Now We Shall Mine The Oceans - EP 39 Gerard Barron

The future looks like more recycling. It looks like more circularity. And so the problem that we're trying to solve for today is the fact that there are not enough metals in the system in circulation to allow recycling to be a viable alternative. But in the future, there will be. The most crucial, you know, number of decades are the ones in front of us right now. We need to stop the deforestation of our most pristine ecosystems and apply some common sense and go to the parts of the planet that we can cause the least impact to both the environment and to humans.

Gerard Barron, thank you for coming.

Great to be here.

You are the CEO of The Metals Company. Um, bit controversial.

Really?

As you might have noticed, I think you're my, my second guest in the last couple of weeks. We got the, the John Oliver adventure, um, on, on what is it, Last Week Tonight. Yeah. Um, used to be funny, that guy. I was wondering, I was wondering how, how it feels. I mean, it must be a strange experience. To—

not really.

No.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was a poor effort, I thought. And, uh, and a lot of people said to me, should be happy John wants to cover it. It's like, I would have been happy if he'd made a little bit more effort to get the facts right.

But yeah, well, we— so we could, we could get into some of that. He doesn't— he— his, uh, the people on the other end, they don't get much of a, a right of reply on the, on the show. So we can, we can get into some of that. But just to To give people context, The Metals Company, you guys are doing deep-sea mining. I mean, it's this thing that people have been talking about for a number of years and it's this idea of fairly straightforward, I guess, from the name going down to the ocean floor and picking up a lot of elements and metals and things that we need, especially to make all these electric batteries that the world is running on more and more. I say it's controversial because obviously you've got one camp of people who want to do this, and they say it's actually going to make less pollution because these things are sitting on the ocean floor. You don't have to go through all the mess of digging through mountains and everything. And then you obviously, for sure, clearly you have a camp of people who don't want to touch this pristine environment and say we don't have enough data and information yet to begin this. You're here at a It's been a journey for this concept and for the company, but you're here at a pretty important time because since Trump has come in, he's, he's identified this as one of the areas that he wants the US to be moving forward on, sees it as a way to help us compete against China and its stranglehold on many of these very important elements and metals. And so is that fair so far for the context?

100%. Okay.

And you, like I said, you've been at this for a while in a couple, couple forms of companies and, and yeah. Well, so tell me, I mean, this really— we're going to get— I want to get into the science and the engineering and how all this works. But, but just going off what I said, I mean, this is— this must be a— it's a big moment for you guys. You guys have been waiting years to get something approaching a green light, right? Yeah.

No, we've been at this particular Kilauea Venture since 2011. And of course, before President Trump was elected, we were heading down this permitting pathway with this international body called the International Seabed Authority. And we had a couple of sponsor countries, a couple of developing nations from the Pacific, but took a while to realize, but it was going nowhere. It was being entirely overtaken by the NGO movement and not directly, but by infiltrating member countries. And one of the characteristics of the last decade is you've seen powerful economies become less powerful economically. You've seen countries like Germany deindustrialize, same with France. And make a lot of compromises, if you like, by having to form coalition governments with, in some cases around Europe, 15 different parties needing to get together to form a government. And what that means is you can have very small minority parties who have something they care a lot about, and it might be a radical Green Party, and they're like, Well, we'll give you our votes, we'll come and support your government, but there are some things that we really want to move on. And unfortunately that was being taken to an extreme case and it was a foolish move. I always thought we would sit with those environmental groups and the Green Party parties around the world and agree on things because I've always deemed myself an environmentalist at heart. I want what's best for the planet and I always thought we'd sit together and work out what's the way to achieve these outcomes. And so I've learned a lot, you know, because they don't want to do that. They don't want to engage. They just want something to oppose.

All right. What do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies, 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations. Rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AIs and software run right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money, and take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. CoreMemory and Brex. And so you were, you were stuck dealing with that. And then, and then Trump did in, in what, in April, I think Trump said, we're going to move forward. We, I want the country to move forward. With this?

Well, we always knew there was a permitting pathway in the United States because if we cast our mind back, and of course I bought one of the rocks here today, this is an example of a poly— well, this is a polymetallic nodule and they just sit on the ocean floor like this. And back in the '70s, the US led the charge. The US was leading industry. And then of course the international community said, ah, don't you think we should all agree the rules? And so The US took a back step and said, okay, well, why don't you go and agree your rules? We don't want to be part of it. We still want to preserve our rights, you know, because no country has sovereignty over the oceans. But 169 of them signed a treaty which basically said when it comes to seafloor metals, which every country has the right to, we are going to agree these rules. Whereas the US said, we don't want any part of that. We feel we have the right to those metals as we have the right for passage with shipping and laying cables and so on. And so they stood by the sidelines. And of course, that international organization was set up in 1994 to put in place some rules. They haven't done that yet. It's now 2025. And so we knew there was a permitting pathway available to us through the United States government. And so when the president was elected, he chose a cabinet that were filled with people that were very supportive to us in opposition. For a variety of reasons, whether it was environment, whether it was national security or human rights, they supported this as a better alternative. And so on April 24th, the president issued an executive order that said, we want to participate in this industry and we also want to secure metals so China doesn't dominate yet another industry.

Right. Yeah. And I think the organization you're talking about, it's the International Seabed Authority, which is based out of Jamaica. Which is interesting. Um, the, uh, well, okay, let's, let's give people some more context. I was doing all this reading last night. Uh, can you, can you hold this up again? So yeah, so these things are sitting on the ocean floor. The area that you guys are particularly interested in is called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Everyone refers to it as the CCZ. Yes, it's between Mexico and Hawaii, and it's a vast stretch, right? I think I read something like half the size of the continental United States. Is that—

it's about 4.5 million square kilometers in size.

Okay. And, and we think it is filled with these, these nodules sitting on the ocean bed.

And those—

it's what?

It's nickel, it's cobalt, it's copper, manganese, and a lot of rare earths as well.

Okay. And they're, they're just in these nodules.

Yeah.

Like, in, and they're formed over I think tens of millions of years.

