| 1) this underestimates the scale of increase in nickel supply we're gonna see in the next five years. last year 3.3m tonnes. by 2025 it's gonna be 5m tonnes, by 2030 11m. on current trends, the vast majority of that comes from Indonesia (today it does 54% of global up from 17% in 2018). if TMC can't compete on price, there's no alternative. small hard rock mines don't make any difference. it's CCZ vs Indo to first order. TMC says its floor price is $6000, meaning there's significant room to undercut. and that's before things like battery passporting and carbon pricing come into play, which drive up indo costs. bear in mind that my view in face of relative enviro and emissions footprints is that car companies and countries should be supporting CCZ nickel and calling for moratoria on Indo nickel, though I don't expect this to happen any time soon 2) 30X is the absolute minimum, as it only accounts for plant biomass in Indo rainforest. the real number is probably closer to 150x. here are my sources for the calculation so you can rerun it yourself - 2g/m^2 biomass in CCZ see "Community Dynamics and Diversity" heading https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.0000... - 30kg/m^2 of just plant life in Sulawesi. in the abstract. 303Mg/hectare https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781... - NORI-D nickel per hectare from this SEC filing - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1798562/000121390021... - Sulawesi nickel per hectare from this investigative reporting https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/illegal-nickel-laundering (note: this leads to an estimate that is much too high. There is research going though peer review which shows there is much less nickel per hectare, which makes the biomass destruction numbers far worse for Indo nickel 3) I did ask him what he and his peers thought about DSM. I didn't quote him on it due to aforementioned space constraints. I would describe his position as broadly open, contingent on strict controls. He described deep sea mining as having been amazing for science, creating the incentive to do science in the CCZ that would never have happened otherwise. And as for the idea that the piece doesn't mention direct destruction of habitat...that is the central idea of the piece No mention is made of the potential use of the CCZ for whale feeding as it is incredibly speculative. see the original paper https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180286. it explains why feeding is unlikely: there is almost no food down there |