When I saw video of a feller-buncher a few weeks ago, it struck me as an over-the-top way to harvest trees, like something out of Dr. Seuss’s Lorax.
At that time, I hadn’t yet read Wired‘s Reservoir Logs:
This unusual harvesting method is made possible by a submersible that can probe the deepest reservoirs for under-water trees to cut and deliver to the surface. It was developed by Chris Godsall, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of Triton Logging. The company is based near Victoria, but the principal underwater logging operation is at Ootsa Lake, almost 750 miles to the north. The lake was formed in 1954, when Alcan, the world’s second-largest aluminum producer, built a hydroelectric dam here to power its smelter. The water behind the dam flooded millions of lodgepole pine, spruce, Douglas fir, and hemlock trees, leaving some $1.2 billion worth of timber preserved in a kind of suspended animation. In the cold, dark, oxygen-poor water, tree wood won’t decay for thousands of years. And Ootsa is one of 45,000 spots around the globe where dams have inundated valleys and submerged vast forests. By some estimates, there is $50 billion worth of marketable timber at the bottom of these man-made lakes. Godsall is quick to point out that he has the only technology able to retrieve it.
To gather up a few logs, it might seem like lunacy to deploy the same kind of sophisticated and pricey ROVs used to explore the Titanic or investigate 9,000-foot-deep geothermal vents along the mid-Atlantic seafloor. But do the math and Godsall’s method starts to make good financial sense. Operated by just one person, a so-called feller buncher — the fastest and cheapest way to harvest timber on land — can cut at least 500 trees a day. But then it takes an additional three-member crew up to three weeks to trim and load the trees for transport. A single Sawfish is more efficient. It may clear only 250 trees in an eight-hour shift with four crew members, but there’s no need to skid the logs down a hillside and truck them to a mill. Instead, a barge delivers the trees to the mill faster and more cheaply, and because they’ve been submerged they’re generally already stripped of foliage and bark. A Sawfish, including the control room, tool shop, and power generator, costs $800,000 to $1 million, depending on the gadgetry packed into the ROV. That’s significantly less than the onetime equipment cost of roughly $1.5 million needed to run a comparable feller buncher operation. Add up all the numbers and, while conventional harvesting costs about $50 per cubic meter of wood, Peter Keyes, an executive at a global timber wholesaler and marketer, estimates Godsall’s cost at closer to $40. “Sure, there are big R&D costs to pay down,” Keyes says. “But the technology has given Godsall access to all these trees as if they were on land. It’s like finding a new penny.”
In similar news, an Australian miner has started a Race to the Bottom — of the ocean:
More than 5,000 feet under the sea, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a small white crab flexes its claw. It has paused halfway up a rock outcropping and is approaching a tantalizing colony of snails when a flash of light illuminates the seabed. A wondrous, prickly landscape of spires appears and stretches off into the blackness. The crab taps its feet on the rock, takes a tentative step toward the snails, and is suddenly confronted by a 6-ton, 10-foot-tall, remotely operated robotic drilling machine.The contraption is fitted with a series of circular, diamond-infused pulverizers, which it lowers onto a nearby rock surface. The pulverizers begin to spin, crushing the rock into gravel. A bloom of silt rises up over the seabed, enveloping the crab in a cloud.
[...]
The crab is getting more than its share of attention. As it’s about to make its tentative bid for the snails, a series of bold yellow numbers pop up on the screen, delineating the mineral content of the rock it’s perched on: 12.2 percent copper, 4.2 percent zinc, and a substantial amount of silver and gold. A crowd gathers around the screen, including a man in a cowboy hat and jeans. He seems impressed but skeptical. Those numbers are just too high.“There’s no mistake, if that’s what you’re thinking,” says David Heydon, looking dapper in pinstripe pants and a crisp white shirt. Heydon is a veteran Australian prospector and onetime dotcom entrepreneur. He returned to the mining industry five years ago to become CEO of Nautilus Minerals, a new breed of mining company with a head start on what may turn out to be the largest gold rush the world has ever seen. It is Heydon’s company that filmed the crab and retrieved the first commercial ore samples from the ocean floor. “The gold is just lying there on the seabed,” he tells the group clustered around the Nautilus booth. He has a breezy Aussie accent and, at 50, a light dusting of gray in his hair. “And let me tell you, we haven’t seen these types of mineral deposits since the beginning of modern mining.”