microprocessors for a whole bunch of chips uh I ran kind of the mobile business uh at arm uh for about a decade uh got the opportunity to work in Japan last job at arm was after arm had gone public was uh the VP of corporate development where I was looking at actually acquiring and investing in startups of of which I did a few uh that is the job that ultimately got me to relocate to Silicon Valley about 18 years ago and then I left arm I really had the bug to go back to smaller companies you know arm was a few thousand people public so I worked as a consultant to a bunch of startups and then in 2012 I founded my own startup that was really in the video compression and streaming space uh we ultimately ran that for seven years as CEO and and co-founder sold it to Xilinx which is now AMD and they now have a chip that has this new way of encoding video for live streams we won business with Amazon twitch uh and then you know 2020 kind of came around and was thinking about what to do and got increasingly concerned about the climate we had really bad wild fires and I happened to discover that there were these rocks on the seabed floor that had all the metals that we absolutely need to electrify to move away from fossil fuels but I was a bit horrified to see that the Tech that people were using was actually designed in the 1960s it's this dredger and riser pump system and it seemed strange to me that there hadn't been any technical innovation in that collection and so I decided to create you know what would be my third company called impossible metals focused on really building very Advanced 21st century technology to pick up this resource with less environmental impact and less cost and be more scalable and that where we are with impossible medals yeah I just wonder if you can just give us a quick overview of the or quick snapshot of the company yeah we are about a three-year-old uh technology startup we've raised about 12 and a half million dollars to date and we are primarily building these new form of autonomous underwater vehicles or auvs or you know autonomous robots that can go up to four miles 6,000 metres underwater to the seabed floor and using their array of cameras and robotic arms pick up the the battery rocksthe nodules and bring them to the surface and by using a fleet of these robots we can actually do millions of tons a year where we are right now we've built two proof of concepts uh the first proof of concept we built in um 22 um and that was a shallow water proof of concept uh that showed the robotic arm working the vision system working the autonomy the buoyancy engine and we are in the process of testing our second gen robot this is the one that's radiated at 6,000 metres or four miles and we hope to have success of picking up a nodule from the deep ocean uh by the end of this quarter by the end of March this year what your thoughts on the news that Norway recently approved deep sea mining uh I think it's encouraging um you know Norway has large amounts of seabed minerals in its exclusive economic zone and so there was a vote in their Parliament where there was an 80% majority to to open the process now um we can maybe start a little bit on deep sea mining because it's not well understood but some basic facts there are actually four types of resource and each resource uh has different metals and has different technology needed to to mine uh so we ourselves are focused on the polymetallic modules and I'm holding one up if people have video here so these are potato size nuggets they're called nodules that form over millions of years in the deep ocean and they're not attached they just lie on the seabed floor and they have large quantities of nickel Cobalt copper uh maganese and some rare Earths and that's the approach we're going after Norway uh does not have this resource it has more of the um the SMS' um which are crust and those are physically attached a bit like landbase mining so you do have to physically cut them uh Norway also has some of the the vents the black smokers both active and passive uh so I think it's the passive ones that they're proposing going after and then the fourth and final resource is rare earth muds so in Japan around some of their Islands they have a lot of rare Earths actually in the mud that's in the deep sea bed so those are the four types of resource uh these are found both in international waters which are then regulated by a UN created organization called the international seabed Authority but they're also found in um the national Waters of countries typically 200 nordical miles off their Coast uh like the US like the Cook Island like um Saudi Arabia like Norway you just showed obviously a picture of a nodule how many of those nodules do you think there is on the seabed across the world trillions um in fact um there have been uh quite a lot of exploration over the last 150 years since they were discovered so they're already uh something like uh almost 40 exploration permits issued for deep sea minerals 31 of them by the international body in international waters and a part of that they have to do extensive surveying and baselining uh in fact some companies have even issued the NI 43-101 where they've actually defined precisely uh the resource and so one of the key numbers is abundance so that's how many kilograms per meter Square uh of the nodules do you find and typically in an area between between Hawaii and Mexico it's called The Clarion-Clipperton Zone you get numbers between 5 to 20 kilograms per meter Square so that's a very high level of abundance wonder if you can just sort of summarize the state of the deep sea mining regulations um and some of the plays in the industry yeah so the first thing to say is that each jurisdiction has its own regulations and its own timeline so you have to be specific but let me first start with the international regulations so in 1982 there was a un convention on the law of the sea that established the creation of the international seabed Authority uh which for the last 30 years has been working on on regulating deep sea mining so the exploration regulations were done over a decade