Well, this one we estimate is about 5 million years old. And we know that they're there because it's a two-dimensional resource. It's like a carpet of nodules. They just sit on the ocean floor. They don't bury. You don't have to dig to find them. And so surveying them is really easy. And there's no other resource in the world where you can see it.

Right.

It's there. And of course how they form, it's like a big ion exchange on the seafloor, 4,200 meters below sea. And so they precipitate a little bit like how a pearl grows. So they precipitate the metals that are in the seawater or the sediment where they are. And this was a very rich area in nickel and copper because if you look east, you have the Rockies and Andes. And over millennia, as all those metals eroded into the Pacific Ocean, you then had these currents that kind of from the north and south, and then they met and headed west. And that's the belt now known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. And it was discovered way back in the 1870s by the British who sailed around the world curious to know what was on the bottom of the ocean. No one even knew how deep the ocean was.

Yeah, well, this is what I was wondering. So far down, how in the 1870s did they even get a sense of what was down there?

Well, luckily, And if you go to the Natural History Museum or the Royal Society in London, you'll see lots of artifacts and displays. But luckily the steam piston had been developed. And so they had like 45 miles of rope on board, hoping that that would be enough. And then they literally carried a basket off the back of the boat, wound it up with the help of the steam piston, and they did that for 4 years.

And they found these things and then somebody tested them and figured out what was inside of them.

Well, they've actually found nodules in a number of oceans, but it was soon realized that these are the ones of interest. These are the ones with high grades of nickel and copper. And that's where most of the value comes from, nickel, copper, manganese, and cobalt. And whereas there are also nodules found in the North Sea, but they're rocks.

Okay.

They're not worth picking up.

Okay. And I'm just searching through my notes because the US Geological Survey put some metrics around this. I mean, this is a non-trivial amount of minerals in here. It is something like, I mean, it's multiple times than what we would have on the surface of the Earth.

Yeah, well, if you think about nickel, cobalt, and manganese, 70% of the known reserves on the entire planet are in this resource. 70%. Okay. And the question is we don't get any metals out of our oceans now apart from De Beers take a few diamonds and we take some iron sands in a few countries, but no metals come from the ocean. Yet on land we're pushing into these very pristine ecosystems known as our tropical rainforests where you are dislodging indigenous communities, you're destroying all of the biomass that lives amongst it, including trees, old growth, hundreds, thousands of years old, millions of years old, including lots of beautiful furry cuddly mammals when it comes to parts of the rainforests in Indonesia. And there's a better alternative. Why not go to the abyssal plain? More than half of the planet is categorized as abyssal zone, abyssal plains and hills. Characterized by being very deep, obviously no plants there, very little life there because no food arrives. It tends to be eaten through the water column. It doesn't mean it's not important, the life that is, but if you measure the amount of biomass, there's around 10 grams of biomass, so living matter per square meter, and more than 70% of that is bacteria living in the sediment. So If we want to apply a first principle thought there, it's like go to the part where there's the least life instead of where there, and the greatest abundance of that ecosystem compared to our very pristine tropical rainforest, which there is a limited supply of. And to get to the metals, you've got to remove the rainforest.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, and let's break down the argument pro and con a bit. So Everything you said, I get the— and please correct me along the way because this is not one of the areas that I'm strongest in. But, you know, as I understand it, I mean, you take out this— I think your boat is called the Hidden Gem. It's this massive ship. You take that out, you lower this vehicle. It's a robotic vehicle. And like you said, these are sitting on top of the seafloor. And so this thing goes along almost like a farming instrument, just row by row, picking picking these up, and then it looks like there's a column where they shoot back up to the main ship. And during that process, sediment is kind of coming back, like the nodules are going up and the bits of sediment are coming back down.

Well, the first, let's begin with how we pick them up because they literally lie unattached on the seafloor. It means we can pick them up And the objective from an engineering perspective is with the greatest efficiency because it's a bulk commodity. We know that we have defined 1.6 billion tons of these and we think we have about another 300 to 500 million tons defined on our own areas of claim. So it's really big, really big. There is no other resource on the planet.

In your same, in the CCZ.

The areas that we have been spending the last 14 years quantifying the resource.

Okay.

We know that we have at least 1.6 billion and we think we have another 300 to 500 million tons of polymetallic nodules with high grades of nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese. But because they lie unattached, it means that we use a collector called a Coanda head. We fire a jet of water at the nodule, which creates an inverse pressure and it effectively lifts the nodule up. And if you see videos of our machine at work, you just see them just popping up like this. And so, and the objective there is to disturb as little of the seafloor sediment as possible. And in fact, we only impact like the top 3 to 5 centimeters of the seafloor. Keeping in mind we're 4,200 meters below sea level. And we then separate any sediment most of the sediment from the nodules inside the machine. And then the nodules go into this, what's called an air riser, which is our vertical transport system.

I mean, that looked cool. So it's like an elevator going from the sea floor to the, to the main ship.

That's right. And there will be great innovations in the pumping systems. In fact, already our partner Allseas are working on something which is very cool. We might even have it ready for 2027. When we expect to be in production. But at the moment we use compressed air. So we inject compressed air into the big water column, into the riser. And you know, as that expands, it creates a vacuum and creates the suction mechanism to lift these nodules. And then when we get the nodules to the production vessel, we have to return the water. We've pretty well taken most of the sediment out, but there'll be some sediment that goes up. So we've elected to return that at 2,000 meters below sea level because of course, most of life lives in the top few hundred meters of the ocean. And in fact, there's pretty well nothing other than, you know, deep dive organisms. Big fish might go below 500 meters. So at 2,000 meters, there's no possibility of impacting any of those fish. But even the studies are finding, even if you did digest that sediment, It's not bioavailable, just passes through the digestion track. And of course, and the other study that we found, people were like, well, what happens to that sediment on the seafloor? And there were disingenuous NGOs who said it's going to travel for thousands of miles because they imagine the currents on the sea surface are the same as they are on the bottom of the ocean, but they're totally different. It's a very still environment. And so what we found through our studies, and there's now been lots of peer-reviewed reports out by people like MIT and others, is that the sediment stays very localized to the area of impact. In fact, as it's coming out the back of our collector, it only rises 2 to 3 meters above the seafloor and it creates its own turbidity current and it resettles, the particles flocculate together and it just resettles from where it came from. And so, you know, there's just so many wonderful characteristics that are offered by the resource itself.

