This paper gives a brief overview on the major milestones of the deep sea mining projects in the 70's and 80's with focus on the OMI/OMCO-Consortia and the engineering milestones SEDCO 445, Hughes Glomar Explorer, Clementine II and PLA2 6000, the pilot mining tests of the AMR, the environmental study DISCOL and the joint efforts of Gemenod/Preussag. Among the most interesting and technologically challenging systems are those for deep sea mining of manganese nodules in water depths of 4,000 to 6,000 meters in the Mid-Pacific. Following the total integrated systems (TIS) approach, the technology transfer between ultra-deep water drilling and deep sea mining is outlined based on several subsystems and specified for the key components of the vertical transport system. As example for state of the art engineering and technologies recent developments of heavy-load active heave compensated drawworks, ultra-deep water riser systems, motion-compensated offshore mining drill pipes with air-lift slurry transport, remote subsea workclass-crawler ISUP and the Korean manganese nodules collector MineRo II are described. Based on the principles applied for development and engineering of systems for shallow water offshore mining and the experiences available from the pilot mining tests conducted in the past, a concept for an offshore mining system was developed by MHWirth in corporation with the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR). This concept will be outlined in the current paper together with the main results of an economic feasibility study. Furthermore, an overview on the current European deep sea mining research projects and a renewed German-French industrial cooperation is given. Synergies with the emerging private space industry are anticipated regarding systems engineering. Future perspectives for a new pilot mining test are discussed.
When offshore oil and gas production goes deeper (more than 2,000 mWD) or intopartly ice covered regions you have to think about different methods /scenarios of preparatory work, installations, maintenance anddecommissioning. Based on this the technical challenges have to be identified and you have tofind proper strategies and solutions - different to actual ones. By changing the available tools a step far beyond actual limitations ispossible.
Besides pumping systems, in the first line, another lifting system offers formining mineral raw materials from large sea depths (up to 6000m) has been knownfor decades in the large-diameter drilling technique, the so-called air liftsystem. Compressed air is blown into a continuous straight lifting string(riser) from top to bottom by injection from the outside into the inner pipe ina certain depth. This operation initiates a continuous lifting process enablinglifting of large solids quantities. In close cooperation with the BGR (German Federal Institute for Geosciences andNatural Resources) we have optimised this system for deep sea mining ofmanganese nodules in water depth up to 6000m as shown in figure 1.
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