Randy Kirk

In Defense of Peak Gold: Evidence Gold Production Peaked in 2001

The underwater mining issue reminds me of mining underwater natural gas hydrates -- mining natural gas hydrates is quietly being selved. If you are going to mine anything on the ocean floor by mechanical or robotic means this is very difficult. A few miles below the ocean surface is very far. We know more about the surface of the moon than the surface of the oceans because it is difficult to send vehicles to oceanic depths.

In both cases (underwater mining and natural gas hydrates) it is difficult to get a handle on the size of the resource. Alan Greenspan mentioned natural gas hydrates in a Federal Reserve speech as a potential massive source of natural gas. But the scientist who originally published the data that the size of natural gas hydrates were huge (estimated larger than all other hydrocarbon resources) now doubts that they can be effectively mined because of the physical limitations of recovering the resource and the scattered nature of the hydrates. It seems to me minerals will also be "disbursed" on the ocean floor, making recovery difficult.