Well, and so you've hit on a couple of the arguments that I saw against this, which was this, this plume that you're talking about there. I mean, you went through a checklist of some of the arguments. One was that some of these squids and other marine life that live at these various layers that do go a bit deeper, that they would choke on the sediment and have trouble surviving. And then, and then just like you mentioned, the disturbance of the seabed itself and, and this idea that you're stirring up so much sediment that it is— it's going to— I guess there's those bits which are part of a similar argument, I think, which is that we just haven't spent a lot of time down there. We don't really know the quantity of life and we don't know the knock-on effects of that if you disturb the sediment, maybe there's other creatures that are living off these nodules and you're, you're, you're upsetting this ecosystem in ways that we can't predict. And that seemed to be your critics, even if they're not critics, I guess the people who were, um, questioning some of this were called, you know, they're calling for a moratorium until we know more about, about what life is like.

Super disingenuous, right? Let me give you one little example. While some people may know not much, we know a lot because we've been out there since ourselves since 2011. Before that, when the US was leading the charge, they had carried out environmental impact studies of the region. And so we had data going back to the late 1970s now about the area and about its recovery rates. And This is where I've been very disappointed in the environmental opponents because they often, they're a little bit too cute. I saw one paper published that talked about the knowledge gaps and they said, "Well, we don't know enough about this and we don't have enough data on that." But when you looked at their paper, they excluded all papers before 2011. They excluded all papers not published in English. And the most frustrating was they included all contractor data. And we're deemed a contractor because we pay for the data. We don't do the work ourselves. We go and hire world-leading institutions. And so they're trying to create a narrative to suit their purpose of of resistance, and it's disingenuous at best. And I think we've always said, let the data set you free. We ourselves have gathered more than 1 petabyte of environmental data since we've been at it. And there is an enormous amount known about this part of the ocean floor. We're talking about 4.5 million square kilometers. We're talking about an ocean that's 360 million 4.5 million square kilometers. And within that 4.5 million, you know, I mentioned that we have 1.6 billion and maybe 300 to 500 million more tons. That's all contained on our area, which is around 200,000 square kilometers. So you're talking about 200,000 square kilometers of 360 million. So it's a tiny, tiny percentage.

Yeah.

That can provide enough nickel and copper and cobalt and manganese to service the needs of America's reindustrialization plans for a variety, 4 years of copper, 400 years of manganese, decades of nickel demand. And the fact is, if we think about what the future looks like, the future looks like more recycling. It looks like more circularity. And so the problem that we're trying to solve for today is the fact that there are not enough metals in the system in circulation to allow recycling to be a viable alternative. But in the future, there will be. The most crucial number of decades are the ones in front of us right now. We need to stop the deforestation of our most pristine ecosystems and apply some common sense and go to the parts of the planet that we can cause the least impact. To both the environment and to humans.

And then just on that argument, the— it seems people counter with the idea, which I don't even know where I land on this. I mean, you know, I was trying to figure out after I read everything last night fully where I stood. I find it all fascinating. And a lot of what you say makes very rational sense to me. The bit about Part of your argument seems to be then we would stop some of the mining that's taking place on the land and instead do this. That's the part where I'm like, oh, humans don't tend to actually stop anything once we've done it. The way you would see this playing out is that you are so much more economical than what is taking place on land that it becomes, it's just not economically viable for people to be doing that. Why would people actually stop mining nickel and cobalt in these other places?

Well, a couple of reasons. Um, at the moment, America imports more than 50% of its copper needs. Okay. And we're about to go into a reindustrialization phase. So we're going to need a lot more copper. We import about 100% of our nickel, cobalt, and manganese needs, and they're coming from a variety of places, right? And It's not coincidence that often the most environmentally impactful, destructive mining processes are also the least economic. And so there's a thing called a cost curve. And you know, if I, it's hard for people to imagine how valuable this is, but we turn 100% of the mass of this nodule into saleable product. And To, to give you a sense of the value of it, if you put the nickel and cobalt and manganese into copper equivalent by value, there's more than 7% copper equivalent. Now last year, the average grade of copper mined was less than 0.6 of 1%. So we're talking about an order of magnitude more valuable than land-based alternatives. And the ones that are the more expensive producers when there's new supply, Because all those people supplying the USA, we hope that we're going to process these metals and refine these metals on USA soil. And so we won't need to buy them anymore. We're going to instead buy them from American industry, from American jobs, and we are going to make the US economy a whole lot more robust. And I know that we will slow down the expansion of nickel mining into these more pristine ecosystems. I just know that.

Because there'll be so much more supply or?

Because we'll be supplying this market. And also eventually, it always frustrates me when I hear what you said yourself, you don't know where you land on this. Well, let me challenge you that if not this, then what? Yeah. And can you describe to me where nickel comes from today? I'm pretty sure You have a hunch, but have you been and walked it? I've been there and walked it. I've seen the destruction that goes on.

Yeah. I mean, the closest I've been to a gold mine, I've been to a lithium mine in Chile. I mean, you know, I haven't been to a nickel mine. I don't have trouble with that. I mean, I've seen photos of these crazy strip mining things and, and yeah, look, I mean, none of that is, is pretty. I think my, my head as I was trying to think it through was just sort of like you said, it's like, okay, well, if the US gets a new supply of this, that doesn't mean that China's stopping mining wherever they might, you know what I mean? And, and, and so I think the— I always worry— you, you were addressing one thing that I was worried about before when you started getting into the recycling, which is, is, you know, if you go over the next 56, 50 to 60 years and we're just mining everything we need for the modern world, unless we either recycle or start getting the asteroids and things like that, we're in a lot of trouble. We just start running out of stuff, you know? And so, um, even if this is the right thing to do, I think there's this part of my brain where you're just like, man, we're just going to tap everything. We're going to run out of things to tap into in, in, in the next few decades. And so I don't know, it just always feels like you're entering some new area and then we go grab all, you know, humans is what humans do.

