Fox Meyer

In broad strokes, basically, you've got a situation where you have an area of the seabed that is outside of an exclusive economic zone.

So it's kind of unclear who owns it.

I would say nobody or all of us owns it.

And you have little potato-sized hunks of valuable stuff just sitting on the ground.

And there's a lot of questions around who owns those or who's going to mine them or what they'd be sold for or used for.

But we're sort of in a situation here where...

You know, a bunch of countries might be looking at trying to form some sort of treaty around this and figure out how to do this responsibly.

But if a country, maybe like the U.S., is not signed on to that treaty and is not held by its constraints, I guess they could just start...

Collecting it?

I mean, whatever the consequences of that are, they would come after the collection is done.

So, you know, it wouldn't really prevent the mining of those nodules.

It depends on the chemical makeup of what you've got there.

But I guess in theory, that's a good way to think about it.

And it's not the same seabed mining as the one that was proposed for offshore Taranaki.

That's iron sand mining where you kind of hoover everything up and then process it all out.

This is you know, there's actual like hunks of stuff here that you could see with the naked eye.

But I would say as well.

The missing step in this that I think is really important for us all to remember is processing and refining.

It's one thing to go out and take a scoop of sand and find a method to like pull out the specific grains of sand that you want.

We're actually pretty good at that.