Abstract

Polymetallic nodules are a potential source of industrially demanded metals such as Ni, Co, Cu, and Mo (up to 3 wt %). Even if there is no deep-sea mining of manganese nodules today, a forecasted gap between metal demand and supply as well as continuously high metal prices may make seabed mining economically viable in the future. Up to now, a well-established industrial-scale extraction method for manganese nodules has been missing. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore how economically interesting metals can be extracted from the nodules in a cost- and energy-efficient way. Polymetallic nodules have a heterogeneous chemical and structural composition without individual metal-rich particles. The economically interesting metals are distributed between different mineral phases (Mn-Fe-(oxy)hydroxides) as well as different growth structures that are intergrown with each other on a nm‒µm scale. Because of that a typical ore processing with the beneficiation of valuable particles is not feasible. The process presented here starts with a pyro-metallurgical pre-treatment of the polymetallic nodules, with the aim of creating artificial metal-rich (Ni, Cu, Co, Mo) particles with enrichment factors up to 10 compared to the original average metal contents. Afterwards, these particles should be beneficiated by conventional mineral processing steps to create a concentrate while reducing the mass stream in the process. The resulting metal particles can be further treated in conventional hydrometallurgical and/or pyro-metallurgical processes.

Highlights

  • Polymetallic nodules occur at the sea floor of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean in water depth between 1000 and 6000 m [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].Detailed German exploration of nodules began in the early 1970s with the vessels Valdivia II (1972–1978) and SONNE because of the economic interest in nodules due to their metal content

  • Cu (69–82%) is most enriched in the metallic phase within all samples followed by Mo (48–75%), Ni (54–73%) and cobalt metal (Co) (51–73%)

  • Investigations of the pre-treated experiments (P1–P6) using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) showed that the internal structures of the nodules have been partly changed (Figure 4A)

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Summary

Introduction

Polymetallic nodules occur at the sea floor of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean in water depth between 1000 and 6000 m [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Detailed German exploration of nodules began in the early 1970s with the vessels Valdivia II (1972–1978) and SONNE (up to 1982) because of the economic interest in nodules due to their metal content. Nodules are enriched in Ni, Cu, Co, Mn, Li, V, and Mo as well as rare earth elements and Y (REY; Table 1); because of the many metals, they are called polymetallic nodules [8,9].

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