In meeting these challenges, Aker Wirth can draw on its many years of experience and expertise as a partner to customers in the mining as well as for the oil and gas industries. For more than 20 years, the company has been successfully supplying drilling systems for the extraction of diamonds from the seabed.
The efficient and environmentally-friendly air-lift technology shall be used to transport the manganese nodules to the drilling vessel. It has proven its worth at Aker Wirth both in diamond mining and in pile foundation drilling. Moreover, the company has demonstrated its capabilities in numerous projects for the exploration of oil and gas reserves at great water depths.
In 2012, Aker Wirth, together with other companies from the industry, conducted a profitability analysis for the complete manganese nodule mining system, with support from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Various economic and ecological conditions for the mining of key raw materials (such as cobalt, nickel and copper) from manganese nodules were analysed.
The study addressed the entire process chain from the collecting of manganese nodules to the transport of materials and right through to land-based processing. The study comes to the conclusion that deep-sea mining is very lucrative, even given the current prices of raw materials and anticipated price developments.
“At present, efforts are being made at an international level to first of all establish the regulations regarding mining of manganese nodules, which will then serve as a basis for the development of mining and transport systems”, concludes Mr Knodt. „As a consequence, the mining of manganese nodules will probably reach an industrial scale in five to ten years’ time.”
- See more at: http://www.austmine.com.au/News/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1540/The-future-of-deep-sea-mining#sthash.jGSUNxsm.dpuf