Page Published 1st March 2025

You may have heard of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a stretch of area from Hawaii to Mexico, which has been targeted by the deep-sea mining sector. They’re planning to extract key battery materials, including cobalt, copper and nickel, from potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Canada’s The Metals Company (NASDAQ: TMC) already has two exploration contracts in that region.

Devan Murugan, Mining.com: Well, 2024 was an interesting year, wasn’t it? You had the election of Leticia Carvalho, a renowned oceanographer, to head up the International Seabed Authority. And at the end of the year, you had an incoming Trump administration, which is seen to be supportive of deep-sea mining. You reckon this was a boost for the industry?

Metals Co. CEO Gerard Barron: You know, 2024 was an interesting year, as you suggest, and one of the toughest, I would say, but it ended with a wet sail. And we’re hopeful about the new secretary general, that she can bring unity to an organization that desperately needs it to serve the needs of the member states who want to see this industry get started. But I think the better news was the election of President Trump.

And there are a lot of big supporters of not only The Metals Company, but also Ocean Minerals. The U.S. has a priority that’s different to other countries. Mineral security is really important for critical minerals. And we’ve had the support of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the UN Ambassador Elise Stefanic. We’re going into 2025 thinking this will be a breakout year.

DM: The investors certainly think so. There was a sizable surge in The Metals Company share price at the end of the year and the start of 2025. Essentially what caused that?

GB: It came about by being oversold and then it came about by people realizing what a new Trump administration might mean for The Metals Company and for the industry as a whole. And I’ve always said you’ll wake up one day and there’ll be a zero on the end of the stock price because we sit on such an enormous undeveloped asset, and we don’t get fairly appreciated for the value of that asset. I mean, we have 1.6 billion tonnes of these polymetallic nodules on two of our licence areas. So, we’re talking about a resource that’s approaching a trillion dollars worth of value. And the thing that stands in the way of us unlocking that value is the permit to be able to go and extract them and sell them. But that’s also going to be a good new year for The Metals Company as we prepare to lodge our submission later this year.

DM: I was going to ask you about that because we know that the mining code is yet to be finalized. Seems like it’s taking forever. Let’s talk about that exploitation licence. Are you applying for one this year, as you say?

GB: You can bet your last dollar on it. We’ve announced that on June 27, we will lodge that application and, we might make it a bit earlier, but at the moment we’re working to that date.

DM: Does it matter that the mining code’s not finalized because there’s just so many unanswered questions for many around deep sea mining and the rules and regulations that apply to it. That’s why that mining code is so important. How does it factor into your entire launch of this?

GB: Devan, we’d much rather the mining code be adopted right now, but the regulator has announced that it will have the code completed by the end of this year. And we hope that they stay true to that word. But if you look at the timeline, what we will do is launch that application and they need a year to assess it. And that gives them plenty of time to get those regulations in place.

Back in 1994, the member states adopted Article 15, which allowed any contractor or country to lodge this two-year notice. And that was really put in place all those years ago for this exact moment. So, we hope the mining code is in place and we and other member countries are working hard to finalize that. And I certainly understand that the new secretary general will be doing the same.

But there is also a pathway for us to get into early production. And of course, we think that with the arrival of a new administration in D.C., that will only further add momentum to what’s happening at the International Seabed Authority.

DM: I want to talk about the economic sense of this, Gerard. Many of the metals you are after are in surplus at the moment. You’re seeing some of the lowest prices in years. Let’s take a look at cobalt, possibly around nine-year lows. Nickel, also not at its highest price at all. One has to ask if it still can be profitable to mine from that perspective. What’s your take on it?

GB: Look, when we prepared our preliminary economic assessment (PEA) many years ago and we’re about to release our pre-feasibility study, the sort of prices that we’re looking at down the track are pretty well consistent with today’s prices. What people will see, as they saw in our PEA, is that we can still be very profitable at these numbers.