ago um and are in effect and and have been issued over 31 permits the exploitation regulations are in the final stages of getting adopted uh they were first drafted about 9 years ago um and we are about to have the Consolidated text published at the next ISA meeting the 29th meeting in March and uh what that organization as public said is that they intend to uh finalize those exploitation regulations this year 2024 and get them legally adopted in early 2025 um the US uh passed its regulations in 1982 so it already has the hard seabed Mineral Act uh the Cook Islands passed its legislation to establish its regulator the seabed minerals Authority I believe around 2010 uh the exploration regulations are done the exploitation are coming they have issued already some drafts uh and I could go on you could talk about India Saudi Arabia uh and uh Sweden and many many other countries I did post a blog post on this so uh if people are curious if they go to impossiblemetals.com/blog I actually wrote quite a lot about the current state of deep sea mining regulations yeah we can include those in the show notes anyway so um for obviously easy access for people to to have a look at that um how does impossible Metals um approach to deep sea mining sort of differ from obviously traditional uh methods especially in terms of minimizing harm to the seabed ecosystem yeah um as I said it's really why I created the company I saw the dredging and riser pump system so let's describe this this was first designed in the 1960s and tested in the 1970s and it's the same architecture that all other companies are using right now uh there was a tested in in 21 and 22 with the same architecture so it's basically a very very large dredging machine that gets lowered to the seabed floor it has tracks and it has a big vacuum so it injects water into the top 5 cm or so of the seabed and then sucks everything back so what you end up is picking up of course the nodules but also a lot of the water and the seabed itself uh and any life that happens to be on there and then it pumps it through a sense a series of pipes uh to up up the uh almost four miles uh to the support ship where in the support ship it dewaters it removes the water it removes more of the sediment and then discharges the sediment back into the midwater column uh and then every few days because there's only temporary storage on the mining ship uh you have to transfer the payload to a bulk transport ship that's that's the architecture that I believe everybody else and there's probably at least a dozen companies Chinese uh Korean European Etc that are building this architecture uh we took a clean sheet of paper and said um it's the 21st century now we have incredible computers uh amazing robotics a lot of AI what could we do differently and so we broke the problem into three areas the physical collection how do you get things off the seabed the vertical transport how do you get things from the seabed to the ship and then the port transport how do you get stuff from the ship to the port and we just iterated we brainstormed many different architectures and ultimately we set we we settled on the architecture that we have now built uh which is using these autonomous robots and so what the robot does is that it's uh battery powered and you deploy it into the water does not have a tether it autonomously descends it gets close to the seabed floor but does not land it hovers by maintaining neutral buoyancy and then it has a range of stereo cameras and it uses the stereo cameras and lights uh to uh detect the module and ultimately control the robotic arm and the claw and if we detect uh megafauna life that we can see uh a coral or a sponge we know every 1% or so has this type of life on it then the system will is programmed to leave that behind the AI algorithms detect that life and says okay we're quarantining we're not picking uh a given area around there so the vehicle keeps moving it has multiple arms um at least 16 in the future we have maybe 60 it's quite a big robot uh once it has filled its payload um which you know could be as large as 25 metric tons one shipping container once that's full the vehicle uses the battery to pump water out of our buoyancy engine that makes the vehicle positively buoyant so it will float to the surface on the surface we have designed an automated crane that will recover the vehicle bring it on board uh will swap the battery pack or empty the payload or do any maintenance and then the vehicle can be redeployed so approximately every 3 and a half hours the vehicle can pick up 25 metric tons and we have a whole Fleet of them so we could have over a hundred of these working concurrently again I think good thing for the show notes we have a 90 second animation that really shows how that operation works and I'll give you the link to to put in the show notes for that can you elaborate on the Technology and Engineering obviously behind these underwater vehicles used by obviously the company for collecting the metals which are critical obviously for EV batteries yeah um we called the company impossible metals because we had to invent a lot of Technology now there are auvs autonomous underwater Vehicles today but they're primarily kind of torpedo shaped and sensored and used to collect a lot of sensor data so the biggest markets today are offshore oil and gas military applications and Marine Science and so we can reuse a lot of those components batteries thrusters navigation communication that stuff we can buy in of course we still have to integrate it electrically mechanically and we have to write software for it but to make this particular application work where we had robotic arms we're actually picking stuff up and we want to maintain neutral buoyancy want to hover we had to invent three key pieces of Technology uh the first technology is the buoyancy engine so that's the the capabilities to keep keep the vehicle neutral to hover and it's a little more complex because each time you pick up a rock you're adjusting the weight of the vehicle and so you have to compensate for that otherwise it will sink and so we needed good