April 2, 2025 — Vancouver, Canada-based seabed mining company The Metals Company (TMC) has announced that it is collaborating with the Trump administration to obtain authorization to mine the deep sea bed in international waters, in defiance of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority (ISA).
The ISA was given jurisdiction over seabed mining in international waters by a 1994 treaty, ratified by 169 U.N. members states, including all major coastal economies, except the U.S.
June 25, 2021 — The first time Gerard Barron tried to mine the sea floor, the company he backed lost a half-billion dollars of investor money, got crosswise with a South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat and ultimately went broke. Now he’s trying again, but with a twist: Mr. Barron is positioning his new seabed mining venture, The Metals Company, as green, to capitalize on a surge of environmentally minded investment.
TMC is set to receive nearly $600 million in investor cash in a deal slated to take the company public in July. If successful, that would value TMC at $2.9 billion—more than any mining company ever to go public in the U.S. with no revenue.
“We were positioning this incorrectly as a big mining, deep-sea mining project, which it was,” says Mr. Barron, who says the metallic nodules he hopes to bring up are crucial to building electric-vehicle batteries. “But it wasn’t the way that we were going to garner support from investors to make this industry a reality.”
Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like.