The Deep-Sea Mineral Trade-Off Behind Clean Technology

What if the clean energy transition depended on potato-sized rocks four miles under the Pacific, and we’ve barely started talking about it?

In this episode I’m joined by Oliver Gunasekara, CEO and co-founder of Impossible Metals, to tackle one of the most uncomfortable truths in climate tech: there is no net zero without mining. We dig into how deep sea polymetallic nodules, AI-driven underwater robots and smarter policy could reshape the energy transition, emissions reduction, and even the geopolitical balance with China.

You’ll hear why 84% of global mining today is still for fossil fuels – and what happens to decarbonisation when ore grades on land collapse to 0.2% while nodules sit at the 4% level. We get into how autonomous robots can hover above the seabed, detect and avoid life, and selectively collect nodules, and why the choice of mining technology matters as much as the decision to mine at all.

We also explore the hard politics: critical minerals as a strategic vulnerability, the West’s dependence on Chinese processing, and why delaying decisions on deep sea mining could mean more rainforest lost, higher battery prices, and a slower energy transition. Kismet: the market for nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese is on track to hit $1 trillion a year by 2035 – and we’re still arguing about whether mining “counts” as climate tech.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Oliver and Impossible Metals are trying to square the circle: scaling climate tech and critical minerals without trashing the planet in the process.

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If you look around like the things on in your room or in my room, there is no energy generation. Everything you see was either grown, or mined. That's the only two options. So civilisation, and energy, and technology are all completely dependent on mining. The question is how can we do it better? Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 250 of the Climate Confident Podcast, your go-to source for actionable insights on climate solutions, decarbonization and the technologies reshaping the global economy. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Now, today's episode tackles a topic most people never think about, but absolutely should. We talk regularly about electrification, batteries, electric vehicles, and grid scale storage. Yet we rarely ask the obvious question, where will the metals actually come from? Especially when average ore grades on land have collapsed to fractions of a percent and 84% of global mining today is just digging up fossil fuels. What if there were a different way, a source with metal grades an order of magnitude higher without blasting mountains, leveling rainforests, or forcing communities off their land? And, what if that source could be accessed using autonomous robots that hover above the seabed, detect and avoid life using AI and selectively collect only what they need? That's the bet impossible Metals is making. And my guest today, CEO and co-founder Oliver Gunasekara believes deep sea polymetallic nodules could reshape both the energy transition and the geopolitical balance of critical minerals. If you care about battery economics, supply chain resilience, environmental integrity are the uncomfortable dependence on China that underpins today's mineral supply, this is a conversation you'll want to hear. Let's dive in. Oliver, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm Oliver Gunasekara. I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Impossible Metals. Okay, and quickly, Oliver, what is impossible Metals? Yeah, we want to build a 21st century mining company. So we are using underwater robots to collect these round potato sized rocks that lie on the deep ocean floor, and we then want to get them processed and extract the nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese that's inside these rocks. Okay, superb. Let's take a couple of steps back so Oliver, and tell me the origin story. What made you wake up one morning and decide to start Impossible Metals? Yeah, it's a, it's a new industry for me. I didn't have a mining background, but I've spent most of my career 30 plus years or so in semiconductors. So I was actually one of the early employees at, Arm A R M. But after selling my last company in 2019, I thought I was gonna be kind of semi-retired. But the climate crisis kind of reared its head. I, I live in Silicon Valley. We had really bad wildfires in the fall of 2020, and that was really the catalyst. Well, maybe I can do one more startup and it's got to really help us decarbonise. And I discovered these potato sized rocks on, on the seabed floor and dug into the tech that people were using and was a little surprised to learn that it basically was tested 50 years ago there hasn't been much innovation. And so that was the idea. Let's use 21st century technology, robotics, AI, autonomy, batteries to really lower the environmental impact and potentially also lower the cost and allow us to access these minerals. Mining, obviously Oliver has got a very bad reputation is, is probably putting it nicely in terms of when you hear about mining, particularly for critical minerals, you get the idea in your head of children in the DRC, Democratic Republic of the Congo, artisanal mines and things like that. Obviously your solution is quite different to that. How did you come up with the idea? Well, I, I