Highlights
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2024-11-05 14:59 But I spoke to a scientist there who had done a study which says that if you could halt a hectare of deforestation, that could save 100 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Whereas if you plant a hectare of new growth forest that only stores about 3 tons of carbon dioxide. So they really aren’t comparable. If you chop down a big old tree and then plant a new one, it’s not doing as good a job at storing carbon dioxide.
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2024-11-05 14:58 So dark oxygen is found in the ocean, but I think let’s start with the oxygen that we already knew was in the ocean because I think it’s kind of surprising that the ocean has a lot of oxygen in it.
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2024-11-05 12:53 So in 2013, a scientist called Andrew Sweetman was Measuring oxygen concentrations with depth. And he found, you know, as expected, there’s less oxygen the deeper you got. But bizarrely, at the bottom, he found a sudden increase in the amount of oxygen. Now this was so unexpected that he basically decided, this is an error in my equipment. And he got on with the rest of his work for about a decade.
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2024-11-05 14:57 So they cooked potato. So they’re like cooked black potato. Like rocks, they’re made out of loads and loads of amazing metals like cobalt and nickel and this kind of thing. It looks like what’s happening is they’re basically creating a current, they’re creating some electricity that is breaking water, which is H2O. So it’s made of hydrogen and oxygen. They’re breaking it up into hydrogen and oxygen separately. So they’re basically generating oxygen at the bottom of the ocean, which totally changes the way we think about life in the ocean. I mean, it could be that the first source of oxygen on planet Earth might have been in the ocean, which isn’t what we thought.
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2024-11-05 14:58 Well, these rocks are releasing oxygen and it could well be that marine life in the deep ocean is quite depend on oxygen from these rocks. And because they contain these amazing metals, they’re a real target for deep sea mining. Because if you can Extract them. They’re a great source of things like cobalt and nickel, which we need for batteries and we need if we’re going to be using more renewable energy in the future. So we need them for things like solar panels, chips in data centers, that kind of thing. But maybe it’s not such a good idea to be pulling them off the ocean floor if marine life depends on them. The difficult thing is we don’t really know how important this source of oxygen is yet because the research just isn’t there.
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2024-11-05 14:56 The way they, the miners would present it is a kind of ready made brick of renewable energy metals just waiting to be smelted and separated into the individual materials. Massive pushback from environmental movement which says, why are you going into this pristine environment? It’s a really great journalistic story because on the one hand you’ve got miners saying, we’re the real greens here, we want to do the least possible damage to get these metals out. On the other hand, the environmentalists have these really strong arguments. I mean, what the miners would say is, look, hold on a second. The abyssal plain, the really deep ocean where these nodules form is 70% of the oceans. The oceans are 70% of the world’s surface. So 50% of the entire surface of the world is deep ocean with the capability to form these nodules.
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2024-11-05 14:55 We don’t think we’d ever need to mine the lot out because we take it and then we recycle it. So what we do is we create the stock of metals that’s required for this incredible industrial revolution we’re in the middle of. And then recycle them. So they’re like, this is a one off thing. It’s a hugely extensive ecosystem. It’s a hugely extensive area. And I mean, they don’t actually say this, but they’re like, have you seen the life down there? Like, compare tube worms with Sumatran rainforest. In terms of biodiversity, they literally are completely different worlds. On the business side, interesting thing is the companies that are getting into this are all new Startup companies, they’re not the big miners who have access to metals on the ground who are saying, we have enough metals to get the energy transition going.
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2024-11-05 14:55 If you look at the world, we are good at recycling steel, but we are not very good at recycling lithium or cobalt or nickel. Why is that? Because we’ve not had the economic incentive so far to do it. Now that battery prices are going up because of the metals prices going up, there is an economic incentive being created. But also the regulatory push from the European Union to want to have more recycled content in the battery is making it viable for these companies that do only recycling or that specialize in recycling to actually create a business model. It is a difficult balance because it’s kind of trying to work out is the potential environmental damage worth the potential environmental gain in terms of having these metals for renewable energies in the future.