With the expected dramatic increase of mineral resources consumption, deep sea mining (DSM) was proposed as a method supplying the running of world economy by cooperating with or compensating for the terrestrial mining industry. However, its industrialization process is hindered by various reasons including the technological feasibility, economic profitability, and the DSM environmental impacts. The objective of this paper is to calculate the DSM environmental impacts based on a DSM environmental impact framework, which was selected through a systematic literature review in earlier work. The numerical calculations focus on the initial DSM disturbances and plume source, species disturbance, sediment plume and tailings. More importantly, the interconnection between the sediment plume and the species disturbances is also analysed particularly in this paper. The research quantifies the environmental impacts into a systematic framework, which could be helpful to assess the comprehensive environmental performances of a DSM activity and to promote the DSM industrialization process in the future.

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Deep sea mining is an emerging activity which attracts significant attentions from different countries governments and international huge companies around the world. Although its research and development work has been done for roughly half century time, the industrial scale deep sea mining project still has not been implemented yet because of a lot of problems in it, such as the profitability issue and marine environmental impacts. The research conducted in this thesis aims at designing an assessment system to evaluate the sustainability of DSM transport plans. To evaluate the sustainability of deep sea mining transport plans, three types of vertical lifting mechanisms are considered: continuous line bucket lifting system, pipe lifting with centrifugal pumps, and pipe lifting with air pumps in terms of the energy consumption, profitability and the caused environmental impacts. The research starts with a systematic literature review on the current research status of deep sea mining activity sustainability development to find out the existing research gaps and the influencing aspects to achieve this goal. Based on the literature review, it is clear that the sustainability of a deep sea mining transport plan could be influenced by its technological performance, e.g., energy consumption and technology maturity, the economic profitability, the environmental impacts and the social impacts.@en

Deep sea mining was identified in the middle of last century. However, its industrialization and commercialization today are limited in the costal mining industry due to the high mining cost and technical issues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a green transport plan of deep sea mining systems in terms of the optimal efficiency of the rigid pipe lifting system and the total energy consumption. The deep sea mining facilities considered in this paper consist of a mineral collecting machine, a flexible hose, a rigid pipe, a grinding machine, a concentrating machine and a horizontal pipe conveyor. Centrifugal pump modelling and its working principle are researched, because it is the major transport facility. The relationship between the optimal efficiency, total energy consumption, transport loss factor, and the relating mining parameters is determined by numerical simulations and fittings under Fortran and Matlab environment, and the optimization under 1st Opt environment. The research conducted in this paper is valuable for the pre-evaluation of deep sea mining transport systems and the further realization of its industrialization and commercialization process.@en

Since the gradual decrease of mineral resources on-land, deep sea mining (DSM) is becoming an urgent and important emerging activity in the world. However, until now there has been no commercial scale DSM project in progress. Together with the reasons of technological feasibility and economic profitability, the environmental impact is one of the major parameters hindering its industrialization. Most of the DSM environmental impact research focuses on only one particular aspect ignoring that all the DSM environmental impacts are related to each other. The objective of this work is to propose a framework for the numerical calculation methods of the integrated DSM environmental impacts through a literature review. This paper covers three parts: (i) definition and importance description of different DSM environmental impacts; (ii) description of the existing numerical calculation methods for different environmental impacts; (iii) selection of a numerical calculation method based on the selected criteria. The research conducted in this paper provides a clear numerical calculation framework for DSM environmental impact and could be helpful to speed up the industrialization process of the DSM industry@en

Since the gradual decrease of mineral resources on-land, deep sea mining (DSM) is becoming an urgent and important emerging activity in the world. However, until now there has been no commercial scale DSM project in progress. Together with the reasons of technological feasibility and economic profitability, the environmental impact is one of the major parameters hindering its industrialization. Most of the DSM environmental impact research focuses on only one particular aspect ignoring that all the DSM environmental impacts are related to each other. The objective of this work is to propose a framework for the numerical calculation methods of the integrated DSM environmental impacts through a literature review. This paper covers three parts: (i) definition and importance description of different DSM environmental impacts; (ii) description of the existing numerical calculation methods for different environmental impacts; (iii) selection of a numerical calculation method based on the selected criteria. The research conducted in this paper provides a clear numerical calculation framework for DSM environmental impact and could be helpful to speed up the industrialization process of the DSM industry@en

Airlifting technology utilized in deep-sea mining (DSM) industry was proposed in the 70s of last century, which was triggered by the discovery of vast amounts of mineral resources on the seabed. The objective of this paper is to assess the technological feasibility and profitability analyses in terms of solid production rate, energy consumption per tonnage of mineral, and profitability per tonnage of mineral. The effects of submergence ratio, pipe diameter, particle diameter, mining depth, and gas flux rate are investigated. The analysis is based on a numerical calculation performed in a Matlab environment. The research reported in this paper can assist to select an optimal transport plan for DSM projects depending on its solid production rate, energy consumption, and profitability.@en

Deep sea mining tailings disposal is a new environmental challenge related to water pollution, mineral crust waste handling, and ocean biology. The objective of this paper is to propose a new tailings disposal procedure for the deep sea mining industry. Through comparisons of the tailings disposal methods which exist in on-land mining and the coastal mining fields, a new tailings disposal procedure, i.e., the submarine–backfill–dam–reuse (SBDR) tailings disposal procedure, is proposed. It combines deep sea submarine tailings disposal, backfill disposal, tailings dam disposal, and tailings reuse disposal for the deep sea mining industry. Then, the analytic network process (ANP) method is utilized to evaluate the performances of different tailings disposal methods. The evaluation results of the ANP show that the new proposed tailings disposal procedure is the most suitable for the deep sea mining industry@en

This paper presents a comparison of the existing research about the deep sea mining industry, including the deep sea mining necessity, the mineral transport process, the simulation method (numerical and experimental) and the required evaluation parameters. The objective of this paper is to find a research direction to design a green transport plan for a deep sea mining system. The research combines the macroscopic research of the dynamic response simulation of the ship-pipe-miner system together with the microscopic research of the solid-liquid two-phase flow propagation. The coupling work of the macroscopic research and microscopic research follows the fluid-structure interaction principle. An optimal transport plan can be determined depending on the multi-criteria evaluation system. Finally, a control system of the deep sea mining system links the optimization results with the realistic production plans. The research conducted in this paper is meaningful for the pre-design and evaluation of a deep sea mining project.@en

In the literature, the continuous line bucket (CLB) lifting system and the pipe lifting system (PLS), as two typical mineral lifting methods in deep sea mining (DSM) systems, have been discussed since the 1960s. The purpose of this paper is to determine an appropriate lifting method for deep sea mining systems at different working conditions. The determination is based on the comparison of the analysis results of the two typical lifting methods considering the technology performance and the profitability. The analysis is based on a numerical calculation performed in a matlab environment. This paper shows the comparison of the results of the CLB system and PLS in terms of the lifting efficiency, the energy consumption, and the profitability. The research reported in this paper can be utilized to select a proper lifting method for a DSM project depending on its specific criteria analysis.
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