Robert van de Ketterij
Managing Director IHC MTI B.V., The Netherlands

The last frontier… that is next door here in Lisbon. Only 10 km away from here there is a part of our planet that we’ve just started exploring: it is the deep sea. And we’re exploring it only now because of our ever increasing need for metals: for our phones, laptops and cars.
In the EU funded program BLUE MINING we try to advance technology so far that we can find where the resources are, how much ore we can mine on different locations on the seafloor, and how we can bring it to the shore safely and with as little damage to the environment as possible. This is all quite a challenge in an environment imposing more extreme conditions to our equipment than a mission to the moon.