Dynamic buoyancy we needed something that could work at 6,000 meters and and so that makes it pretty complex so we designed our own pumps our own buoyancy engine we have multiple patterns on that uh the second key piece of technology we had to invent was a robotic arm uh there are plenty of robotic arms that go on underwater vehicles but they're not designed for speed they're designed for slow operations operating a valve picking up one sample Etc we needed a system where we could have multiple arms and they could move really quickly because as you know mining is about speed it's about how many millions of tons can you pick up in a year so we took something that you would normally see in an Industrial Automation Factory a Delta arm where where we have uh free Limbs and it can move incredibly quickly so we've already proven that our arm can from seeing the nodule to placing it in the internal uh collection point we can do that in two seconds and that's super fast so that's something that we had to uniquely design uh also the end effect or the claw is a unique design we wanted to minimize the sediment disturbance uh so we have pattern on that and then the third area is really the AI algorithms you know this it has to operate fully autonomously there's no human operator you you program the mission and then it goes and executes it and and so the vehicle has to of course navigate itself but when it's actually picking it has to physically find the nodule on the seabed and move the robotic arm over it so it can pick it up we proved that but now it also needs to detect the megafauna corals the sponges or other forms of life so we have a very powerful Nvidia GPU on board where we run those AI algorithms so those are the three unique pieces of technology that we had to invent what measures will impossible Metals take to ensure obviously environmental sustainability in their deep sea mining uh operations I suppose particularly in relation to protecting the sea bed ecosystem yeah I mean it's it's fundamental to to what we do I mean we we really architected a new system based on the fact that we didn't like the sediment plumes these clouds of sediment that are generated from a track vehicle uh we didn't want to have the noise associated with the rise of pump system uh we didn't want to have the biodiversity lost that we know there isn't a huge amount of biomass deep in the ocean in fact 70% of it is bacteria so that shows how little real biomass is there but it's super unique like you go um a few tens of miles away and you'll find completely different species and so the biodiversity is really important to us and and so by developing a system that can do selective harvesting where we can program what to leave how much to leave behind and the fact that we don't generate sedent plumes and we don't need to generate a large amount of noise by pumping the material up and down the Water we don't need differential positioning which is the big thrusters on the ships that keep them very very still unfortunately that generates huge amounts of noise and that's at the top water column where you have big marine life like whales and dolphins so you know we took the science statement that already talked about the criticism of the 1960s approach and that was part of our input for how we could build a better system uh we also spent a lot of time on the economics because there's no point having a massively better environmental system if it costs much more than the incumbent so we try to do both you know much less environmental footprint much less cost and and ultimately we will do trials we will have Marine scientists inspect and visit and document and publish but you know intuitively you know you have a huge machine that has tracks that is you know literally crawling on the seabed vacuuming everything up versus a fleet of vehicles that just hover and selectively pick up and avoid life and so I think it's it's pretty obvious to show that one has much less impact but we will ultimately get Marine scientists to publish and you know deep sea mining is highly regulated uh you typically have to spend about $50 million doing environmental Baseline work before you can submit an exploitation permit request um that's part of your environmental impact and social assessment so all of this work will ultimately be contributed to a regulator before they Grant permission for for deep sea minding are there any sort of regulatory uh or ethical considerations uh that the company will address uh in their deep sea mining activities um and how do you sort of navigate these challenges so I mean we desperately need these Metals I think everyone knows that we're in a energy transition and we're primarily transitioning to electrification electrification needs needs metals to either transport the electricity or to store it uh it's also a fact that there's an order of magnitude more of these Metals in the sea bed than on land you know for two reasons uh 71% of our ocean of our planet is ocean so it's a huge area compared to the 29% which is you know the land and we know nobody lives on the ocean right I mean so when you look at the environmental and social impacts you have an environment where we have not yet mined so we have very high grade uh and people don't live there and the life that there is less so from my point of view in time we can get to full circularity but that's probably not for another 50 years in the meantime we need massive quantities so shouldn't we get them where a we have the biggest resource B we can do the mining with the least environmental and social impact and see we can do it with the lowest cost because we don't have to build new infrastructure we reuse ships and ports and our or grade is so high like in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone the nickel equivalent grade with the byproduct credits for Cobalt copper and magnese is 3.2% you don't find resources of this size with this grade with this cost with this little environmental impact on land and so I'm completely convinced we should do this and when deep sea mining starts to scale I think it will stop the need for landbased mines