Today’s Maritime Monday features a 250 ton gold dredging crawler. It struck me as relatively small compared to the diamond dredging crawlers typically seen in Cape Town harbour, used on a number of ships sucking up diamonds off the coast of Namibia and South Africa.
Here are some links:
http://www.e-mj.com/features/4107-debmar-pacific-makes-port-of-call-in-cape-town.html#.V4x0iWfouUk
http://www.reuters.com/article/namibia-diamonds-idUSL6N0OZ1QA20140618
http://technology.infomine.com/articles/1/99/deep-sea-mining.undersea-miners.black-smoker/deep-sea.mining.and.aspx
Forget about the Oil & Gas industry in the GoM. The future lays in Offshore Mining and Renewable Energy in the form of Offshore Wind Farms, Wave and Tidal Generators, all of which requires Maritime skills at some stage and form.
The diamond mining off Namibia is old hat, using old Drillships, Dockships and Barges in relatively shallow waters.
Some new ships are joining the fleet and the water depth limit is moving towards deeper waters and larger crawlers, but still dominated by DeBear and concentrated off Namibia. Here is the newest: http://subseaworldnews.com/2016/06/30/kleven-delivers-mineral-exploration-vessel-to-debmarine-namibia/
The big future lays in deep water open ocean mining in international waters outside anybody’s jurisdiction. Nodules containing a range of metals exist in large quantities, but the problem is to get them to the surface.
The Drillship SEDCO 445 did some tests in the Red Sea and off Hawaii back in the late 1970s and managed to recover nodules, but it was not commercially viable to do so at the time.
PS> SEDCO 445 is now one of the old Drillships used for diamond mining off Namibia, together with the Glomar Grand Banks and Glomar Pacific. (There may be more)
Modern deep water mining is in progress in Papua New Guinea waters, but it is too early to say if it will be an economical success: http://innovations.oceanhub.com/tooling-up-for-pioneering-deep-sea-mining/
(BTW The Crawler mentioned by OP is for this project)
That it will be the business of the future is not in dispute, but the right technology has to be developed to make it viable.
So get out of your comfort zone and join the future of Marine Operations, either as the one that find the best solution(s), or just to supply the elbow grease that will still be required.
One thing for sure, it will have nothing to do with the Bayou, but maybe some of the more forward looking Bayou Boys?
