Sustainability of Deep Sea Mining Transport Plans

Abstract

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.