in nickel and Cobalt because they just economically won't be able to compete um we'll have by far the lowest cost in what way does impossible Metals collaborate with the Environmental organizations to engage obviously in research to better understand and minimize obviously the environmental impact of deep sea mining yeah so um you know every six months or so we have a marine uh scientific Roundtable of which we publish the notes where we are getting input from the experts on the design of our vehicle how to conduct studies how to minimize the impact uh and so so that's work that we've been doing for the last 18 months or so you can see uh written reports uh on our website uh but as we are entering into the phase where we're about to be doing ocean trials we will encourage and and hope that we will get Marine scientists to actually publish uh results from those trials um that's something that you know we haven't yet had the capabilities because we're only just beginning to do deep water testing but absolutely you know we we want to be able to have published independent scientific data that shows that our settlement disturbance is much less our biodiversity is much higher because of the selective harvesting our noise and light pollution are much less so we can say it we can show it but ultimately we want Marine scientists uh to to publish and uh to have documented evidence how do impossible Metals ensure transparency in their operations um obviously particularly regarding the extraction and utilization of metals from Deep Sea mining yeah we're we're extremely committed to transparency it's it's very important to us so for instance the um the the demo Day event that we held uh May of last year we published all the presentations all the videos all the telemetric data from that test and you'll see us continue to do this with with other tests but when we get to actual production uh we're pretty keen on supporting a battery passport so that for every ton of material that's collected you will know precisely what date what time what location on the seabed and we'll uh provide video data uh because our vehicles have uh like huge numbers of cameras the Eureka 2 vehicle we're testing right now has something like 13 cameras on board um and so you know we we want to be completely transparent and make all of that available to people are there any specific regions or sites in the deep sea that impossible Metals will Target for obviously your operation um and what criteria are considered when obviously selecting some of these locations yeah so deep sea mining is highly regulated so you can't just go anywhere you have to get permission and typically that starts with exploration so you need to receive an exploration permit this would be typically 75,000 square kilometers is the typical size and it's to find you know GPS coordinates on on a map um and so you you get your exploration permit and then you do the exploration work you do the resource definition the environmental Baseline you collect all the data and then you you submit that to the regulator and ultimately then you get the permission to do exploitation now of the locations um there are three major areas that we are interested in um the Cook Islands um they are within their own exclusive economic zone so they are their own regulator it's called the SE minerals Authority uh they've already issued three exploration permits already um and those companies are working on them so that's a good location uh the second I would say would be somewhere like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone that's an area in international waters between Hawaii and Mexico something like 19 exploration permits have already been issued in that area uh and then the third would be maybe in uh US Territory so you know US has uh a large uh seabed both on the the continental US on the east and west we do know that There Are nodules uh in there but also around minority Islands Hawaii and others um and uh in 1982 Congress passed the legislation that allows the department of the Interior to actually lease uh these areas so those are probably the three areas that we are the most interested in in the short term uh longer term I think there will be other areas as well how does impossible metals contribute to the broader uh conversation on sustainable resource extraction and the transition to obviously Greener Technologies yeah I mean we are trying to show people that deep sea minerals has a great opportunity here you know uh we I think everyone agrees we need 500% more mining to get these transition metals to get to Net Zero uh I saw some data from IEA saying a thousand new mines by 2050 so the question is do we do this where we have the biggest impact which is controlled by China where the environmental aspects are maybe not as well um you know recovered or or respected um or do we do it in an area where the resource is much larger the costs are going to be much less and with our technology the environmental impact is is going to be a fraction I think as your audience knows you know nickel is a key transition metal especially for batteries in EVS today the biggest reserves are in Indonesia and then Australia um and unfortunately almost all of those mines in Indonesia are in rainforest and they're operated by Chinese companies and and so you have a huge amount of biodiversity and biomass and carbon sinks being destroyed to get at the nickel laterite ores that are directly below the rainforest uh and then they use uh HPAL you know high pressure acid leaching as their refining technology and uh they stack up the tailings you know they dry them out they stack them up uh but it's a seismic active area and often you hear of people being forced by soldiers to move away from their village because there's a mine uh so that's nickel Cobalt the DRC in the Congo is the biggest reserves today uh we read often about the human rights violations of children dying in mines being paid $1 to $2 a day uh what if we could replace all of that with the seabed what if you know one of the things I really like about the international treaty is that it's there for everybody