Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company, wants his firm to be the first to commercially mine the ocean floor. He applauded a recent executive order signed by President Trump, which promotes deep-sea mining as a way for the U.S. to counter China’s advantage in key global mineral supplies. “ This resource can help America become mineral independent, just like it became energy independent through shale and gas,” Barron says.
CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images
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CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images
The deep ocean covers most of the planet. Gerard Barron wants his company to be the first to mine it.
That’s been his dream since 2001, when Barron’s then-tennis partner asked him to invest in a first-of-its-kind project to extract gold and other metals from a hydrothermal vent off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
“I knew very little about the ocean. I knew very little about mining,” Barron told NPR. “But I was curious.”
Barron, 58, is a serial entrepreneur from Australia who always seems to be in a different time zone — calling from Vancouver, London or Dubai. He’s founded companies in fields ranging from finance to industrial manufacturing.
That first deep-sea mining project didn’t quite go as planned. The company struggled to attract financing and went bankrupt in 2019, though not before Barron sold his stake at a profit.
Along the way, he learned about a different, potentially more lucrative, opportunity: “The big game was this nodule field off the coast of Mexico.”
That “big game” is a remote stretch of the Pacific Ocean, believed to hold massive amounts of minerals like nickel and cobalt. It would become the target of his latest firm, The Metals Company.
Barron argues that securing access to those minerals, which are used in defense and energy technologies, could help usher in a new era of industrialization for the U.S.
“ This resource can help America become mineral independent, just like it became energy independent through shale and gas,” he says.
That argument has caught the attention of the Trump administration. The Metals Company is now seeking approval for the project from federal regulators – the first time U.S. agencies have considered such a project.
But scientists worry about the impact of deep-sea mining on a little-studied ecosystem. Most other countries argue that these minerals, located beneath international waters, do not belong to the United States. Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company, describes the nodules in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone as resembling golf balls on a driving range. The company aims to mine this region. In 2021, Professor Sweetman, a research leader at the Lyell Centre for Earth, Marine Science, and Technology at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, shed light on the process of obtaining samples from the depths of the ocean for research on the potential environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. This research is crucial as many ocean researchers have expressed concerns about the unknown effects on an ecosystem that deep-sea mining could have.
Just recently, it was uncertain if any company would venture into deep-sea mining. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), responsible for overseeing mining in international waters, has been working on regulations for over a decade. However, with these regulations still in negotiation, companies like Barron’s have been in a state of uncertainty.
A significant shift occurred when President Trump signed an executive order promoting deep-sea mining to counter China’s mineral dominance. This order directed federal agencies to expedite permitting for deep-sea mining projects, both in federal and international waters. While this provided a lifeline for the industry, it set the U.S. apart from other nations.
The ISA considers seabed minerals as the common heritage of all humans and has condemned the U.S. unilateral approach to mining them. Despite not being bound by ISA rules due to the non-ratification of the treaty, past administrations have generally cooperated. The Metals Company’s prospects have improved following the executive order, with increased stock prices and new corporate investments.
Looking ahead, Barron plans to capitalize on this opportunity by seeking approval from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for commercial-scale mining in international waters. NOAA has committed to expeditiously reviewing the application, although the timeline remains uncertain. If approved, it will take at least a year to develop a full-scale mining system.
With deep-sea nodules discovered over a century ago, The Metals Company is on the verge of extracting them commercially. The process is expected to unfold during Trump’s presidency, marking a significant milestone in the realm of deep-sea mining. following sentence using different words:
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