Winners of the Student Challenge

Marte Morgenlie Skei and Peter Sagdahl from NTNU won with their proposal “Contract Design for Onshore-Deep-Sea Mining Collaborations”.

The winners of the Student Challenge were announced at the Deep Sea Minerals conference in Bergen on 3 April.

The award comprises of 10,000 NOK, free tickets to the conference and a plenary presentation of the proposed concept.

The competition was supported by Viridien and organised in collaboration with GCE Ocean Technology and GeoPublishing.

Runner-up students were also given free tickets to the conference.

Bridging Sea and Land

The winning proposal outlined how the onshore and deep-sea mining industry can obtain mutual benefits by collaboration with land-based mining on mineral processing.

It described different frameworks for collaboration and assessed the profitability and risk distribution under different contract models.

– We are very excited to have been selected as the winners of the Student Challenge, says Marte and Peter.

– It’s been a great experience to work on a real-world challenge with such relevance for the future of the mining industry. We hope our proposal can contribute to further discussion on how the industry can collaborate across value chains.

The work is based on their project thesis in Financial Engineering at NTNU in Trondheim.

Developing the proposal pushed them to think critically about risk-sharing mechanisms and the practicalities of integrating different parts of the value chain. – We've learned a lot from exploring both economic models and the technical aspects of mineral processing.

– Presenting our work to professionals in the field was a valuable experience. It was encouraging to see that our ideas generated interest and discussion, and we received useful feedback and suggestions for future work.

They shared that attending the conference and engaging with other participants provided new perspectives and ideas that thei will incorporate into their ongoing work.

– We’re very grateful for the opportunity and hope initiatives like this continue to be encouraged, Marte and Peter ends.

New Ideas are Important

– We are very pleased with the many great ideas submitted to the competition, says Vetle Vinje, Senior Scientist at Viridien.

– Students bring fresh perspectives and innovative thinking that are highly valuable to our industry. As a knowledge-driven company and a leader in our core field, Viridien is committed to staying at the forefront of high-tech innovation. To support this goal and continue attracting top talent, we work closely with Norwegian universities at multiple levels. This includes hosting numerous PhD students and interns at our headquarters in Oslo, as well as participating in university-led consortia.