Google, BMW, Volvo and Samsung SDI are the first global companies to have signed up to a World Wide Fund for Nature call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, the WWF said on Wednesday.
Deep-sea mining would extract cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese — key materials commonly used to make batteries — from potato-sized nodules which pepper the sea floor at depths of 4km-6km and are particularly abundant in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, a vast area spanning millions of kilometres between Hawaii and Mexico.
The moratorium calls for a ban on deep seabed mining activities until the risks are fully understood and all alternatives are exhausted. Companies that hold exploration licences for swathes of the sea floor, including DeepGreen, GSR and UK Seabed Resources — a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin's UK-based arm — hope to eventually sell minerals from the seabed to carmakers and battery companies.