Gerard Barron

50% of the planet, almost approaching 70% of the oceans are considered abyssal, characterized by deep, low amount of biomass there because all the food gets eaten on the way down the water column.

And if you look on our website at metals.co, you'll see lots of video of us doing trials down there.

And there are no plants down there, of course, because we're talking more than 4,000 meters deep.

And the amount of life living down there is grams per square meter.

Most of it bacterial, single-cell organisms living in the sediment.

So if you ever had to have a big resource somewhere, this would be the perfect place.

You can't go and grow crops there or live there or, you know, it's the perfect thing.

Yet, we also have people who wish we wouldn't do it, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I've always deemed myself an environmentalist and, you know, and I often get criticized for the fact that by the NGO community or

know activists who don't want to see any progress saying uh you've just you know switched from talking about environment to now talking about geopolitics and critical supply chains it's like well if you go back to my presentation decks a decade ago you'll find security of supply was always highlighted as one of the critical issues but

at the end of the day, geopolitics are pretty important because we've got trading partners who've said they'll turn off supply if they choose to.

And that tells you you've got to make some changes in that supply chain.

But if we just maybe take a journey down that path because circularity

is something we should aspire to.

And at The Metals Company, we do aspire to it.

And if you go, we just had a big strategy day on August 4, actually.

where we talked about step one is where can we find the lowest impact supply of these critical minerals?

And when I say lowest impact, I mean less destruction of biomass ecosystem, less impact on biodiversity, less CO2 emissions, less impact on freshwater ecosystems, and the list goes on.

And we've spent so much money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on that whole basket of studies.

And they all point to one thing, and that is that we can massively reduce the impact when we create metals from these rocks compared to land-based alternatives, no matter where they come from.