Resource information
In January this year, the managing director of Papua New Guinea’s Mineral Resources Authority declared that the proposal to develop what had once been touted as the world’s first deep-sea mine would ‘not get off the ground’. This was a far cry from the optimism that surrounded the grant of the first seabed exploration licence to Nautilus Minerals Ltd, a company formerly listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), back in 1997. The PNG government was still enthusiastic when it granted the company its first mining licence in 2011 — so much so that it opted to purchase a 30 percent stake in the project, the maximum allowed under the terms of PNG’s Mining Act. But by that time a cloud of controversy already surrounded the project as a rainbow coalition of environmental defenders and orthodox Christians mounted a campaign against the treatment of PNG as the proverbial guinea pig in a ghastly industrial experiment. Some members of this coalition are now asking why the government has not cancelled the mining licence if the project is dead in the water.
