A consortium of 26 leading Norwegian companies, universities, research institutes, innovation– and a catapult-centre have joined forces in an Arena Marine Minerals cluster.
The cluster has applied for Arena status with the Norwegian Innovation Clusters programme, and the objective is to gather Norwegian actors to strengthen the knowledge and establish solutions and collaborations which can form the basis for marine minerals as a sustainable new ocean industry.
The cluster will focus on three main topics, where environment and sustainability will form the basis for all activities:
- Competence: Develop and share competence
- Innovation: Establish new innovation projects to increase our understanding of the deep sea environment, its resources and mitigation of possible negative impact
- From seabed to batteries: Integrated value chains and life cycle assessments
«We need to show that future mining can be done without doing significant harm. Our hypothesis is that marine minerals will come with a smaller environmental and climate footprint than land-based mining», says on Hellevang R&D Manager GCE Ocean Technology.
«While some call for a moratorium of the deep sea until we know more, we believe that a joint effort from the public, industry, research institutes and universities will be the best way forward,» Hellevang says.
