Minerals Report - International Seabed Authority

3.3 Methods used to assess resource potentials
We use essentially four stages to assess potential non-living
resources in the extended legal continental shelf (ELCS) regions. For some
resources, not all stages are possible. In these cases we progress the stages
as far as reasonable, or possible, to reach a qualitative ranking of resources
by region.
(1) The first involves the identification of all known and
documents occurrences of the potential resource materials in
the global oceans. These occurrences include coastal,
continental shelf, continental slope, continental rise and
abyssal locations, regardless of their relationship to the ELCS
(legal extended continental shelf) regions.
(2) The second stage is to determine, where possible, all known
and estimated determinations of the resource density in mass
per unit area of various minerals and elements. For
manganese nodules and crusts, for example, these are based
on reports in the literature of seabed surface coverage
determined from sampling and photographic observations.
For conventional hydrocarbons (gas and oil), existing regions
of production are identified, as well as reserve and resource
estimates based on regional compilations.
(3) Where appropriate, a third stage assesses chemical
compositional data for elements of significant economic
value. These are largely restricted to manganese nodules and
crusts, for which there is global data coverage. Other
minerals, for which global coverage is absent, require further
exploration prior to being treated this way.
(4) The fourth stage multiplies the occurrence, frequency or
density of resource minerals (in mass per unit area) with
elemental compositional data for those minerals (in wt. %) to
arrive at abundance values in units of mass per unit area for
individual elements. These values are further multiplied by
the area occupied by each of the identified ELCS regions
(including their sub-divisions) to arrive at estimates of the
total mass of material in those ELCS regions.
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 682