would say I, I really discovered a company that was called Deep Green. Now it's called the Metals Company. And they were quite vocal about what they were doing and they were using this dredging technology, and that was really how the idea got in my head of like, let's innovate and do something different. But stepping back, I've come to realise that mining is really underappreciated. Frankly, society doesn't exist without mining. You know, if you look around like the things on in your room or in my room, there is no energy generation. Everything you see was either grown or mined. That's the only two options. And so mining is really the first technology, the first innovation that humans had. We have the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, these are all metals that came out of the ground. This was all mining. So, society literally goes back to before we were living in caves, you know, kind of at that level. And even then we were doing a form of mining if we were getting tools that we needed. So civilisation and, energy and technology are all completely dependent on mining. The question is how can we do it better? Because I agree historically mining has been pretty terrible. You talked about the human right violations of child labor, forced labor, people being displaced, pollution. These are all really bad social impacts that unfortunately happen every day in places like Indonesia, but there's also the massive environmental destruction. Our view is the world needs mining, but we can do it a better way and we can go to a place that we haven't yet mined that has a fraction of the life. The life that's there is very precious and special, but let's use technology to preserve it. And that's really the mission of Impossible Metals. Okay, and why underwater mining as opposed to mining on land. It would seem that it's a lot easier to get to metals that we need if they're on land or underground at least. What's the advantage of going under underwater? Well, we've been mining on land for tens of thousands of years, and, and so the reality is the good stuff's already been mined. Define good stuff. Well, it's low cost, it's easy to access, it's convenient, it's not in very remote locations. So one of the key metrics of a mine is the grade. When you dig up the or, how much of it is waste? How much is it valuable metals that you can sell. In copper, the average grade today is about half a percent, 0.5. So you can imagine how much material you have to dig up to get at half a percent. And of course, that half a percent isn't just in one location, it's spread all around the ore. So you have to process huge, huge quantities. If you go back a hundred years ago, that was much, much higher. It was a few percent. And and so that's the problem of all this mining happening. Now, nickel is even worse. There are often new mines in the process of getting permitted that are the 0.2%, 0.2%. So this has a massive environmental impact'cause you have to remove and process so much more material, but it also has a huge economic impact in the fact that it's just really, really expensive to dig up, a mountain and only get 0.2 of it after you process it, that you can actually sell. The unit economics start to look very poor and this is somewhat similar to offshore oil and gas. In the 1960s, almost all oil and gas was on land, but some people figured out that we could actually go to the ocean and now it's a big part. I think maybe a third of all oil and gas comes from offshore. With mining we're getting to the limits of what becomes economically feasible. Yes, there's plenty of material on land. But can you get it at a cost effective point? And, and the cost is so critical if you care about the energy transition as I do, we need the price of these metals to continue to decline because, you know, I drive an EV. It's got about a, I think an 80 kilowatt hour pack. It's a nickel rich chemistry, and the vast majority of that battery is nickel. It's by far the largest line item on the whole cost of the car. I think there's at least $10,000 worth of nickel in the battery. And so if the nickel price doubles, that's $20,000 that makes these cars unaffordable. And of course you could substitute nickel for iron, but then you give up a third of your range because it's a lot heavier. So if we want a just transition, we need to have, I think the IEA estimates 600 times more mining to substitute fossil fuels, and it's really critical that those prices don't spike because that will slow everything down. Hmm. Yeah, I would question that 600 times more mining just because I was looking at this this morning as a bit of research, and if you look at all the mining that happens globally today, 84% of all mining is for the extraction of fossil fuels. And if we are doing that, just transition that you mentioned, that 84% should go to close to zero. And if we look at the critical metals, the lithiums, nickel, cobalt, et cetera, they account for 0.008%. of all mining today, so even if they increased 600 times, you'd still be in low single digit percentages of all the mining that's happening today. Yeah, you, you, you are correct. The 600% is the existing, if we take nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, it's the scale up of those. It doesn't factor in what's happening to other forms of, of mining, like fossil fuel extraction, which absolutely will, decrease. And you know, one of the beauties of electrification is that well, we have a renewable source in the form