Well, it's very, it's also very hard to disrupt an industry while you're part of that industry. And so we have that golden opportunity, you know, where it's a new supply. Yeah. And we can establish some different rules. And we had a strategy day recently on August 4th and we released, you know, what our medium long-term plans are around supply because, you know, I've spent some time in the SaaS industry and so we got thinking about why sell this stuff? Why not rent it in a similar way to, and we call it Metals as a Service, MAS, because—

And you guys do the recycling and—

That's right.

Okay.

And the whole plan is, you know, our evolution happens in 3 phases. You know, the first is where can we get the lowest impact supply of new material to put into the system and then sell the products so we know they're gonna come back to us because recycling's a big issue for people, right? Yeah. At the moment, China's bidding up the cost of recycled material, so it's all heading to China. But I think the administration's going to stop that because the local recycling businesses are calling out for it to say, "We can't buy the stuff. We can't afford to buy the material because China's outbidding us." But in the future, what we see is that our blend of what we call virgin ore, virgin nodules, will diminish to eventually a very, very tiny fraction. By making sure that those atoms come back to us and atoms or metals as a service, I think is a really cool concept because it can also lower the investment cost for a customer. It means that they can pay us less money on day one and more money sort of in future years, but it means that they can, they'll have an obligation to return the units to us because we'll have the infrastructure to enable the the retreatment of that material so we can supply it again. And so it means these atoms can survive centuries.

And there's, there's a lot of stuff to be optimistic about on that front. JB Straubel, who is basically a co-founder at Tesla, I've been out to his massive facility in Nevada. Is it Redwood Materials?

I think.

And, and it's really interesting. I mean, so this is a guy who starts out selling electric vehicles And then takes very— gets really into the idea of, well, you know, we have to recycle this stuff. If my whole— my— he was— I've known JB for a long time. I mean, you know, he's, he's like bought into the electric car religion and, and, and that this— the environmental side of all that. And so he wanted to close the loop on, on how this works. And so they're recycling these batteries in ways that are amazing. I mean, they really do break it down into the elements. So I am a believer on that for sure. And that seems to be the direction we're heading and that we have to go. Okay, since day one, the Core Memory Podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. Let's get into like some more of the science. Like when you talk about— we talked about the Brits pulling these up in buckets. My I come from Texas and the oil industry and, you know, you're always looking for the well and there's all these different ways to survey land and the sea to try to find this. How do we, how do you even go about looking through the ocean at such depths to try and find those exciting spots? I have no idea what tool you use to do that.

Well, the good news is we're not using buckets anymore and ropes. Although we do use what we call a box score where we drop it, it's like a turf cutter, it takes a square of seafloor so we can assess the grade of the nodules and so on. But it's largely by sending signals and seeing what bounce back you get.

Okay.

Because it's a two-dimensional resource, you're really looking for anomalies. And of course, with the evolution of automated underwater vehicles, The former Chief Technology Officer of Google has now got a startup where he's building these very cheap underwater AUVs. His goal is to deploy those pieces of equipment for like $20,000. Today, a Huygens AUV costs $6 to $8 million, so really expensive. And they get lost on occasions. What you'll find is that the technology providers are starting to come to this industry as well.

And they're doing LiDAR or what do they do to get that bounce back?

It's a combination of different side sonar.

Okay, yeah, I guess LiDAR, there would be nothing to—

That's right. Yeah, not so much LiDAR. But the interesting thing, I was in Hainan Island in China talking at a conference some years ago, and they have this little township, they have about 28,000 people all dedicated to deep sea mining and the technology stack one layer down, building the stuff.

In China?

In China.

And are they already pushing ahead with this or?

No, but as China does, they're very forward-looking and good planners. And so they're really saying to industry, get on board, build the tech because Xi has said we want to dominate deep earth, deep ocean, deep space. And at the moment they're a little bit behind us, which they don't like because we've been leading the charge and they've also been victim of this international body not being able to get out of its own way. Because they still haven't agreed rules. But that international organization, the International Seabed Authority, is pretty well dominated by China.

Okay.

And they will be the driver, driving force.

Okay. So you do have that international body. And so with just because Trump has said he wants to do this, I know this, I saw your stock shot way up. So people got excited that this is opening some doors. But do you still have international, what's the next step to like just make this happen or are you free to go do this now?

No, we're free to, well, what we announced is that we're going to apply through our US company, TMC USA, for commercial recovery permits over the area that we've been spending the last 14 years focused on. And so we'll still reserve our rights through the international body because, you know, we have claim over those grounds along with our sponsor countries, but we have the legal right to apply under the USA rules. And, and We're not entering a period of lawlessness. It so happens that the international body couldn't agree the rules, yet the USA set up these rules back in 1980 and they're robust and we applied under those rules. And so, and that's the other thing, you know, it's not as though we can just go and start picking up rocks. Firstly, it's a really complex exercise, right? It's, you need a big boat, you need that big pipe we talked about and a robot. So, But you also need the rules and the, you know, monitoring plan to make sure that you stay within boundaries from an environmental perspective and so on. And so that's what the process we're in the middle of right now.

And 3 years ago, you guys picked up 4,000— was it pounds or tons?

Tons, yeah.

Tons. And that's— so you've done this.

Yeah.

And that was with like a prototype vehicle or— okay. And so you went, you So you did this test, you showed that you could do it, and then you've been what, you've been developing a bigger vehicle or, okay. And your partner, you mentioned their name and I read about them.

Allseas.

Allseas. And so they're kind of designing the hard, the robotic hardware for this.

Yeah. They have for the last 40 years have been focused on laying pipes for the deep ocean, connecting up oil and gas fields and putting in place oil transportation and gas transportation systems in the deep ocean Where are they based? They're based, they're a Swiss company.

Okay.

But their big engineering office is in Houston and also Delft in the Netherlands.

And so are the machines being built in Houston? Where do they get built?

Yeah, well, it'll be a combination actually.

Okay.

But most certainly it's going to be more Houston-based in the medium term because of our pivot to the USA.

So have you, like, I mean, I don't know if you can reveal these things or not. I mean, how far along is the Sure.

It's a long way. I mean, we've already got the boat. Yeah. There's a few changes we need to make to it. And then, you know, we tested our collector back in 2022. It was a great success. And, you know, the team have been busy engineering the next one. And that first one was about 6 meters wide. The next one will be more than double that.

