The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of Impossible Metals
Deep-sea mining for critical battery minerals in a sustainable way, with robots instead of dredging ("tweezers instead of a bulldozer")
Oliver Gunasekara is the CEO and co-founder of Impossible Metals, a startup working to use robots and AI “tweezers” to mine critical battery minerals from the seafloor without harming ocean life, unlike dredging’s “bulldozer” effect. He has previously worked at semiconductor company ARM and founded tech company NGCodec.
A lightly edited transcript of this exclusive interview follows. This writer’s questions and remarks are in bold, Mr. Gunasekara’s responses are in regular type. Bold italics and image captions are clarifications and extra information added after the interview.
I'd love to discuss your journey to your current position at Impossible Metals.
It basically happened during the pandemic. I had sold my last company and was looking around for what to do next. I was getting increasingly concerned about the climate crisis. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we had really bad wildfires, the sky went orange. That was the final push to say, if I’m going to create a new company it needs to be something helping the move to electrification and away from fossil fuels.
At the same time, I discovered The Metals Company. [Deep-sea mining startup The Metals Company (TMC) has secured access to Nauru’s NORI patch of the CCZ and hopes to soon be commercially producing seabed sourced nickel]. I was a little surprised by the fact that they were using dredging technology to harvest these modules. I found that that dredging technology hadn’t changed in fifty years. I thought, there must be a way to use modern technology, robots, AI, semiconductors, to lower the environmental impact and lower the cost. So that was really the birth of Impossible Metals.
We use autonomous underwater vehicles, AUVs. They’re battery-powered, not tethered, they move along the water column [not scraping along the bottom like a dredge]. They use cameras to look for and detect the nodules, then operate a robotic arm to pick it up1. One of the nice implications of this is that if we detect megafauna, or life of some other kind like corals, it can then leave it alone.
Last year we built EUREKA-1, our proof of concept AUV. It can go 25 meters, 75 feet underwater.
That vehicle achieved fully autonomous pickup of nodules in May 2023.
We are now in the construction phase of EUREKA II. Much larger, about the size of a small car, it has three arms, it can go 6000 meters or 4 miles deep. We are building it now, in November 2023 we will test it in a lake, and in December 2023 we will test it in the ocean.
Wow, you’re really far along!
We haven’t made a big fuss about it yet. I did mention it at the annual Underwater Mineral Conference in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.
So what kind of regulatory barriers do you expect? I know the international regulations weren’t finalized when they were expected to be finalized by in July 2023-does that mean it’s currently open for mining in international waters?
So, International Seabed Authority that meets quarterly and is headquartered in Jamaica has authority over international waters. But countries have authority over their own exclusive economic zone (EEZ), their territorial waters. The Cook Islands, the United States, India, Papua New Guinea, many countries are interested in deep-sea mining. (Here’s Oliver’s blog post on the current status of deep-sea mining regulations).
The ISA was hoping that exploitation regulations for international waters would be finalized by July 2023, but they’re not. They said they will get them finished next year [2024] and formally adopted by early 2025. In theory, there’s a loophole right now where you could apply before the regulations are finished, but nobody’s going to do that.
This is highly regulated. Before exploitation or production, you have to apply for an exploration permit. And one of the conditions is you have to spend fifty million dollars doing environmental impact assessments. And this is true whether it’s domestic regulations or international. So our strategy is to focus on the technology and partner with companies that already have that exploration permit.
A bunch of companies already have exploration permits and don’t really have a technical plan yet, right? So you plan to be the other half of that equation.
Well, they probably plan to use dredging, because that’s the only technology currently available. But the environmental impact assessment is very expensive. The Metals Company has spent over $100 million dollars.
For renewables in the US, there’s often some serious issues with being held to higher standards than fossil fuels, because fossil fuels have been around for a long time and have lots of legal loopholes and lobbyists already on their side, while renewables are coming of age and trying to scale up when there are lots of existing regulations. Do you feel that your “tweezers” AUV technology might end up having an easier, harder, or the same difficulty getting permitted as the incumbent “bulldozer” dredging technology?
