Potato-sized rocks are found on the seafloor in quantities that have drawn significant corporate attention in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a section of the abyssal Pacific floor that is roughly the size of the continental United States and sits between Hawaii and Mexico at depths of four to five kilometers. In the context of electric vehicle battery supply chains and the geopolitical pressure to lessen reliance on Chinese-controlled land-based processing, the rocks—polymetallic nodules—contain nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese in ratios that make them truly intriguing to the minerals industry. For millions of years, they have been sitting there. Four businesses are seriously preparing to go after them, with differing levels of technical readiness, regulatory positioning, and financial support.
Perhaps because it is the most financially vulnerable, The Metals Company has been the most open about its goals. Due to its public listing, TMC’s balance sheet, setbacks, and shareholder communications are all publicly available. These details reveal a company that has made significant investments in research and development but has not produced any commercial results. Through a system that involves sponsoring small Pacific island states, mostly Nauru, to apply for ISA contracts that the nations themselves could not realistically pursue on their own, the business possesses exploration rights in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
In addition to giving TMC access to the necessary legal environment, the arrangement exposed Nauru politically by linking it to a mining activity that its own neighbors have resisted and provided it a minimal interest in the earnings. In a move that has drawn harsh criticism from around the world, TMC has also been seeking the U.S. licensing option under NOAA, avoiding ISA supervision.
The least obvious of the four is Lockheed Martin’s involvement in deep-sea mining through its UK Seabed Resources subsidiary—that is, until you take into account that the company has been solving the fundamental technical challenge of operating heavy machinery under crushing pressure in complete darkness for decades. Large areas of the Pacific seabed are covered by ISA exploration licenses held by UK Seabed Resources, and Lockheed Martin’s engineering expertise is mainly in the robotic systems that would carry out the actual extraction—tracked vehicles built to function at depth, control sediment plumes, and gather nodules at rates that could make the operation profitable. The subsidiary has been comparatively quiet in the public eye, which usually indicates that the technology development is either moving forward without much fanfare or at a slower pace than anticipated. Most likely a combination of the two.
As the company that has conducted what may be the most conspicuous testing, Global Sea Mineral Resources occupies an intriguing niche. For deep-sea testing in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, GSR, a division of the Belgian marine engineering business DEME, created and implemented a prototype nodule collector known as Patania II. Both industry and environmental organizations kept a close eye on the trial, and the outcomes, which included documentation of the sediment plume produced by the collector’s operation and its extent beyond the vehicle’s direct track, added to the scientific dataset on environmental impacts that the ISA’s regulatory process is meant to incorporate. The company’s leadership has probably considered whether GSR’s strategy of visible, documented testing results in a reputational advantage in future commercial licensing or just offers better proof for opposition claims.
Because of its connection to the Chinese government, China Minmetals Corporation is classified differently than the other three. It is a state-owned business that operates with the tacit support of the Chinese government and within the framework of a national strategic objective for the security of vital mineral supplies; it is not an independent private corporation making independent commercial judgments. China Minmetals has been funding deep-sea extraction technology development and has ISA exploration contracts in the Pacific. Establishing Chinese presence and technical capability in deep-sea resource extraction places China in a governance dialog about the ocean floor that will become more significant as commercial production becomes more likely. This is why the strategic interest goes beyond the specific mineral yields.
None of these four organizations have yet to extract minerals from the deep ocean on a commercial basis, which is a noteworthy fact. They possess licenses for exploration. They are equipped. They have a variety of types of financial support. What they lack is a profitable, operational commercial mine. The technological challenges—processing the nodules once they are brought to the surface, managing sediment disturbance within reasonable bounds, working at great depths with sufficient reliability, and doing all of this at a cost that makes the operation profitable—are being worked on rather than resolved. After decades of negotiations, the ISA’s commercial mining code, which would create the legal foundation for the future issuance of extraction licenses, is still unresolved. Both the technical and regulatory issues need to be resolved concurrently for deep-sea mining to be commercially viable, and neither is nearly resolved.