Okay.

Width-wise. And it was 90 tons out of the water. But one of our biggest challenges was keeping it on the seafloor.

You know, the actual machine itself.

Yeah.

Okay. So 12 meters wide.

More than, well, it was 6. Yeah. It'll be more than, more than double that.

Okay.

The production one.

Okay. And then at what rate does it, do you have multiple of those? Do you have one? What's in there?

Well, we'll start with one.

Okay.

But then we'll go to two. And I think as we get a bigger boat that the Hidden Gem can handle about 3 million tons of production per annum.

Okay.

And then of course we offload the nodules to a cargo transporter that then takes them to shore. So it's like, I don't know if I grew up on a farm, right? So it's like harvesting a paddock of wheat. You know, the harvester just keeps going and the bins full up, get loaded, off they go.

That's what it looks like.

Yeah. Yeah.

And they'll be refined in Houston.

Well, we haven't announced where, but we've got a shortlist of about 4 sites. We're talking to the government about, you know, whether they have a home inside the strategic reserve stockpile or whether we'll send them to Japan or Korea for the first processing because— Because there's existing infrastructure built already that can handle the processing of the nodules.

Correct.

But there's nowhere in the USA. So that's why we've got to build something. And that's exciting. This is what President Trump talked about when it came to reindustrialization. There hasn't been these heavy industries built in this country for decades, like more than 50 years.

And this is like a new thing that's been—

It is. And of course the good news is if you go back 50 years ago, there was massive inefficiencies. Some of the pollutants were more, I guess, more common, whereas the environmental rules around that, I mean, we don't have that problem because we have, we used all of the mass, we don't generate waste or tailings, but we're going to bring back an industry that's clean and obviously it'll have a lot of automation in there. So China were happy to take those industries over the last 30 years because they needed to keep a workforce busy. But even they're starting to automate, even they're starting to bring AI and technology into those heavy industries. And that'll be the opportunity to do that here in the USA.

And you've hit on it a couple times, but I do want to be explicit on this point. The refining is no joke. I mean, that, that nodule that you're holding, I mean, it's almost pure, right? I mean, unlike getting this out of a mine where, yeah, you have to do so much work to actually get at what you have to spend so much energy, do all this work, all this labor, all kinds of pollutants along the way to get at what you're really after. Whereas it's my understanding from what I read last night in and you did mention a couple times that that is almost exactly what you're looking for.

Yeah, it is. And we, I mean, if you look at the metal content, it's about 33% metal content.

Okay.

And the rest is crystallized water. It's about 24%. There's silica in there, there's iron in there. But the important thing is we turn all of it into saleable, usable material.

Okay.

100% of it. So for example, the manganese, Today, the biggest use for it is to make steel. So we turn it into a manganese silicate product. And so it's about a 43% manganese and it's, but over time we'll also turn that into manganese sulfate for the battery industry. And that's manganese is starting to become a really important replacement product for nickel. It used to be that batteries, battery cathodes were very high in nickel, like up to 90%. Whereas in the future they'll probably be more like 30 to 40% nickel and the rest will be manganese in the cathode, that is.

Yeah, I was just at, uh, General Motors, um, in their battery research and development facility. And so they are moving to these LMR chemistries, which are, are like you said, much more manganese rich. And, um, because this is another thing your critics have, have tried to hit you guys on, is that that this is all well and good, you're going to go mine this stuff, but battery chemistries are going to change and we don't need nickel and cobalt like we used to.

Well, even Ford, you know, Ford were in the press this week talking about their phosphate batteries. But the fact is, when you dive into the numbers and we know the Ford numbers, they use 4 times, make 4 times more cathodes using nickel. Rich chemistries than LFP. But people just take the narrative that suits their purpose for the day, right? And we've got to remember that this is the beginning of a very long journey. It's a beginning of a reindustrialization journey. It's the beginning of an electrification journey. EVs have hit a little bit of a speed hump, but they're not going anywhere.

No, I mean, certain we are gonna electrify everything. Absolutely. I'm quite, quite certain on that.

Yeah.

Um, all right. So you, you mentioned it before, you're an Aussie. I'm a half Aussie, but you're from Queensland. Yeah. My mom's from Sydney. And you grew up on a farm in Queensland.

Uh-huh.

And, and it seemed like you were quite the entrepreneur growing up. I, it was quite the range of businesses that I read about. That you worked on. I mean, all kinds of, all kinds of things. And then you ended up doing very well in the ad tech business for a while and then, and then invested in a deep sea mining company, a previous one.

Yeah, correct.

And then so, so you just kind of got sucked into this.

Yeah.

This world, sort of.

I did. I did.

As a hobby that turned into.

Yeah, I mean, I knew nothing about Well, I was making batteries in China in the early '90s. I built a telecoms company, which I sold to Singtel. I mean, I was attracted to disruptive type players, but in 2001, a friend of mine went to work for this other pioneer, if you like, company. It was called Nautilus. And I got excited. It was like he was saying, Jerry, this is really cool. This is so much better than land-based. I'm going, yeah, I think I can see. In brackets, we got no money. It's like, ah, now I get it. And so I agreed to provide the early seed capital. And, but I was busy building a SaaS company before SaaS was a thing. I was busy building this other ad tech company. And so I said, look, I'll help you raise some money and I'll provide the early seed capital. And it worked out pretty well. I, You know, we floated the company in 2006. I sold out soon after because the same person that I backed was leaving.

Yeah.

I said for me it was just, it was, you know, an experience and I never worked for the company or took any fees for the company. And, but it often gets brought up because in 2018 the owners put it in through a, you know, a prepack.

I saw that people on Reddit are upset about your relationship with that a little bit. Yes.

Yeah. But it's like I sold in 2007, right?

Yeah.

