Glencore Buys Underwater Metals Mining
Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trading company, has agreed to buy 50% of the nickel and copper mined from the seafloor by DeepGreen Resources.
DeepGreen, based in Vancouver, Canada, is using the Nautilus underwater harvester to mine the seafloor of the Pacific off Mexico’s shore.
This has been a volatile time for Nautilus coming off 2 major issues this month. They started out making progress at the Solwara 1 project, however they are now embroiled in a legal battle with the Papua New Guinea government. In addition, they had funding issues on their main mining ship. These caused investors to panic as stocks dropped 50% in 2 days. Many investors familiar with the projects are very skeptical in the prospects of undersea mining.
Nautilus believe that they can product 60,000 tonnes of nickel, 50,000 tonnes of copper, and 1.3 million tonnes of manganese annually. This would easily make them one of the largest metals producers in the world. However they are still very far from realizing these kind of levels.
Although this project seems revolutionary, it is actually just a new spin on an old project from the 1970s — which also failed to live up to expectations. So Glencore is taking a fairly large gamble by partnering with DeepGreen.
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