The idea of extracting gold and copper from the ocean floor, thousands of meters below the surface, in water so dark and pressurized that even the machinery must be specifically imagined into existence, has an almost mythological quality. For years, the Canadian company Nautilus Minerals Inc. insisted that this was a near-future industrial reality rather than a fantasy, and they built their entire corporate identity around that image. And Papua New Guinea believed them for a long, costly, and painful period of time.
Targeting hydrothermal vents that contained copper, gold, silver, and zinc, the Solwara 1 project was located 1.6 kilometers below the Bismarck Sea. At a time when the majority of land-based mines were barely surviving on less than half a percent, the mineral grades were truly remarkable, with estimated copper levels of 7.2%. It looked like an investor’s paradise on paper. In reality, it fell apart with the kind of gradual inevitability that only becomes clear in retrospect.
With a 15% share in the business, the PNG government had invested PGK 327 million, or about AUD $157 million. That is a substantial amount for an island nation in the Pacific, and the decision to commit it was based in part on projections, in part on faith, and in part on the allure of a new industry that promised cleaner returns than conventional land mining. However, comprehensive feasibility studies were lacking. It was the first time deep-sea mining had been done on that scale and at that depth. Three remotely operated seafloor machines that the company had designed and built were in fact in storage, but the specialized ship required to recover the ore was a completely different story. The contract was terminated when Nautilus failed to make payments for the vessel’s construction. Replacing a ship designed specifically for that purpose? Nearly impossible.
The company needed $350 million to start mining, but by early 2019 it had about $200,000 in cash. There isn’t a funding gap there. It’s a chasm. There was no safety net when the largest investor withdrew. Soon after, Nautilus took over, and by September of that year, PNG Prime Minister James Marape was in front of his nation denouncing the entire endeavor as “a total failure.”
It’s difficult to avoid feeling a little sorry for the common people on both sides of this. Local fishing communities in the Bismarck Sea have been voicing concerns for years about the potential effects of deep-sea drilling on the ecosystems they rely on, the disturbance of sediment, and the introduction of light and noise pollution into waters that science hardly understands. When the copper grades appeared appealing, those issues were not given much attention. Although those communities weren’t exactly vindicated by the collapse, it did lend credence to a question they had been asking all along: who is at risk when something this unproven goes wrong?
In this case, the environmental aspect is not incidental. Deep-sea biodiversity is still poorly mapped, as scientists have repeatedly noted. Hydrothermal vent ecosystems are unique, peculiar, and irreplaceable. Frank Bainimarama, the president of Fiji, used the collapse of Solwara 1 to advocate for a ten-year moratorium on seabed mining throughout the Pacific, claiming the area needed time for genuine scientific research rather than reactive damage control. The prime minister of Vanuatu supported him. Even the new PNG government, which had previously supported Nautilus, publicly changed its stance.
As this story draws to a close, the issue of accountability remains. With declared plans to eventually turn Solwara 1 into a commercial production, Deep Sea Mining Finance Limited currently owns the project’s assets, intellectual property, and subsidiaries. It is genuinely unclear whether that will ever happen—that is, whether the financing, science, and regulatory framework will ever coincide. The floor of the ocean is patient. As it happens, the investors weren’t.
