Copper is lifted off the sea floor. (Courtesy of Nautilus Minerals)

There is a new hybrid car on the drawing board that cuts exhaust emissions nearly in half. But to build it, you need twice as much copper.

That is the point David Heydon makes when speaking about the controversial (to some) deep-sea project his Vancouver-based company wants to undertake off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

No other company has ever before extracted significant amounts of copper, gold, zinc and silver from the ocean floor. And despite a recent spate of environmental concerns — some scientists compare deep-sea dredging to destroying an eco-system as complex as a tropical rain forest — Heydon's Nautilus Minerals is plowing ahead.

It recently signed a contract for the construction of a customized, $120-million US ship that will be able to control remote-operated drilling rigs 1,700 metres below the surface.

Providing environmental assessments pan out, Heydon has his eye on a 2009 start to excavate gold and copper deposits in the Bismarck Sea off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea.

The event, he says, should be "as world-changing as off-shore oil and gas in the 1950s. If we hadn't have gone off-shore in the '50s, you and I wouldn't have turned the lights on, or come in on a train, bus or car today."

Metal requirements are much greater now with the rise of consuming middle classes in China and India. As he argues, turning from land to the sea could help supply the world with the metals it needs, not only for everyday gadgets, but to manufacture environmentally friendlier cars and solar panels or to shelter people in poorer countries with zinc-covered roofs.

"At the end of the day, where is society going to get more copper and zinc? While we all have our plasma televisions, our fancy tools and coffee makers, people in developing countries would be happy just for a galvanized roof," said Heydon, the Australian head of Vancouver-based Nautilus, while on a business trip to meet institutional and funding investors in San Francisco.

The next gold rush?

For a recent Pacific cruise, Nautilus filled up the boat with geologists and geophysicists who traversed some of the seabed territory licensed to Heydon. It includes Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. They explored a United Kingdom-sized portion of the sea floor, the area they're authorized by the Papua New Guinea government to collect data from.

What they found in just one month was more than some scientists spend a career looking for. It amounted to four major deposits of minerals.

This pot of gold on the bottom of the ocean may outweigh what's on land in more ways than one. Although metallurgy tests have yet to be completed — Nautilus will measure the depth of these deposits — the ore looks more than promising, and mining it could be less intrusive than with land pits.

David Heydon, CEO of the Vancouver-based Nautilus Minerals, is shown in London, England, after winning a Mining Journal pioneer award. (Courtesy of Nautilus Minerals)

"One of the problems is that 85 per cent of the deposits found on land are uneconomic. Geologists find them. They drill them. They do the engineering, and then they don't mine them. They have to walk away," Heydon said.

Land deposits are generally too small to justify the high costs to develop them. Mining on land means creating sinking shafts, the gaping holes drilled thousands of metres into solid rock so workers and equipment can exploit metals deep in the earth.

With this reality, Nautilus has managed to put together a $300-million US merger of sorts with a handful of mainly traditional mining companies. As part of the deal, these partners have agreed not to compete with Nautilus for nearly five years, and have imbedded staff into the company's Australia offices, where Heydon is based. These eager companies have also bought up Nautilus stock, which has doubled since 2006.

Heydon said he hopes to lean on his partners for their expertise: Jan De Nul is a Belgium-based dredging company with a fleet of large ships equipped to suck up earth from the ocean floor. Similarly, Anglo American, with expertise in sea diamond mining off the coast of Namibia, has signed on. And the world's biggest zinc and gold land mining companies, Teck Cominco and Barrick Gold (respectively), have joined in.

To the beginnings of earth

Although Nautilus might save the world some greenhouse gases, the question raised by environmentalists is: What will mining do to a seabed known as the "cradle of civilization?"

The excavations will take place on the ocean floor near hydrothermal vents from deep inside the earth. These are vents that release natural bubbles, an effervescent indicator for Nautilus of lucrative minerals.

But the vents are also where scientists suspect the earth's living creatures originated.

Because the magma-heated waters produce large quantities of nutrients, the area is overrun with unusual species. Clams, molluscs and sulphur-imbibing bacteria rely on the rare ecosystem and its high nutrient deposits, which are created when warmer waters from the vents meet more frigid ones in the deep ocean.

Moreover, the ecosystem can be a haven for scientific studies; it's already been lauded as an area for potential groundbreaking pharmaceutical research.

As a result, two prominent science journals published articles in May cautioning against prospecting there. Science magazine, and Nature quoted environmentalists who waved red flags.

A special part of the earth

It's an area that needs more study, according to Jochen Halfar, an assistant marine geology professor at the University of Toronto, who co-authored the Science article.

Halfar is exceptionally interested in ocean-bed mining's environmental effects, a scientific topic he said has been overlooked. In fact, he has been following Nautilus's project for seven years.

Because of these concerns, Heydon, a geologist himself, has insisted on studies to coincide with the mining project. So far, he's done environmental expeditions with experts from the likes of the Scripps Research Institute, University of Toronto and Duke University. They collected samples and reviewed the area.

Heydon said he's giving the scientists free reign to make any comments to the public or press. In about a year, their evidence will be presented in a document for public discussion.

One specific concern is that sediment plumes, thrown upward during the mining process, might alter or even devastate the seabed habitat.

Heydon refuted this point after reading about it in Science, clarifying that the type of mining used won't be disruptive enough to stir up particles in this way.

But Halfar cautioned that without attempting the process first, or at least modelling it, effects wouldn't be known.

"We are concerned that just the general crushing up of ore underwater will create a plume by itself, which I don't think will be entirely sucked up by hydraulic suction devices. The plumes cannot be avoided, I would say," Halfar explained.

And he warned that minerals suctioned aboard the mining ship would be accompanied by deep-sea water specific to the vent habitats. If this nutrient-rich water is funnelled back out into sea-level waters that have fewer nutrients, the process could disrupt yet another ecosystem at the surface, including fish habitat.

Halfar confirmed the existence of high-grade levels of ore that are easier to mine than on land. Seabed deposits lie on the surface, which should prove much simpler to extract, he said.

But that triggers a bigger concern down the road. Halfar's afraid if Nautilus's venture proves to be as profitable as it seems, there could be a bigger gold rush of sorts.

Other companies will likely want to join in prospecting the 250 vent areas already discovered throughout the world, and Halfar thinks more spots will be found. Case in point, the British mining company Neptune Minerals plans to explore a more spread-out region of potential deposits with licenses from several countries.

What this could bring is the eventual destruction of an ecosystem. As Halfar explains, the consequences could be farther-reaching than expected: "If you get ecosystems out of balance on this earth anywhere you will bring other ecosystems out of balance. It's basically the same thing as destroying a tropical rain forest."

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