of the metal, you know, with the fossil fuel you dig it up, you burn it, you, release a large amount of carbon and it's gone. With a renewable source, ideally solar or wind, or nuclear or geothermal, that energy keeps coming. We need metals to move the electricity, to generate the electricity, to store the electricity, to use the electricity, but the metal is infinitely recyclable. So these, these are elements. They're not destroyed. They do have to be repurposed. And so long term. 50, 60, 70 years, we may be able to source the majority of our metal requirements from circularity and recycling, but we can't do it today because it just takes too long. You know, you buy an EV today, it's got at least 10 years of life in the car, and then the battery pack will probably be reused as a grid storage for another 10 years. So the cars that are sold today have at least 20 years before the metal is available for recycling. And, and so that's why primary mining has to ramp up. But long term, yeah, recycling should be a significant portion of the, the metals that we need. Great, and I mean two things then you mentioned offshore derricks for oil and gas, and obviously they have an horrendous reputation in terms of pollution and blowing up from time to time the other thing that you mentioned was the fact that the amount of copper, nickel, et cetera, has decreased enormously in the ores that we're finding on land today. How does that compare to what you're finding underwater? So, two kind of questions there related to what you're saying. One, how does offshore mining of these metals compare to offshore drilling for oil and gas in terms of environmental destruction? And two, are there higher concentrations of the metals offshore than there are now onshore? Yeah, so first question, I mean, drilling for oil and gas is completely different, and unfortunately you have the opportunities for, for spills and leaks, which we have seen happen multiple times. That's not the case when we talk about polymetallic nodules. So these are potato sized rocks that lie on the seabed floor. Unattached. So there's no blasting, there's no drilling, there's no tunneling. You literally just have to pick up large quantities of these potato sized rocks that lie on the seabed floor. So there really isn't any potential for a major catastrophe like an oil spill that could happen because we are picking up these rocks. And depending on what technology you use, the impact will vary. And historically our competitors, and there's probably eight or so companies that have built these dredging tractors that, go to the seabed floor and they vacuum up the seabed through a riser system, and they pump a slurry of nodules and sea water and sediment to the support ship where they dewater and then pump back the sediment into the midwater column. That's the traditional approach. That's what I saw about five years ago. And, and when I dug in, I could read patents from 1965, I could see testing from the seventies, and it, it seemed to me we could do it better. And, and so what we've invented is a completely different way to do that. So our system is using a parallel fleet of underwater robots. These robots are battery powered. They are untethered, and what they do is that they descend under their own power using a buoyancy engine that we invented, and they dive to close to the seabed floor, but they don't land. And they hover approximately one meter above the seabed floor, and then they switch on their lights and cameras and they look at the seabed and they're looking for life. And if we see the very rare, occasional, larger forms of life, there's an octopus, there's corals, the sponges. This stuff is super rare at these depths. We're talking up to four miles deep, 6,000 meters deep. You might see what we would call megafauna, something that's bigger than one centimeter in size, every few square miles. So pretty rare. But if we see it, the vehicle completely avoids it, it quarantines the area and goes around. And then if we don't see that life, it uses the cameras and the array of arms to quickly pick the potato size, rocks, the nodules. And we can program to leave a small percentage behind. In fact, that percentage could be as small as 30%, or right now we're planning to leave 60% behind, and that's to preserve the life we can't see, which is the vast majority, the single cell, microscopic life, the bacteria, the viruses that live on the nodules and on the sediment. We can't see that. Nobody, you need a microscope to see it, but by only removing a small percent, we will preserve that life. And then the vehicle gets full by picking. Our production vehicle has a four metric ton payload 4,000 kilograms, and then it uses the buoyancy engine and batteries to float to the surface or near surface, where we have an automated crane launch and recovery system that brings it onto the ship. We empty the payload, swap the battery for one that's fully charged, and then the vehicle can be redeployed. So I think from an environmental standpoint there isn't really any major opportunities for big environmental disasters because we are not pumping oil. So that's, that's probably your first question. One of the really attractive things about the ocean is that because no mining has yet occurred, we spent 50 years under a moratorium doing research and collecting data, but we, we haven't actually done production mining. We do know that the grades are super high, so the nickel equivalent grade, which is a number