Like, I'm sorry, I backed an idea, it made me a lot of money, thank you. And now I'm, you know, more than a decade later, the owners decided to reorganize it. So, you know, but what it taught me mainly was about polymetallic nodules because that first venture was interesting, but it was, you know, it was really mining in the ocean. Yeah. You know, whereas we're picking up rocks, but it was up in Papua New Guinea. So there was a lot of sovereign country risk. You know, about 5 years after I exited, the PNG government invested in that project, you know, which I also, apparently that was my fault as well. And they never found much of it. Even today there's only a few million tons identified, but it's really valuable and rich. It's a copper gold deposit. I'm sure there's more of it out there and I'm sure it's gonna be successful for them because they are still moving it into production even today.

Wait, and so, and I derailed myself before. I mean, you hit on it when you were talking about the different sites that you're interested in. So you've got this main one.

Yeah.

The, is it CCZ or is it CCZ? And then those, the other ones that you were talking about, those are in separate geographical locations.

Yeah. For us, we're, we're purely focused on the CCZ.

You're just the CCZ. So when you were talking about—

For the time being.

Okay. And when we were discussing about surveying the ocean and And yeah, like, as far as looking for things like this, what do— how much of the ocean have we surveyed? How— because you had quantified the amount of tons that are available.

Yeah.

Like, how do we know that? How much could be out there?

Well, we know how much— I think the, um, U.S. Geological Society said there's about 21 billion tons of these, right?

Just in the CCZ though.

Just in the CCZ. Yeah. And if you add my 1.6 definite and my maybe up to 500, I've got about 2 billion of it on.

But like, have we, have people looked at the, are there other spots that people think are promising?

Look, we think when it comes to nodules, this is the spot.

Okay.

Because of the surrounding geology.

Okay.

However, you know, the seafloor mass of sulfides, and they tend to form where the tectonic plates meet. So it's easier to go looking. And I think as survey technologies become better, then there will be more of those found. And a lot of the Pacific Island countries who are really struggling at the moment have those resources in their territorial waters. Of course, we have two of them, the Kingdom of Tonga and the Republic of Nauru, have been our partners in this since 2011 and then 2012 for Tonga. And so They're saying, look, we've got some of this, could you come and help us? And I think in time, once we get this asset into production and once we show people that this is a better way to do it, and the fact that the area, the fact that we can show people how quickly it recovers, the recovery rates actually are crazy. Honestly. For the area that we take them from.

It just, obviously the nodules aren't coming back.

No, that's right. Apart from that.

What about, there were people that are saying, oh, well, there's animals that eat the stuff that's on the nodules and they like to hang out there.

Yeah. Well, look, I wish I could guarantee that there was no impact, but that's a fairy tale, right? I mean, there has to be some impact. The question is, what is our impact and how does that compare to the known impacts of what we're doing today?

Yep. Yep. Yep. No, that's true. That strikes me as fair.

But that's the opportunity for the regulator to say yes or say, oh, maybe not.

Yeah.

Like we don't get to go and decide to do this. We've had amazing supportive partners and shareholders who've, who like the idea and continue to support us today. And you've commented a couple of times about our share price is a lot better, but it's a fraction of where it should be. A fraction.

I was looking, 'cause I remember when you guys first kind of came on the scene, which my vantage point for that was not actually when the company started, it was when you guys started to get attention. Actually, I think The New Yorker did a couple stories earlier than I would've expected them to in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

Because usually it takes them a while to catch on to things like this. But you got this early wave of attention. Yeah. I saw you kind of roll your eyes a little bit. I mean, so some of it was, it was a bit negative out of the gate, but I remember excitement around all this stuff.

Yeah.

And then, and you guys went public during kind of the SPAC boom. And then, yeah, I had not checked in on your share price in a while. I saw there was a lull, you know, so it seemed like—

a long winter.

Yeah, it seemed like my interpretation of that, which I think you addressed earlier, was that people had decided regulators were going to make this impossible.

Correct.

And so then, so then Trump, the administration changes, and, and so this has all been brought back to life. I remember there used to be something like 30 startups that were vaguely wanted to be involved in that. Is that still the case or did that lull clear out a bunch?

I think a lot of them are, well, a lot of them are sovereigns, right? And I think it's fair to say China is playing the long game. Like they, this is too important to China.

Okay.

So China is, it's very convenient for China, this long game because they know companies like us could run out of money if we'd stayed down that international path.

Pathway.

And they're like, "Ah, another 2 years, 5 years, what does it matter?" Matters a lot to us, right? And so a lot of those 30 companies or license holders are governments. But I think for the ones that aren't governments, we might see a few of them knock on the door of the NOAA agency and say, "Listen, that's not working. Could we come to you to permit through your regulations. And I hope they do because I can tell you from my perspective, it's been a good experience. You've got a president who likes it. He's got a cabinet filled with people who knew us in opposition and were supportive and are not all that keen on multilateral organizations either. So that's not bad. And you've got a permitting agency who's had rules in place for more than 40 years who want applications, who are saying, yeah, come and talk to us. Yeah. We want to see this happen. So, you know, at last, I think all the roads are leading in the right direction.

And when you say the share price is not where it could be, I know I'm gonna, you're a public company, maybe some of these things are tricky to navigate, but you're arguing that there is still some kind of regulatory doubt that must be surrounding this.

No, I think it's, well, it's the reason I'm delighted to talk to you today. And people don't know about it. Yeah. Like I, we held a strategy day in New York on August 4th. We invited 140 people. It kind of was our first move to pay more love to the retail crowd. We're getting more institutions on board. We've just had the Hess family come and invest., you know, a big chunk of money. They're one of the amazing successful families in North America. We've just had Korea Zinc, who outside of China are about the only refining company who could help us build this PCAM facility in record speed time. So they just invested $85 million and my team and I'll be, you know, in Korea in the coming weeks. And you know, they, I've been in the White House alongside the chairman where we've met with a very large contingent of administration officials where the administration is saying, how can we make this happen for you? And Korea Zinc chairman and myself, he's got a bit more firepower than me going, we want to make this happen as well and we've got money to make it happen. Can we just get rid of the obstacles so we can fast-track all of this? And of course we've had the president of Korea, in Washington in the last days. Yeah. And so I think if you read the tea leaves, they all point to the fact that this industry finally is gonna have its day. Yeah. And there's a very determined company in us who've been at it for a long time. So far our greatest achievement is survival, you know, because we've had a lot of people try and send us off the rails, but, Thanks to an amazing group of shareholders and also an amazing team that have just stuck together like glue, you know, where we can move so fast, you know, and we've got amazing partners who are coming in seeing that and want to be part of it. And so, but it comes down to regulations because we know that we've got, you know, well, we know that we've got a trillion dollars of metal on our area and maybe more. And But the company's not worth more than billions of dollars, you know?