I honestly don’t know, but I don’t think we’ll be at a disadvantage. Nobody has yet been handed an exploitation permit. As of today, the international exploitation regulations are in development at the ISA, and the Cook Islands and others are in various stages of domestic exploitation regulations. I do think that since our technology doesn’t impact the seabed, I hope that our environmental impact process is easier and less expensive.
What are your thoughts on the global "critical minerals race”? We’re seeing the US-led Minerals Security Partnership trying to de-risk from China's mineral processing supply chain. There’s a US Under Secretary of State, Jose Fernandez, going to places like Papua New Guinea and Mongolia to connect with new sources of rare earth elements and other key battery minerals. Is there any US government national security interest in your technology?
There is, but I’m not authorized to talk about that at this moment in time.
Good to know that they’re on the ball!
The US has a very large EEZ, over 11.3 million square kilometers. There are lots of critical minerals, off the East Coast on the Blake Plateau, around Hawaii, and around the United States Minor Outlying Islands [which include Johnson Atoll, Jarvis Island, Wake Island, Howland Island, etc]. American Samoa is also very interesting because it borders the Cook Islands. And the Cook Islands have done extensive work. It’s very likely that the resource is in the American Samoa.
This sounds pretty amazing, like deep-sea mining technology could be a major positive supply-side shock to the renewables revolution and really the whole world economy. I’ve read that mineral nodules in the CCZ alone likely hold more nickel than the world’s entire currently-known land-based reserves, and with your technology they could be harvested in an environmentally responsible way. How fast do you think you can scale up?
2026 is when we hope to start production with a small fleet of AUVs. By 2030, we could harvest 6 million tonnes of nodules a year, with 128 of our robots. That would be harvesting 10 to 15% of the world’s entire annual production of cobalt. Our strategy is that we think the ocean can supply all of the world’s needs for nickel and cobalt from 2030 onwards. And our environmental impacts are significantly better than mining in Africa or in Indonesia2, which has huge impacts. So potentially no new land based mines for nickel and cobalt from 2030, as the ocean would provide all of the new capacity.
Are you seeing any opposition from current major nickel and cobalt producers? There’s a long history of incumbents trying to build a regulatory moat to keep out competitors.
Almost all of the countries lobbying the ISA to ban deep-sea mining have large domestic mining operations. France is a big example. They have a big nickel mine in New Caledonia. You can see why it’s threatening to them that we could produce this metal at a lower cost and with lower environmental impacts.
So some countries are lobbying to ban deep-sea mining, and they’re doing it in the name of conservation, but it’s essentially just protectionism, trying to keep out competition. Even when that competition is better for wildlife!
This tends to be countries that don’t have deep-sea mining resources in their waters and do have domestic mining resources on their land. Those tend to be most vocal for calling for a ban on the international stage.
You also have people like Greenpeace that are violently opposed to deep-sea mining. Greenpeace really stopped a decade or more of innovation in nuclear power, and what we’ve realized now is we lost that time, nuclear is an important mix in the package of renewables. We’ve also ended up with regulations in nuclear power that are now very burdensome. It becomes hard for nuclear power to compete with fossil fuels. The strategy of Greenpeace is delay, delay, delay, and then impose heavy regulatory burdens. And they’re trying to do that with deep-sea mining.
8 million people die a year from bad air quality. If we’d pushed harder on nuclear power, we could have avoided a lot of that.
Yeah, that’s always tough for me to hear, because as a kid I idolized Greenpeace, I read Rex Weyler’s Greenpeace and daydreamed about the heroes saving the whales. And their anti-whaling campaigns were indeed incredibly good and effective. But it’s true. The more research I’ve done over the years, the more I’ve found that that kind of anti-tech environmentalism often leads to terrible outcomes. I wrote an article about that, about how nuclear power on its worst day kills fewer people than fossil fuels operating normally. That’s part of what my writing is trying to do, be part of the ecomodernist movement, encourage people to do the cost-benefit analyses and see when banning technology might have negative consequences.