that mining uses when you get a byproduct credit for the other metals is about 4%. So, 4% versus 0.2. And if you want to break that down, it varies a little bit by location, but you're looking at copper grades of about 1%. Nickel at about 1.25%, cobalt at about 0.2%, and manganese about 27, 28%. This is super high grade, so about a third of the rock is super useful. That's unheard of. And that combined with the fact that there's no drilling or blasting or cutting, and the fact we don't have to pay for infrastructure. You know that mine that's in the middle of Africa, there isn't even a road. You have to build the road, maybe even a railway line, a power connection, infrastructure for workers. All of that has to be paid for. In the ocean, we just reuse ships and ports, massive cost saving. So we are estimating that our all in sustaining cost, which is what it costs to get a metric ton of nickel out of the ground and processed, would be under $1,500 a metric ton our cost. The average last year just under $15,000. So we're talking a 10 x reduction in cost, when you're looking at all in sustaining costs. That's super destructive with a fraction of the environmental impact and speed that we can do in just a few years by partnering with people that have spent 20 years or more collecting environmental data. Okay. And obviously there's been a huge amount of talk in the last couple of years about AI. I'm assuming there's an AI angle in this as well. The vision system is completely AI driven, so we have a, a very sophisticated Nvidia, GPU on the vehicle. And it is being fed the stereo image data from the multiple cameras and they are doing the life detection and the detection of the actual nodules. The beauty of our AI vision system is that it's relatively simple. You know, unlike say, an autonomous vehicle on land we don't have a lot of traffic to deal with. We don't have to deal with mixed illumination. Biggest problem with the computer vision and AI is dealing with, well, you have the sun, the light varies depending on the time of day. You have shadows, you have street lights, you have other things that makes it really complicated. In our scenario, it's pitch black. As soon as you go a few hundred meters, no sunlight gets there. That's why there's very little life. And so we have our own lights, so that probably makes our problem nine times simpler because we control the illumination and our AI is really only looking for three things. It's trying to find the seabed, which is kind of yellow, sandish, maybe clay. It's looking for the poly metallic nodules, the ore, these are kind of black potato sized rocks, and then it's looking for anything else. And anything else we just assume is life and we avoid it. That could be a submarine cable. It could be an octopus. We don't care. It's just not a nodule and, and so we don't have to have pre foreseen all of the life for the AI to avoid it. Right. Okay. And, i'm curious as well, where do these potato sized nodules come from? Yeah, how do they form? So, basically there is volcanic action on the planet that brings the core metals that we're looking for, nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese to the surface. And then over millions of years there's weathering. And basically they, if they're on land, they will roll through weathering into solution and then they will roll into the ocean. So now you have the ocean with parts per million of these metals. What happens now is that there is a kernel, a shark's tooth, a piece of clay, some piece, some small object. And the metals start to solidify. They precipitate into that object. And so the nodules actually grow. So every million years is about one centimeter in diameter. And if you were to cut open one of these nodules, you'd actually see the rings as they've kind of grown out. There are trillions of them. It's been estimated that there is over $20 trillion worth of nodules in the ocean, and we've only discovered a small fraction. So there's a massive amount there. And they lie on what's called the abysmal planes, which are these flat areas, which are the majority of the deep ocean. But they are deep. They're typically, as I said, between four and six kilometers, two and a half to, to four miles deep. And they need to have been in water for that length of time. So typically shallower water, may have been land, may not have been water. So that's one of the reasons why they have to be very, very deep. And then are they ubiquitous or are there particular regions that you need to go to to do this? They are found in specific regions, but in huge quantities. So, the way that the licensing regime works is that you typically get 75,000 square kilometers as a licensed area per company. And there's something like 40 of those areas that have been awarded, and you typically get them initially for five or more years so that you can do environmental research and define the resource. So just last month a company finally defined minerals in the ocean as a as a reserve. So if, in the mineral mining world, you have two definitions loosely of minerals that are on the ground. You have a a resource. So that's something that's in the ground, but you don't quite know what how expensive it's going to be to get it out of the ground and whether it's economically viable. And then you have what's called a reserve. So a reserve is a resource that you know is economic to extract and you know how to process. And just last month we had the world's first definition of