In 2023, the first ever high resolution Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) footage was obtained for the nodule fields at the bottom of the Cook Islands seafloor. A ROV is a scientific/work platform that is lowered from a boat all the way to the seabed. There is no-one on board, which makes them very safe and simpler to operate, according to SBMA. Photo: Screengrab/YouTube/Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority
The Cook Islands government is considering extending its deep sea mining exploration licences.
The Cook Islands is three-and-a-half years into its five-year exploration phase.
After the exploration phase is the potential for mining, or as the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA) calls it "harvesting", but mining can only happen if companies can prove to the government it can take place without causing serious environmental harm.
SBMA partnerships and cooperation director Edward Herman said an extension of the exploration phase is being looked at.
"There is a likelihood of [the exploration license] being extended because if we cannot get the data within the next year and a half it's very likely that we'll need to extend it," Herman said.
"Sometimes license holders can perform a lot of work within a year and a half but at the moment it's tough. It's very challenging, not only for our license holders, but for us as an agency, as a regulator."
Herman said more information is needed before a decision is made on whether mining can proceed.
"We need baseline data to make an ethical, informed, science-based decision, so if the data is not available, we will require more data."
Hans Smit, the chief executive officer of deep sea mining company Moana Minerals said an extension of an exploration license is "definitely" needed for his company.
"If you just look at the time it takes for the Cook Islands to assess and evaluate our environmental permit application and our mining license application, there's not enough time. If I were to submit tomorrow, I wouldn't have an answer before my exploration license expired."
But Smit is bullish about the industry. If everything goes to plan, which he said is a big if, mining could start in 2028/2029.
"It's not a question of if we go mining, it's a question of when we go mining," he said.
"We certainly haven't run into any massive abundance of animals that could create a problem. We are also seeing that the animals that we are seeing are reasonably dispersed across the greater Cook Islands area… as far as the biodata is concerned, we can show that we won't do significant harm.
"Everywhere we're looking, we are yet to find something that we feel is a potential roadblock that's going to stop us from moving forward."
Smit said he felt there was enough data to start mining but not enough to underpin a mining application.
He said more data is needed over a period of time to show the conclusions reached are not outliers.
Environmental NGO Te Ipukarea Society president June Hosking thinks exploration is a good but worries the focus is on how commercially viable the industry is, not so much on what the environmental implications of mining would be.
"I personally think if they do honest exploration they would discover it's not a good idea to mine that it's going to do too much damage to the environment and the only way to prove that is to do the exploration," she said.
"It would be nice if people just left the whole thing alone, but humans aren't like that."
Smit said Moana Minerals had mapped 15 percent of the Cook Islands exclusive economic zone and had more than 100 hours of sea floor nodules.
He said the Moana Minerals mining system design is complete and the vessel that would be used for mining had been identified.
"What we are waiting for is at what point do we decide to pull the trigger and start doing that work, to convert this ship into the mining vessel."
On the processing side, Smit said the company had developed its own metal extraction process, which has been proven in a laboratory scale.
He said the company is now testing if nodules could be processed at a higher capacity.
