Gerard Barron

Allseas are one of our biggest investors.

And for the last 40 years, they've been laying pipes in the deep ocean to connect oil and gas to transport it around the world.

owned by an amazing engineer, Edward Herrimer.

And so we built the robot.

We have a production vessel floating up top.

In fact, our first production vessel, called the Hidden Gem, was a former oil and gas drill ship, which we bought for, well, Allseas bought it, but with some help from us, very cheaply.

It was a $700 million boat new in 2011 and bought it for less than $50 million.

And we then connect it with a big riser, it's called.

Think of it as a big straw, which is the vertical transport system.

And so basically the robot crawls along and fires a jet of water at these nodules.

So kind of a curved head, fires a jet of water.

It creates an inverse pressure and lifts the nodule

goes into the hopper.

We separate the sediment, which we spit out the back.

And we then move the nodule into the vertical transport system and pump it up to the boat, 4,200 meters.

Well, the first one we built was six meters wide, weighed about 90 tons.

the biggest challenge was keeping it on the floor.

90 tons.

Because when you put it in water, it gets a lot of buoyancy.

Then you add more buoyancy.