a mineral resource. And this is following a an SEC ruling. So there are, for any publicly listed company that is a mining company, they have to follow the rules for what is a definition and how they define the resources in the ocean and on land. It basically, it's the same rules. And so that's a big deal that there is now we've known about the resources, what's there forever. But now the technology is maturing, the processing is mature, that that definition can be upgraded to being a a reserve. Meaning we know that it is economic to actually extract. And that's, that's a big deal. Okay. Obviously. Weather is gonna play a significant part as well in the ability to mine these. I know four, four to six kilometers down, weather won't play a large part, but at the surface for the ships trying to retrieve these robots, obviously weather will play a part and it's probably consequentially seasonal. Does that mean, I mean, you're talking about SEC rules, that implies North America. United States in particular, are you looking at other places in other hemispheres so that you could do it, you know, 12 months of the year? Where are those licensed areas, all that kind of thing. Talk to me about that. The license areas are found in different oceans and they're under two major jurisdictions. So if they're in what's called the exclusive economic zone, that's typically 200 nautical miles off the coast of a country, that's treated as its sovereign rights, no different than if the minerals were on land. And so that country decides the rules and allows or does not mining. Some countries happen to have very deep water and so do have these minerals. Typically these tend to be Pacific Island states, volcanic, historic volcanic island states. Cook Island is a great example. It's a group of 15 islands not too far from New Zealand, maybe a long way south of Hawaii. I believe these are, extinct volcanoes. And, and so the seabed around them is super deep and they have, I think because the islands are spread something like 2 million square kilometers of exclusive economic zone, their sovereign area, and they've now awarded three exploration license areas. They're quite actively moving down that path. Now, the vast majority are in what's called areas beyond national jurisdiction, the area or high seas. So when you go outside of that 200 nautical miles and the biggest area is what's known as the Clarion–Clipperton zone or CCZ, and it's an area quite large I think around 2 million square kilometers as well between Hawaii and Mexico. So huge area. There are 16 licensed areas today, and this area has the most research and is the most prolific area for polymetallic nodules. And so that's probably the area that is likely to have mining first. It's where the metals company actually has two concession areas sponsored by the small island state of Nauru and Tonga, but that's the location. That's probably where I think mining would would happen first. Okay, and who holds the licenses? Well, first of all, it depends of those two jurisdictions. So if you are in a country's EZ, then the country defines the rules . They have a criteria, maybe an application fee, and a company, so Cook Islands has awarded three licenses. If you're in international water, there is a UN created organisation. There's a framework law called UNCLOS United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea. It establishes the International Seabed Authority, the ISA headquartered in Jamaica. That organisation has been working now for 30 years and it has exclusive jurisdiction of licensing areas in international waters. It has licensed, I believe, 31 areas to date each, typically 75,000 square kilometers. To get sponsored, to apply a company has to be sponsored by a country that has ratified this law. And we just went through it. So we we recently got sponsored by the Kingdom of Bahrain. And so the Foreign Minister signed a legal document that allows Impossible Metals to apply for a licensed area in this international waters, this area between Hawaii and Mexico. And we've now submitted an application. And we should then be awarded the licensed area and then we will have to do five years of environmental work before we can then apply for a commercial license to actually go mining. And would there be a shortcut of going to other licensees and saying. I see you've got this lovely license there. We've got this lovely technology here. You know, you wanna jump into bed together? You are absolutely right. And we have signed an MOU with another country. We haven't yet announced that, but absolutely. And, and that's a much shorter route because they've already collected all of the environmental data. We also have an agreement with the country of Germany. That has a licensed area to do a collector test with BGR, which is their federal marine and resource agency. They hold a license area and we have an agreement to do a, a full collector test in their area to allow scientists to document the impacts of our technology. And so yeah what we call phase one is very much partnering with one of the 40 or so licenses that are already awarded. That's, as you point out, a much faster route to market because they've collected the data, we bring the tech, but phase two is now securing our own area, but it will take longer. Okay, and you've been doing testing with, I think it's Eureka One and Eureka Two are the names of the robots that you've tested so far. Any surprises from testing those? We learn every time we develop