Challenges in the Metallurgical Processing of Marine Mineral Resources

In the deep sea, a gigantic stock of polymetallic raw-materials exists. These polymetallic rawmaterials can be of high interest for the metal industry in order to satisfy the rising demands and needs of different metals. Especially the German industrial sector depends to an extensive amount on the import of raw-materials for the metal production. During the past decades, a variety of processes have been developed to treat manganese nodules in order to extract mainly base metals like nickel, copper, cobalt or manganese. These processes mostly consist of different kinds of leaching of the manganese nodules and sometimes further treatment of the metal rich solution. Alternatively, pyrometallurgical processing steps are suggested during which a copper, nickel and cobalt rich metal phase and a ferromanganese or ferrosilicon manganese slag are produced. Other marine resources like massive sulphides are likely to be treated by conventional processes via beneficiation and smelting due to a comparable composition to chalcopyrite. This paper describes the challenges in processing of marine mineral resources, especially manganese nodules, and states metallurgical concepts for their processing. In these suggestions, a major goal is reaching industrial input grades of intermediate products for an easy integration into commercial production routes of strategic and base metals. An additional target is to minimize metal losses throughout the entire process chain, such as optimizing the polymetallic resource efficiency. Furthermore an outlook on future investigations in the field of processing marine mineral resources with focus on high-tech metals is given. The full paper will be published soon after the conference in a scientific journal.