Competitors, like The Metals Company, use giant machines that roll along the seabed and suck up the nodules, a highly controversial technique.
Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told AFP this method scoops up ocean floor using collectors or excavators, “a bit like bulldozers,” he explained.
Everything is then brought up to ships, where the nodules are separated from waste, which is tossed back into the ocean.
This creates large plumes of sediment and toxins with a multitude of potential impacts, he said.
A less invasive approach, like that advocated by Impossible Metals, would reduce the risk of environmental damage, McCauley explained.
But he noted lighter-touch harvesting is not without risk.
The nodules themselves also harbor living organisms, and removing them even with a selective technique, involves destroying the habitat, he said.
Impossible Metals admits its technology cannot detect microscopic life, but the company claims to have a policy of leaving 60 percent of the nodules untouched.
McCauley is unconvinced, explaining “ecosystems in the deep ocean are especially fragile and sensitive.”
“Life down there moves very slowly, so they reproduce very slowly, they grow very slowly.”
Duncan Currie of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition said it was impossible to assess the impact of any deep sea harvesting.
“We don’t know enough yet either in terms of the biodiversity and the ecosystem down there,” he told AFP.
According to the international scientific initiative Ocean Census, only 250,000 species are known, out of the two million that are estimated to populate the oceans.
High demand
Mining is “always going to have some impact,” said Impossible Metals chief executive and co-founder Oliver Gunasekara, who has spent most of his career in the semiconductor field.