What we have to remember that even the country that is responsible for keeping a little bit of a cap on the nickel price, Indonesia, they have a limited supply of high-grade nickel laterite saprolite. They need to supplement the supply of that material with other high-grade feed because the limonite supply comes with a heap of other environmental problems and obviously it’s a much lower grade material.

The point I’m getting at is we have to look at the supply of these metals over the next decades. And you can’t take a today, tomorrow view on commodity prices. You have to believe that over the next 10 years, 20 years, that as the transition continues, as the industrialization of the developing world continues, you see the initiatives announced by the new Trump administration where they want to build industry. They want to create jobs.

And you’re going to see that in other European countries as well. In fact, you’re going to see it across the world where people want to create jobs back home. They want to reshore new industries. And for that, you’re going to need a supply of metals. And our deposit, a thousand miles southwest of San Diego in the Pacific Ocean, is one of the only deposits on this planet, if not the only, that can make America metal independent, the same way they became energy independent with the introduction of shale many years ago. For the United States, it’s a very exciting moment for them.

DM: There’s also some talk about underestimating how much it will cost to bring these nodules from the sea floor to the surface.

GB: Let me just address that. If you look at the people that are commenting on that, they tend to be environmental activists who have no idea what they’re talking about. If you look at our approach to that, we went and looked to partner with people that operate in these marine environments and have done for decades. One of our biggest investors is a company called Allseas. For the last 40 years, they’ve been operating in the deep ocean, laying pipeline, establishing and demobilizing oil platforms.

They know what 24/7, 365-day production looks like. And of course, in 2022, we ran a very successful collector test where we put our first collector system in the water, on board The Hidden Gem. You can find some great videos of that on our website at Metals.co. And that was the first time a fully integrated collector test had been done since the 1970s.

We know what the economics are going to look like. And obviously, one of the things that has changed is the absolute insistence from economies like America that they want to build up the local processing capacity of metals to support their local industries. We expect that will provide added incentives for us to look at not only shipping our nodules, perhaps to Japan, as we’ve already announced, or Indonesia, but also shipping them straight to the U.S. where we can turn them into the battery metals and the industrial metals that are going to be needed to spawn many other industries and jobs.

DM: As we wrap up, Gerard, you brought up how you got a backlash from environmental groups who say harm and destruction of the sea will be devastating if this continues. Has there been any contact with communities in the Pacific?

GB: Look, the environmental story is one of the strongest aspects of picking up these polymetallic nodules and turning them into battery metals. And once again, if you look at who the voices that are speaking those concerns, they tend to be environmental activists or independent scientists who have joined onto the causes of those activists. And they’re based on desktop studies. They’re based on what might happen.

For the last more than a decade, we’ve been out there spending hundreds of millions of dollars to gather the important environmental data that will provide the evidence for regulators to make decisions. And in fact, I’ve just returned from our environmental conference in Brisbane, where we brought together leading experts who’ve been working on our environmental program for the last five or six years. And people are going to be blown away at just how small the impacts are and what high quality data we have.

What I always say to people is, you have to apply first principles to any new industry. And it makes sense that we carry out extractive industries in parts of the planet where there is the least life, not the most life. At the moment, we’re pushing into our tropical rainforest to get access to those metals. And the problem with that is you’ve got to move aside the rainforest and push out the indigenous people to then dig up the dirt to get the metal.

Why wouldn’t you go to the abyssal plain where the amount of life is measured in grams per square metre to pick up these rocks and our environmental data will show that we can contain the environmental impacts to the area? We’re also going to have some amazing news about recovery. And not only that, there was an expedition that returned in the last six months from some of the trial mining that was done in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone back in the 1970s.

When we submit this application, there’s going to be an amount of data, not only covering our application, but data available on how the area recovered from activities 40 years ago. Now, I’ve been lucky to get an early view of that. It’s all good news from where we sit at the moment, Devan.

DM: Looking forward to June when that application is submitted. But for now we leave it there, Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company. Thanks very much indeed for talking to us.