new technology. I mean, with Eureka one, it was really the first time would the concept even work? We weren't a hundred percent sure we could make the vehicle stable enough such that the vision system and arms could pick. It was really a combination. You know, everything was new. We had new arms, new buoyancy, new computer vision. All of that was brand new and so we were really excited when we were able to prove that at least in shallow water the system would work and, and could pick. Eureka Two was really take that learning and now create something that can go six kilometers deep into the ocean. And a lot of learnings. The first time we went to deploy Eureka Two from a ship, previously we'd deployed off the harbor or on a barge in a lake with Eureka one, Right. But trying to deploy in the ocean with waves. We had some safety concerns. We had to redesign how we were doing the launch and recovery, just a lot of learnings to go. But since then, you know, we've proven that the tech works at depth. And Eureka Three is the one that we've now designed. It's the full scale production version. It's quite a bit larger, four to five times larger than Eureka Two. It's the size of a 20 foot shipping container. But fundamentally, no new technology just scaled up. Okay. And how big is your demand pipeline? So demand, if you, let's talk about the total addressable market for the four metals we want to sell. So, nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. This year $500 billion will be spent on those four metals. And it's growing at about seven and a half percent every year. So by 2035, that's $1 trillion a year. So we think we can get a big slice of that. It will start with one area, a modest ramp of robots. Over time, we'll have 300 or more robots operating in one area. And then we'll add a second area and a third area, and maybe we'll have a dozen areas. And so that's how we think we can execute on our mission of being the world's biggest mining company. And you're deciding to go down the path of mining as opposed to manufacturing robots and, I don't know, getting ARR from leasing them out. There's a couple of reasons for that. First, you gotta prove it works. Nobody's gonna buy our robots without them being proven or, so, we've got to do it anyway. And what we're doing it anyway, why don't we keep 90% of the profits versus 10% if we were just leasing? Now it means we have to raise more capital. We have complexity. But the reality is access to capital, especially when you talk about project financing, is going to be relatively easy. All mining projects need large amounts of capital. There are standard mechanisms that financial institutions use. If we are 10 x cheaper, 10 x faster, 10 x less ESG, I'm pretty confident that we will be able to attract that funding. I also see that recently there has been a real strategic focus from the Trump administration and, and Europe and other countries of like, let's get some independence from China. The reality is that China now has a 25 year lead on control of critical minerals, and the West has woken up. That means for instance, the Big Beautiful Bill that got passed had something like $10 billion allocated for critical mineral projects over the next four years. So there's plenty of government money. I think there's customer money, there's traditional mining company, and in time that will be debt and leasing options as well. The access to capital in general though yours is a newer, well, it is a new technology. So how are potential investors reacting when you come up and show them this? You know, are they going, dunno, mining, the extractive industries? Usually very conservative, know, so this is a whole new thing. Are they going not so sure, or are they going, wow, this looks interesting. There's been a bit of a change. Until president Trump kind of won and, he put out an executive order on deep sea mining. I think people are realising this is going to happen. Prior to that, there was a big environmental concerns that maybe it, it's not going to happen. which is ironic because my view is we don't get to net zero without deep sea minerals and huge amount of environmental and social destruction if we were to exclusively rely on land-based mining. But. we are starting to see a lot of great interest. I think the Bahrain sponsorship is an eyeopener that how we become a full stack mining company. Not many startups of our size have a tam, this year. I mean, I'm not talking, the future this year is $500 billion and growing. And so I don't see there's any real risks around demand. We are fortunate that we're in the probably 1% of startups that doesn't have to worry about demand. If you are selling electricity, you probably don't have to worry about demand, but if you are making some new widget that, some new form of battery. Well, you gotta see how does it compete with all of the other forms of battery? Does anybody want it? And how does it fit on the cost curve with the alternatives? We really just have to make sure that we win on the cost side of things and that we're very, very confident on. And how far are we, do you think, from seabed mining becoming mainstream? Well, I, I would say production should start in 2028. There's still a bit of work to do for us. We have to build the fleet of robots. We have to submit a commercial recovery permit. And, and we have to organise the shipping infrastructure. So, a little bit of work to do before now and then, but we think that that's absolutely doable. Now