Yeah, I think it was, it depends on the timing of when, I think it was a $2 billion when I checked last night.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm listening, you've gotta earn your pathway to more value, right? And of course I care a little bit about that because I'm here to serve the needs of the shareholders and also, you know, I also wanna make sure we do the right deals. To make sure that we put infrastructure on the ground. We've got people like Allseas who have publicly declared they want to put more boats on the water. Amazing. That's what we want. I mean, we don't want to own boats. We want to find partners who want to put boats on the water to come and help us pick up more rocks.

Yeah.

You know, and that's how the oil and gas industry typically works. You know, often Exxon or Chevron don't own the oil rigs. You know, they own the area. And then they invite people to come and do some of that.

Yeah. If it makes you feel any better, when the John Oliver piece aired, and I think it didn't help the share price, a friend of mine, he told me last night, he bought, he bought right after it, right after it. He's done very well for himself.

Please tell your friend. Thank you.

The, um, what is, what's the Canada of this all? You guys are based in Vancouver.

Yeah.

I think. And then, and then I'm trying to play out the, dynamics here. I mean, Canada is, relies on a lot of natural resources, so you could see them wanting to be in this place. You have some tension with the US.

No, it's, it's not that complex actually. Okay. You've gotta cast your mind back to 2011. At the time we thought we might use the TSX. It was a friendly resources stock exchange. But I haven't been to Vancouver for, I don't know, 4 years probably. So it's the base, but all of our energy is not there. It's US domiciled. And so, no offense Canada, but if we could be a US company, I'd much rather that. But there's a heavy exit tax.

Where do you spend most of your time?

Well, variety of places. I mean, this year, I've spent a lot of time in DC. I've spent time in New York. We've got a project office in Brisbane, Australia. We still— there's a lot of advocacy that we continue to need to do. I'll be in Korea in the coming weeks. So, yeah, so it's kind of all over the place, but it's a much better travel schedule than it used to be when we were serving, when we were planning to permit through the International Seabed Authority.

And where, where are the Aussies on this? I mean, such a mining, you know, more natural resources than anywhere on earth, but at the same time. Yeah, well, well, but you know, the country is a little divided on if they want that to be their future. You know, there's always this tension, environmental tension there. Clearly relatively close to places like Korea and Japan. And I don't know, does Australia have any— no, no claims on any of this?

No, they've been observing and the people often say to me, how come the big miners don't have a piece of—

Well, that's what I was just wondering. Yeah. If they were angling.

No.

So this, because this is just so foreign from—

No, I think they like, there was one issue, it's permitting certainty.

Okay.

Yeah. And so have I received inbound inquiries in the last 6 months? Absolutely. Absolutely.

What about the deep-sea drilling guys? There's no, is there overlap or?

Well, we already have Allseas, so they're not drillers, but they have deepwater expertise. But the deepwater drillers, they have boats, but they go through periods of prosperity and periods of not so prosperous. And so, and a lot of them are public. And I think one of the saving graces has been having shareholders like Ulises. My biggest shareholder is one of my best friends here in San Francisco and family office. So it doesn't care about—

Is that Steve? No, no.

And then of course we're attracting amazing people like Steve Jurvetson.

Okay. For people who don't know Steve Jurvetson, longtime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and longtime board member of SpaceX and Tesla and probably other Elon ventures. I mean, has experience in regulated industrial high-risk ventures.

Yes, you tick all the boxes.

Is there not— is there not a way? I know it would be expensive and it would probably take more time, but I've just been covering so much of what's happening in AI and robotics. Could you not get around a lot of the criticisms by developing a system that is going down there and using computer vision just to sit right above these and just pluck them up one by one without really disturbing almost anything?

Well, I know there's people working on that. And in fact, I think Lockheed worked on that way back in 2007. And there's a startup who's also focused on it, but You know, the question is, what are you solving for? Because this is a bulk commodity. And as I said before, we need to pick it up with the lightest impact and the greatest efficiency. I mean, I've got say 2 billion tons, that's a lot of nodules. And so the idea of picking them up one at a time, I can't quite get my head around at the moment. And But for me, it's all about if there's a better way of picking them up in the future, then let's do it. But, but if you look at our 2022 trials, we went back there a year later to see recovery rates. And honestly, the nodules that were right adjacent to the tracks that were previously covered in sediment, because I said it stays very localized to the area of impact, but, you know, talking about inches away. So they had a heavy layer of sediment on them. When we went back a year later, they didn't have sediment on them. And the explanation is that the critters, bacteria living down there, because there's so little food, that actually by stirring it up a little bit, we created productivity.

Okay.

And so you've got to say, what are you solving for? Because obviously when you're hovering, you're creating current anyway, right? You're going to stir it up. And so—

And you guys are doing this thing, I don't know if you're still doing this, where you, you're doing one track and then you leave, you leave some of the nodules, right?

We do. Yeah. Well, we only pick up, um, you know, say 85 to 90% of them. And what studies have found is, let's talk about macrofauna that do depend on the nodules, that once you get to 5% abundance of nodules in an area, the more nodules doesn't have any impact on the colony of macro, whether it's worms or whatever it is. So it's not as though more nodules means more species. Um, and in fact, you know, some of the results that came back in from our own studies that'll be released soon is that we actually promoted more productivity in those top 2, 3 centimeters by removing the nodules because the nodules can get in the way.

So, and the P, there is, and there's interesting, there's reason you would want to keep them because there's interesting bacteria and enzymes and and all kinds of stuff.

Totally. Well, we are partnering with some research organizations. We haven't announced it yet because we're sort of negotiating, but you know, when it comes to some of those exciting scientific breakthroughs and people say, well, will there be scientific breakthroughs? Well, without exploration and commercialization, no, 'cause you've gotta be down there, right? And of course we'll be, you know, very open, but we've tried to give our samples away to universities for that purpose. And they're like, nah, sorry, don't know what to do with them. We don't want them. So it's like, you know, if we, okay.

