Norwegian Seabed Offers Minerals for the Future

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) has found that the country's continental shelf is unusually rich in minerals that will be useful for electrification, it said June 7.

Its chemical analyses of sulphides and manganese crusts from the Norwegian shelf reveal that the sulphides contain a high content of copper, zinc and cobalt. Cobalt is used in car batteries. The sulphides "have a relatively high content of copper (up to 14% in some samples), zinc (3%) and cobalt (less than 1%), it said. It did not comment on the possible opposition to a potential large-scale disturbance of the seabed.

"These are important metals as society moves towards increasing electrification. They are also in demand from the industrial sector. The content of metals in sulphides and manganese crusts from the Norwegian shelf is higher than what is found in samples from other parts of the world," the NPD said.

The UK paper The Times reported June 6 that globally, supplies of cobalt are limited and that this poses a risk to plans to electrify transport affordably and on the scale needed to decarbonise. Geologists that comprise the Security of Supply of Mineral Resources (SSMR), a government-funded research project, told another government-funded body, the Committee for Climate Change, that its call for net zero emissions in the UK by 2050 entirely omits the challenge of the metal resources needed, the paper said.

It quoted the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum and an SSMR member Richard Herrington saying that it would take 15,600 metric tons of cobalt to build the 2.3mn cars sold in the UK each year and potentially much more by 2035, while European industrial demand for cobalt is only 19,800 mt. The UK would also need 20,000 mt/yr of lithium carbonate, which is about 45% of the present European demand.