we'll start with, say a fleet of 10 or 15 robots, but over time we will scale that up to hundreds. And that fleet of initially 10 to 15, how much are they recovering, per day, per week, per month, however you're measuring it? Yeah, I mean, each robot can do four metric tons every four hours, so, six trips a day. that's with one robot. And then you just multiply it out. And then obviously you have to still bring the minerals to shore for processing. That depends on the grades, but we'll start with a modest amount, but the beauty is. It's just more capital now. Build more robots, operate more ships, have more mineral processing, and it scales far more linearly than our competitors that have to build a brand new ship or a brand new dredge. So we, we think we can start small but then ramp up quite rapidly. Okay. If you were, I don't know, talking to policy makers, what's one thing you'd want them to know? I, I would want them to factor in there's a lot of concerns about the environment or impacts, like the argument goes, mining's destroyed the land. Let's not open a new area and destroy all the life that lives there, that today is pristine and hasn't been impacted by humans. I get it. But, there are consequences of that. Our argument is that you're gonna have far more land-based destruction. You're going to have costs that rise, that make decarbonisation unattainable, and you're gonna seed all control to China. So what we would say is, yes, it's a pristine area that hasn't been mined today, but we're talking of all mining happened that we consider for the next a hundred years be, well, less than 1% of the seabed. It's a very, very small area, relatively speaking, The amount of life down there is a fraction. And the thing that I think never gets into the discussion on public debate is the technology that you use to do the mining has the biggest impact. An example I like to use is that in the 1960s there were some people that considered mining with nuclear bombs. Now it didn't happen, but the environmental impact would've been horrendous, versus an open pit mine. And so you cannot separate the environmental impact from the technology that's being used and almost all of these environmentalists that are just fundamentally opposed is because they're considering the old technology. The technology of the dredging and the riser system that will indiscriminately remove all of the life in front of the dredger. Now, the regulator has designated marine protected areas. So the, those would never be mined and that's great. The problem is they're quite a long way away. They're, potentially thousands of kilometers away. We do know that the microscopic life and some of the larger megafauna is very localised. Our approach of having a robot that hovers, it doesn't land. It has no major sediment plume. It has no midwater plume. It uses AI to detect larger life and leave it, and also only removes a small percent. That's a different impact. And, and so we don't see the environmental impacts coming up when people factor in what technology is being used. And, and that's the thing I would say to policy. I understand you want to preserve this area, but what is the knock on effect if you are successful, and how does new technology change that equation? And Oliver, what gives you the most confidence that we can meet the clean energy transition without destroying the planet in the process? I think it's innovation it's, it's technology startups like us, but there are plenty of them in the world that are innovating and inventing every day new technologies that allow us to do more with less and with renewable sources, et cetera. Technology innovation. is what is going to allow us to, get to net zero and, move away from fossil fuels. A left field question for you, Oliver. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead real or fictional a champion far underwater mining, who would it be and why? That's a great question. I would want someone that is respected on kind of both sides of the political spectrum. Someone that is passionate about the environment. And someone that's a little bit controversial and will speak their mind maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, would be a good, interesting person. You know, I'm, I'm very impressed that, he's had three successful careers, body lifting actor and as the governor of, what is what The Fifth World's biggest economy, California. So I think he would be a really fascinating person. Nice. I like it. Very good. Cool. we're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Oliver, is there any question that I did not ask that you wish I did, or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? The geopolitical side. We touched on it a little bit, but it, it is very concerning. I feel that for 25 years the West has basically outsourced its heavy, dirty industries to China. And we realised with COVID that supply chains matter. We've gotta get an independent source of these minerals. It really will dictate safety. That's something I've, I didn't realise when I started the company, but I am increasingly concerned about. Okay, great. Oliver, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yeah, I think our website is the best place, impossible metals.com. We also have a fairly active LinkedIn page. I'm fairly active myself. We have a YouTube channel as well, but I would focus on, on the website, impossible metals.com. Great. Super Oliver, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.