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Minerals Report - International Seabed Authority

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He said that in Australia the mining industry has adopted a ‘Code for<br />

Environmental Management that is a voluntary code. He said that the<br />

Australian minerals industry wanted to win back the sort of initiative it had in<br />

conducting the environmental debate. It was convinced of its own motive<br />

with regard to the environment but was tired of having other groups running<br />

away with the story and always trying to polarize the situation into a good<br />

guy/bad guy relationship.<br />

Mr. Malnic said that the code has attracted 44 companies that<br />

represent 85 percent of Australia’s mineral production and that 29 of them<br />

have now gone to the next stage which is to self regulate. He said that every<br />

year the companies go out, audit their environmental improvement<br />

achievements, and make them known in a published report.<br />

In concluding his presentation, Mr. Malnic again pointed out that the<br />

marine areas in which their licenses are to be found are the subject of a lot of<br />

marine scientific research. He pointed out that Nautilus owes its existence to<br />

marine scientific research. Mr. Malnic said that while many scientists come<br />

back to the area to conduct research, one of the conditions that is not being<br />

met is to make the results of their work available to Papua New Guinea. In<br />

some cases, Mr. Malnic said that the permissions of Nautilus and the<br />

Government of Papua New Guinea were not obtained.<br />

SUMMARY OF THE DISCUSSIONS<br />

The discussions that followed Mr. Malnic’s presentation focussed on<br />

the plant envisioned by Nautilus at its site. One participant pointed out that<br />

based on a daily production rate of 1000 tonnes as indicated by Mr. Malnic,<br />

the price of the mining vessel of $50 millions and a price of product of<br />

$300.00/tonne, the return on investment would be very high. The same<br />

participant said that based on these figures, in a year and a half the entire<br />

investment would have been recovered. This participant wanted to know<br />

whether or not the daily production target was reasonable.<br />

INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 355

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