there's this concept of the benefits for all humankind so there will be a royalty uh the ISA the international seabed Authority is now deciding how will that royalty be spent my view is we should pay children in the Congo to go to school instead of working in a deep mine um and that potentially could happen so I feel very good about what we're doing I know there are a lot of environmentalists against deep sea mining because we haven't done it um but we do need these resources and with our technology we really preserve the habitat you know we don't destroy it and I believe that's the first time ever that we've been able to do mining where in situ we preserve that habitat you know if we see life we leave it behind uh I don't believe that's ever happened before and that's really something that our technology and the deep sea make possible uh can you discuss the ongoing future innovations that impossible Metals um are exploring to sort of further improve the sustainability and efficiency of their deepsea mining uh operations yeah I mean we obviously have a path to scale our technology so um we're about to test what we call Eureka 2 uh in the deep ocean uh but Eureka 2 is is only has 100 kilogram payload so it's about the size of a small car um three arms it's not large enough for a production operation so we are in development of Eureka 3 this is a much larger vehicle that has 16 arms and has six tons 6,000 kilogram payload so that's the next major design um it's basically the same architecture just bigger uh and we are also in design of an automated launch and recovery system an automated crane uh to speed up the operation so those are two developments uh we also have a small team that's um researching how could we do better refining and this could be applicable to both land and seabed resources you know today we have primarily two approaches uh pyro where we roast at high temperatures or Hydro where we leech with with strong acids uh what if there was a third approach what if we could use natural occurring bacteria to break down the ore without any of the negatives of large energy or large amounts of tailings toxic waste and and so we have a small team that's researching that um and you know we hope that that's something that we could scale up not just for the sea bed but for landbased ores as well and lastly just wonder if you can just give us a um prediction of what's happening with you guys over the next sort of six 12 months the Outlook um and also is there anything else that you want to tell our audience uh around around I suppose your company and your mission uh in deep sea mining yeah I I think the next six to 12 months are you know test and succeed in picking up a nodule in the deep ocean that's a big milestone for us with our autonomous underwater vehicle we will be only the second company uh in the last 50 years to to achieve that and one that's using very very new technology so that's that's the major Milestone um obviously we're a startup so we will look to raise a series a in the next six six to 12 months as well that will allow us to continue the mission and keep going um final thing I would say is um you know everything you kind of read about deep sea mining is is kind of based on this 1960s invented technology if you use 21st century technology you can kind of change the equation and you know reiterate by you know it's a fact that the reserves in the seabed are orders of magnitude bigger than all the all locations on land that's a fact it's also going to be much less expensive because we don't need new infrastructure we don't need to build a you know a motorway or a train line or a village or a power plant we just reuse ships and ports and the ore grade is so high you know 200 years ago we had ore grades of 20% but nowadays we're at a fraction of the percent but in the ocean we're at 3.2 and then finally with our technology we can do it with without hurting any people there's no people living in the deep ocean our system is fully automated uh and from the environmental standpoint our AI detects life and preserves it so you know in all of those metrics economic size of the resource and uh environmental and social impact I believe we're a massive win and that's why I think you know from 2030 uh we're going to have a big place generating you know many many millions of tons of of ore that will contribute to you know 10 to 20% of the worldwide production of nickel and cobalt in in the next decade Oliver really appreciate your time thank you for um sharing your insights to deep sea mining and obviously impossible Metals as well and wondered if our audience wants to reach out to you if they've got any questions especially if they want to follow follow the story and follow um how how you're going with uh obviously the the new technology and and going into operation um how can they go about doing that what social media platforms are you on yeah I I think the best one is our website impossiblemetals.com uh we have
a YouTube channel called impossible metals um we have a quite active LinkedIn page um and X Twitter as well but it's all linked from our our website so I would I would send people to Impossiblemetals.com yeah and they'll be included in the show notes so people can have easy access to them so um like I said really appreciate your time perhaps you can come on later this year next year and give us an update sounds great thank you very much for the opportunity yeah no worries thank you for listening hope you enjoyed that episode um obviously we we on this podcast is mainly all about mining on the land but this is this is obviously something different and there's obviously a big future in deep sea mining so please share this episode to as far as wide as possible people that you know in the industry no matter what country continent you are please keep sharing these episodes really appreciate your continued support and until next time happy mining thank you for listening remember to reach out to Rob via the show notes and be sure to subscribe and leave a review until next time happy mining helping each other to improve the mining industry
2024-02-06 15:40
