Almost every complicated industrial process has a point where everyone realizes that something they thought would be easy isn’t really easy at all. For the deep sea mining industry, that moment seems to be coming around a type of ship that most people outside the field have never heard of. It’s happening quietly, without any press releases.
A STARS vessel is what it’s called. Shuttle Ship For Transport And Resupply. The name sounds pretty simple, almost like an office name. Though, when you learn more about what these ships are supposed to do, you’ll understand why some engineers in this field say that moving nodules is one of the most underrated challenges in the industry.
We have a pretty good idea of what deep sea mining is all about now. A big production support ship sits on top of a mineral-rich area of the ocean floor, like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Northern Pacific or parts of the Penrhyn Basin in the Cook Islands. It does this while harvesting equipment pulls up polymetallic nodules that are full of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper. After that, things get more complicated in the story. The nodules need to get from the production ship to a refinery on land. Plus you can’t just hire any old bulk carrier.
The STARS ship is like a shuttle in this situation; it is meant to come alongside or behind the production ship, pick up the ore, and bring it back to port. It also has to bring fuel, food, tools, and crew to the production site, which sounds like a simple task until you think about how far it has to go. Many of these mines are very far from the nearest port, over a thousand miles away. Resupply by helicopter is not an option. That range is too far for platform supply vessels to make money traveling. This makes the STARS carry a lot of things, which changes what it needs to be.
Moving nodules from one ship to another in the middle of the ocean is not a well-known procedure. In wet transfer, ore slurry moves through a hose. In dry transfer, ore moves along a conveyor. Both of these main methods have real problems. STARS needs to have dewatering equipment for the wet method, and then there is the question of what to do with the separated water, which is chemically and thermally different from surface water and can’t just be dumped. Dry transfer doesn’t do that, but the vessels have to be very close to each other and offset errors can be noticeable. It looks like the industry is leaning toward dry transfer, but neither method has been used on a large scale in this setting.
That brings up an important point that you should think about for a moment: there are no published standards for moving dry cargo from one ship to another at sea right now. For oil tankers, the OCIMF/SIGTTO guidance framework is there. There is no other way to transfer dry bulk nodules. One possible place for new rules to come from is the International Subsea Minerals Academy in Texas, but nothing has been made official yet.
Regulations that are hard to understand add to the operational uncertainty. If a STARS ship has more than twelve industrial workers on board, which it almost certainly will, it has to follow the IP Code, which was created by the Maritime Safety Committee in 2022. This is an international safety standard that most standard bulk carriers were not made to meet. When you add the MARPOL rules for ships that transfer fuel to other ships, what at first glance looked like a modified bulk carrier starts to look more like a custom-built ship with a completely different set of specs and a higher price tag.
It’s not easy to do the math for retrofitting. You can find used handymax bulk carriers for a reasonable price on the secondary market, but they would probably cost more and be less useful than a ship that was designed from scratch because they would need to be changed to include Dynamic Positioning systems, tanker-grade hull subdivisions, better accommodations, and crew transfer equipment. The American Bureau of Shipping has done a lot of work on classification rules for this area, and it looks like a formal vessel designation like the one that was given to the Allseas Hidden Gem will happen at some point. But “eventually” is not a good deadline when shipyards around the world are already full and construction lead times are getting longer.
It’s still not clear if the industry as a whole has fully understood what this means. In any extraction industry that needs a lot of capital, the logistics infrastructure is often overlooked in favor of the more important technologies, like the harvesting gear, the processing systems, and the environmental monitoring. The situation with the STARS vessels suggests that “later” may be coming sooner than planned. The ships transporting ore across the open ocean could quietly become the factor that limits which deep sea mining projects reach production and which ones don’t.
