Outer space and outta control

Outer space and outta control

An important aim of this site is to anticipate where mining companies are heading in the near future: whose territory they may be expected to enter; with which states they will be negotiating; what minerals and metals lie within their sights.

It’s not an easy task. The industry evinces a deplorable lack of transparency and there is hardly any greater openness displayed by government agencies and private banks or multilateral investors. To be fair, it’s often impossible for companies and their consultants to predict the outcomes of a specific project. They rightly tell us that only one in 300 (or 1 in 500, even a thousand) exploration ventures end in a viable mine. Moreover, judging an appropriate balance between metals supply and demand is notoriously difficult. Not even the London Metals Exchange – the sector’s largest spot and futures market – necessarily knows who is dealing in what metals, or what physical stocks may be available, at any moment.

However, such uncertainties should make us more, rather than less, alarmed about any new, let alone unknown, fields into which miners appear to be moving. The latest allegations against foreign companies, of complicity in human rights atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, surely justify resumption of a mining moratorium, at least for some parts of the country. The call, made by many Indonesian NGOs three years ago for a ban on all mining in protected forests, seems even more valid now than it was then.

At least general debate about these issues can be framed in terms of preventing the contravention of specific rights, the acceleration of adverse climate change, or the destruction of irreplaceable natural resources. But proposals, recently mooted by some mining proponents, go where existing rules just cannot reach.

Out of sight, out of mind

Take seabed exploration. Although there is a UN law of the sea, supposedly governing the exploitation of submarine resources, it is neither methodically applied to corporate seabed exploration, nor to mineral rich “vents” which play a crucial role in guaranteeing the integrity of oceanic life. Last March, Placer Dome financed a joint venture with Sydney-based Nautilus Minerals, enabling the Canadian company to survey sulphide based gold emerging from such vents, located off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

The CEO of Nautilus described the plan as a “world first for exploration”. This statement alone should have set alarm bells ringing among marine biologists, fisher folk, international lawyers and environmentalists at large. Yet it doesn’t seem to have sparked any concern - including from the PNG government itself.

Then, within the past fortnight, the Japanese government has proposed making a “journey to the centre of the earth” (or at least drilling six miles into its crust) to find out what’s there. It’s surely the height of naivety to believe that this is simply a disinterested scientific investigation with no intended commercial pay-off. Here again, though, the announcement passed off with hardly a murmur of concern.

In theory it might be possible to devise international treaties to control such unprecedented (if so far largely conjectural) moves beyond the limits of traditional earth-bound extraction. Unfortunately there seems a complete lack of political will to do so. In any case, how could mining deep below the earth’s surface, or at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, be effectively policed? For the past fifteen years, it has proved impossible to determine accurately the impacts of submarine tailings dumping, even though this may take place just 100 metres or so below the surface and only a few kilometres offshore.

Lunacy

And now we have the most grotesque spectre of all: mining outer space, not simply on the moon (where mineral “grabbing” on a small scale has been an integral part of moon shots since the 1960s) but on Mars and beyond.

Bogus sales of “plots” on our nearest celestial body have been offered for some years via the internet, and no doubt some unsuspecting people have fallen for such a literally lunatic scam. This time it’s deadly serious. NASA, the world’s most powerful space agency, is proposing large scale access to extra-terrestrial resources and seeking Canadian mining expertise for assistance.

The initial justification is to enable space craft to find fuel and minerals to re-equip themselves. Nonetheless, a NASA spokesperson has already gone much further than this, speculating that planetary plunder could compensate for the rapid diminishing of earth’s own minerals.

The idea may seem fantastical, or a ruse from deep within the US military-industrial complex to appropriate even more public funds. After all, during the uranium boom years of the seventies, Japanese scientists secured money from their government to extract uranium (at one part per million!) from sea water; a pilot plant proved it could be done.

Not surprisingly, this was where that particular experiment ended. Unfortunately – without a major outcry - stopping NASA’s crazy project in its tracks may not prove so easy.

[Comment by Nostromo Research, London, June 19 2005]