Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
“Deep-water ports around the world are often degraded ecosystems unwelcoming to local communities. We asked our architects to reimagine what a metals-processing facility could be, to have it integrate with—even remediate—the urban coastal environment,” said The Metals Company Chairman and CEO, Gerard Barron.
“The result is a breathtaking innovation complex that will transform an industrial port into a community-based hub for the electric vehicle revolution.”
The Metals Company will remake conventional metal production for the 21st century as society embarks on the transition to a net-zero-carbon future.
The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based metal and deep-sea mining company is working on a project that will collect these nodules from a location 2.5 miles deep in a part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone.
The metal nodules will be brought up and shipped to an onshore processing facility, where they will be separated out for use in the production of batteries and other metal products, primarily in the form of nickel, which is the primary component of lithium ion batteries.
With the development of robotic vehicles and vessels, the company uses to scoop up and transport these metal nodules, as well as the processing plant.
The Metals Company’s challenge is to bring innovative, whole-systems design to the industrial components needed to supply the world with critical battery metals from polymetallic nodules fist-sized rocks containing battery-grade nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese—while reimagining the nexus of industry and community.
This new project will deliver an integrated suite of assets that work together to lift nodules off the seafloor and up to a purpose-built production vessel, transfer them to a hydrodynamic shuttle carrier, and onward to a metallurgical plant designed to transform an urban port site into a battery materials innovation and community hub, set within a regenerative coastal landscape.
To collect the nodules, the company has designed a light-touch, robotic collector vehicle that aims a jet of seawater across the tops of the rocks to gently pry them from the sediment.
Part of the design for future collectors includes a buoyant, hydrodynamic shell with an extended lip to minimize seafloor compaction and reduce and redirect the dust plume kicked up during nodule collection.
The Metals Company’s first-generation collector vehicle has been engineered and is currently being built by Allseas in the Netherlands to be deployed for testing early next year.
Nodules are transported through a flexible hose at the top of the collector vehicle to a rigid riser pipe where they are lifted on compressed air bubbles ~4 km up to the surface production vessel, a 216-meter-long ship that runs on carbon-neutral electro fuels, with a sunken deck that is covered with photovoltaic solar panels.
The streamlined design of the production vessel is driven by functionality.
Equipment for nodule collection is strategically packed in the hull to minimize the size of the vessel and maximize operational efficiency.
At scale, each production vessel would operate multiple collectors with additional maintenance capacity provided by a support vessel with a ‘moon pool’ for deploying and retrieving collector vehicles.
While The Metals Company’s first production vessel is a deep-water drillship repurposed by Allseas to enable pilot nodule collection, next generation vessel design is central to The Metals Company’s plans to scale to a fleet of 10 production vessels, enabling the provision of over 40 million tons of battery metals by 2050, enough to produce 280 million electric vehicles (EVs)—a quarter of the global passenger car fleet.
At full-scale operations, nodules will be transferred from the production vessels to shuttle carriers, whose X-bow design has been chosen deliver hyper-efficient, hydrodynamic ships to further assist The Metals Company in lowering the carbon footprint of its battery metals.
Once at the port, the nodules are offloaded onto a conveyor and into a portside processing plant designed as a sustainable, performative and social campus in a regenerative landscape that turns conventional metallurgy on its head.
The company envisions multiple facilities spread across three continents and a number of brownfield sites are currently under consideration. These plants would in time be retooled to recycle battery cathodes, closing the loop on the battery metals supply chain.
“We’re remaking how society gets, uses and ultimately re-uses the base metals which form the foundation of the clean energy economy,” said Barron.
“Now the exciting question is, which port will we transform first?”
Project: Next-Generation Robotic Mineral Collecting Facility
Architects: Bjarke Ingels Group
Client: The Metals Company