So moving away from the regulatory side, the Biden Administration is investing a huge amount in clean manufacturing and clean energy technologies, through the CHIPS Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and of course the Inflation Reduction Act. Has any of that been helpful for Impossible Metals?
It’s very helpful, especially the Inflation Reduction Act. If you onshore the processing of critical minerals for batteries, then you can get an advanced manufacturing tax credit which is quite substantial. We’re planning to have the minerals we harvest processed in the US or a free trade-associated country so we’d qualify for that credit. This is very favorable for our business.
Are you looking at qualifying for any other countries’ renewables subsidies?
We’re really focused on the US. As a US company, that fits really nicely with what we’re doing. The Inflation Reduction Act is a massive help. There’s some grants under the Defense Production Act. We’re hoping to eventually apply to the Department of Energy Loan Program Office for capital to scale up our fleet.
The DOE LPO under Jigar Shah, right. I’ve written about their work a lot, they’re making a lot of spectacular investments in clean energy. Thank you for doing this work, by the way!
We’re really trying to reinvent the space. Deep-sea mining, a lot of people when they first hear about it are understandably opposed. But we need to get these metals. Recycling, yes, in the long term, but there’s not enough yet. When we mine them in Africa, there’s often huge human rights violations. And in Indonesia, rainforests are being cut down to get these metals. We think we can solve all of these problems by going to seabed and using advanced AI technology to avoid the habitat not destroy the habitat.
Great!
This is the first time, with mining, where you’re doing selective harvesting. Like the alternatives to clear-cutting in forests, where you only remove a few trees. It’s only now that the technology has made that possible.
Even if Greenpeace and France do manage to get the ISA to ban deep sea mining in international waters, do you think you can still reach your goal of a fleet of robots harvesting millions of tonnes of nodules by 2030? Do you think you could get a nation-state partner and be able to make that timeline?
Yeah, I do. Because there’s plenty of countries where we can go mining in their domestic waters. The US notably. You’ve got a dozen jurisdictions in various stages. Look at the Cook Islands, small nation, less than 20,000 people, massive EEZ, and they’ve already issued exploration permits [remember, that’s a permit to look for minerals, different from exploitation permits to mine for minerals, which nobody has yet in the deep-sea mining space]. They’re at a big risk of climate change, and they’re not a rich country, they don’t have the money to build sea defenses. But they do have minerals that can help by generating revenue for them and going into electric vehicles. I mean, who’s to say they can’t do that?
Thank you for doing this! It has been great talking with you.
Thanks, Sam! Bye.
It’s a good time to add the reminder that even though you’re hearing about lots of new mining for nickel, lithium, rare earth elements, and other key battery minerals, it still adds up to hundreds of thousands times less mining overall than keeping the fossil fuel industry going, because we constantly burn oil, coal, and gas in large amounts but small amounts of these metals do their job in batteries for decades. It’s just posing new logistical issues because we’re ramping up production of a bunch of minerals that we didn’t historically use that much of. So even though there’s lots of discussion about the environmental impacts of renewables mining, all of it together is still way, way less than fossil fuel mining!
Indonesia is producing so much nickel that prices have actually fallen substantially, so nickel is plentiful for the fast-growing battery world at the moment. However, a lot of these nickel mines are eating away at Indonesian rainforests on and around the island of Sulawesi, where they’re causing substantial human and environmental impacts. Even worse, a lot of the nickel smelters are powered by highly polluting coal plants. Indonesia burned 33% more coal in 2022 than 2021, in part due to the nickel boom as their nickel production rose by 60% in 2022 alone. Despite agreeing to an international JETP deal to help finance Indonesia’s move away from coal, the dirty fuel will likely remain dominant on the nation’s grid for at least the next few years.
So that’s kind of disappointing, that we have to endure short-term coal use increases and rainforest destruction to help fight climate change. If it were just that, it might be viewed as a painful but necessary short-term tradeoff. But deep-sea mining provides another option, a way to ensure a global supply of nickel. And mining with robots instead of dredging could ensure minimal environmental damages!