The explosive growth in world population to nine billion people by 2050 and 11 billion by 2100 is leading many primarily land-based industries to consider a jump into the ocean.
A broad array of industry leaders in attendance at the World Ocean Council’s Sustainable Oceans Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from 29 November to 1 December, said a ballooning world population is pushing them look at the world’s oceans as a potential source for economic opportunities.
At the conference, Claire Jolly, the head of innovation policies for space and oceans for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said her organization foresaw a massive overall growth in ocean industries in the next 10 to 15 years.
“The OECD looked at the ocean economy in 2030. It looked to oceans in the future,” she said. “The key finding was seeing growth of all ocean industries.”
In 2010, ocean industries generated USD 1.5 trillion (EUR 1.3 trillion) in economic activity. The OECD sees doubling that total doubling to USD 3 trillion (EUR 2.6 trillion) in 2030.
“That’s basically taking the economy of Canada to the level of the economy of Germany,” Jolly said.
The oceans are already a busy place, with thriving hidden sectors beyond the obvious fihing and shipping. For example, most of the world’s communications are transmitted not by satellite link, but undersea cable, according to Alasdair Wilkie, chief technology officer of Deep Blue Cable. Wilkie said 90 percent of all international communication and business traffic currently travels by cable, including more than 15 million financial transactions that flow between 8,300 financial institutions in 195 countries every day.
One million of these messages are worth USD 4.7 trillion (EUR 4 trillion), Wilkie said.
The number of messages being sent via underwater cable is only exceeded by the size of the content they contain. The total size of cable traffic soared from 100 gigabytes (GB) a day in 1992 to 28,600 GB per second in 2016. By 2021, undersea cables will carry 105,800 GB of information per second.
The oceans are also being seriously considered as a major future energy and mineral source, according to Annie Dallman, the vice-chair of Ocean Energy Systems, an intergovernmental collaboration operating under framework of the International Energy Agency. The OES projects that between 2030 and 2050, installed capacity will grow to 300 gigawatts of energy generation worth USD 35 billion (EUR 29.8 billion), employing 680,000 people and removing 500 million tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. To achieve this, the ocean energy sector will have to overcome the same challenges that faced the wind power sector 20 years ago, Dallman said – it must be cost-competitive, have improved reliability and survivability, improved efficiency and performance, better load factors and enhanced access for servicing.
Another ocean industry expected to grow is ocean mining, Samantha Smith, the director of Blue Globe Solutions, said, who argued that seafloor minerals have the potential to transform the way the world sources the metals it uses.
As the world moves to a clean carbon future, Smith said, it may actually become more dependent on minerals and metals. Smith cited the example of wind power, which requires six times more copper than traditional energy transmission. Smith said her company has also noted surging demand for lithium ion for batteries, as well as nickel, aluminum, copper, cobalt, magnesium, and graphite.
Smith said the good news is that many seafloor minerals are found in golf ball-sized lumps on the surface, so they don’t need a lot of energy to collect. Ocean mining is lifting, not mining, she said. The result is a clean collection process, Smith said, with minimal waste to recover a high-grade mineral via a reusable production infrastructure and no social displacement, no pressurization (like that required for oil and gas extraction) and no blasting.
One of the most striking examples of how an increasing global population will lead to new uses of the ocean – and likely make it a more crowded place – was given by Rutger-de-Graaf van Dinthier, the founder of Blue 21, a conceptual design firm. Van Dinthier predicted that, by 2100, there will be “a land deficit” of 22 million square kilometers, or a land area roughly the size of the North America. That will create two billion “land refugees,” he estimated.
In response to this, Blue 21 is developing a prototype floating community. With rising water levels expected to cause massive damage to low-lying countries, potentially making them uninhabitable, the company has designed one of its prototypes specifically for French Polynesia.
In the future, van Dinthier postulated, floating communities, with breakwaters, harbors and their own ocean-based economies, could morph into independent and politically autonomous states.