To the extent that you can answer this, what is your, what's your biggest challenge from now till, I think you said 2027 is when you might start the, I would imagine you've gone public, you've raised a certain amount of money.

Mm-hmm.

You could get some more for people that want to become partners in the refinement and things like that. However, I suspect this— you talked about the machine that you've built. I've covered enough hardware companies to know it's expensive to build these machines. You said you had that one, you would like more. What over these next, whatever that is, a year and a half, 2 years, is that your biggest challenge is riding out this cash until you can start mining? Is that kind of the biggest, the biggest crux of, well, of the problem at the moment?

No, I wouldn't say so. I'd say for company, for people who followed us, they know that, you know, I run the company like a startup. You know, that's where I come from. And, you know, we are very frugal when it comes to, you know, how we preserve our dollars. And, you know, we've been focused over the last years by how can we get into production with the least amount of capital. You know, by not making commitments that if things get delayed or things don't go to plan, we potentially risk the company. I just won't do that. You know, I'm very determined to make sure that the shareholders that are my current shareholders are the ones who eventually make the money out of it as well. Because I've seen it too often where the founders go with too much faith and, you know, courage, and they just make mistakes because you can't control all of the elements. And so I never ever wanted to be that company. And so for me, we've already got the partner, it's called Allseas. And on the production side, of course I'd love it if we could kick off with half a dozen boats, but the resource ain't going anywhere. Okay? Yeah. It's there. So I've got it. So get the first one moving. We have a government and administration who realizes that to compete against China, and we I should just make that point. I don't want to sound like a China hawk, but had we not moved to the USA for permitting, this industry would 100% have been dominated by China. So yet another industry when it comes to natural resources for minerals at least would be dominated by China. And because they're really smart at this stuff, they look a long way into the future, whereas America hasn't in the past. But finally, we've got an administration who says, you know, critical minerals, super important. Also a bit more expensive to build here in the US than it is in China. So we'll help companies do that. So my biggest challenge, I'm, I'm very comfortable on the permitting. We're making good progress. We've got a, a regulator who wants to see this permitted. It's really to make sure that we get access to some of that government funding on the right terms. And that we, you know, do the right partner deals with Korea Zinc who've made it very clear that they want to come and put infrastructure on the ground such that we protect our shareholder equity in the best way possible. And so that's where my focus is really.

And so you think the boat goes out for the first time 2027? Mm-hmm. That would be, it would be very fascinating to see the—

Yeah, it's gonna be cool.

I don't— and I don't— I don't want to belabor this too much, but I mean, so you got the— on the criticism front, I mean, are you— do you feel like you're past that now? I mean, it is what it is. The government's decided what's going to happen. I mean, Greenpeace, that you are not a favored nation of Greenpeace. Does it bother you? You seemed like the John Oliver thing, it was unpleasant.

I couldn't give a damn, to be honest. I couldn't give a damn. Like, I am so singularly focused. I don't care what people think. I care what my team, my stakeholders think. Like, I don't want to give people the impression that I'm not sensitive, but I couldn't give a shit what Greenpeace think or what John Oliver thinks.

Yeah.

Because there's a group of people that are always going to think what they think. That same group of people think that recycling or degrowth is the answer. But I can point to you how degrowth will lead to civil war and the total chaos. So it's very hard to find common ground when you believe your fundamental beliefs are so different. Greenpeace think we've just got some billions of people too many on the planet, They just can't decide which ones to get rid of. And you know, I don't think of it that way. You know, I'm a bit more optimistic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that all strikes me as fair. Have you ever looked at the asteroid mining stuff?

Way back in 2015 I did when Planetary Resources around, but I can honestly say not since.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, I was super skeptical just on like how long it would take to pull something like that off. I went to visit the startup AstroForge a couple years ago in Los Angeles. I was actually kind of impressed with, um, they've had some trouble on their launches with their prototypes, but I mean, they actually seem to have a plan. I, I don't know, it struck me as, as more feasible, uh, that I, that I'd imagined.

And, uh, well, I wish them success. I mean, it's like picking up nodules one at a time. Yeah, I wish them success too. Yeah, like, yeah, there's room for everyone.

Um, well, thank you so much. I, I realize I may have made a huge blunder because Aussies pronounce your first name different than we do in the US usually. Do you?

Give it a run.

Gerard? No, Jared.

I used to be ambivalent. Yeah. But these days it's, I'm not a big fan of the French at the moment, mainly because Macron and his position on this topic, he went from being a big supporter to a total turncoat. So it's definitely Jared.

Jared Butler. No, I might be making this up. I feel like my mom, when she's talking about, what is it, the actor Gerard Butler, right? Gerard Butler. Gerard Butler. But I always feel like she has a, she's got a different pronunciation for—

No, it's Gerard. Gerard's, he's a good mate of mine and a shareholder as well.

Oh, you guys Gerard together?

Yeah, we're two GPs in a pod.

That's pretty funny. He's an investor in the company?

Uh-huh.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. That, that is, that's great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It was— it's like one of these areas I wanted to know more about. So this was a fantastic excuse for me to do some reading last night. Oh, can I ask you one last question? Oh, just on the recycling front, because you guys have said, you know, you want to be part of that process. Is that something where you're already building machines for that, or does it— does that take funding to then go?

And no, it's called our Our land-based processing and refining will be able to take black mass. So it's built specifically to enable us to take that recycled material. And when we get around to announcing, and certainly Korea Zinc are very keen that we can take some of that recycled mass into the equation because they have a small recycling business here in the US.

Okay. And at some point you become a recycling company, really?

Of course.

Like in what, 30, 40 years or something like that?

Precisely. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you, and if people want to learn more about that, please go and look at our filings because on August 4th, we released quite a bit about that. And if you read our impact report that we publish every year, If you read our purpose, it's very clear. It has been since we published it in 2018. What's, what our purpose is. It hasn't changed.

Okay. All right, mate. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you.

Appreciate it. I feel like people have learned, learned some things. Cheers.

Thanks.

Yeah. The Core Memory Podcast. The podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex and E1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack YouTube and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.