Oliver Gunsekara is the CEO and co-founder of Impossible Metals, a startup doing sustainable deep-sea mining and harvesting. Founded in 2020, the company is developing an innovative fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) designed to selectively harvest polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor while minimizing environmental impact. Impossible Metals’ cutting-edge technology combines robotics, AI, and computer vision to enable individual nodule collection, preserving seafloor ecosystems and offering a more sustainable alternative to traditional dredging methods.
What led you to start Impossible Metals?
This is the third company I’ve founded, with the previous ones being in the semiconductor space. After my last company, which focused on video compression technology, I was planning to semi-retire and travel in 2019. However, the pandemic put a stop to that. Living in the Bay Area, I became increasingly concerned about climate change, especially after the wildfires in the fall of 2020. On what we call “Orange Day,” the sky turned orange and that was really the motivation. I thought, “Well, maybe there’s one more company in me, so let’s try to do something that really helps with the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”
From there, I did a lot of research and came to discover metals that form in potato-sized rocks called nodules on the deep ocean floor. These rocks form in massive quantities and contain exactly the metals we need to electrify everything: nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. However, all the companies pursuing ocean mining were using pretty old technology invented in the 1960s and tested in the 1970s. It literally involves dredging the seabed floor and pumping everything up. There’s a lot of environmental pushback on that because of biodiversity loss, sediment plumes, noise, et cetera.
It seemed to me that the obvious answer was underwater robots. So I spent some time finding co-founders with the right experience to build a company, and that’s really how Impossible Metals got started.
How is your approach to deep-sea mining different from current industry standards?
It’s basically an alternative to the dredging approach. The way the rest of the industry operates is basically to lower a dredging tractor down to the deep ocean seabed and then it injects water into the top five to 10 feet of seabed sucks everything up. This process indiscriminately sucks up everything – the desired nodules, along with seabed material and any marine life present. A series of pumps then transports this mixture through a pumping system to the production support vessel on the surface. There, the nodules are separated from the water and sediment, with the latter being pumped back into the ocean. That’s the architecture that everyone else is using.
There are at least a dozen companies that have built variants of that. We looked at that and saw some real challenges. First, from an environmental standpoint, you’re indiscriminately destroying all the life that lives down there. Even though there isn’t a huge amount of life, it’s pretty unique and special. It’s also extremely expensive and there are several reasons for that. First, you need a dedicated ship to remotely operate the dredging tractor. Additionally, there are complexities involved in transferring materials. Every few days, you have to move the collected material from the production ship to a transport ship, which is a challenging operation to perform on the high seas.
We approached this challenge by asking ourselves how we could leverage 21st-century technology, particularly advanced robotics and AI, to revolutionize this process. The result is an innovative architecture where our robots are launched directly from the transport ship, eliminating the need for a dedicated vessel. These fully autonomous, untethered, and battery-powered units are designed to dive independently to the ocean depths. These robots don’t land, they actually hover about 1 meter above the seabed floor, avoiding the sediment plume that would happen with a tracked vehicle. They have an array of stereo cameras and arms that they use to look for nodules on the ocean floor. These robots control their arms to pick up the nodules and can also look for signs of life.
We can’t see bacteria, but anything bigger than a millimeter in size like a deep-sea coral or sponge we can detect and also leave a quarantine area around that material. It’s the first time ever that we can actually do a form of mining where we’re preserving the habitat at the same time as the mining is happening. Once the payload of the vehicle is full, it uses buoyancy engine technology to make itself lighter, so it will float to the surface. Once it’s on the surface, it’s recovered with an automated crane. The payload is emptied, the battery is swapped, any maintenance is performed, and now the vehicle can be redeployed. We have something like a four-hour mission time, and in time we will have a parallel fleet with hundreds of these vehicles operating concurrently so we can scale to very large levels of production.
Where are you right now in terms of production?
We’ve been around just over three and a half years and are in the market for a Series A. We did a pre-seed and a seed round for a total of $12.5 million. Now we’re looking to raise about $23 million that will build what we call Eureka III, which is the full-size production vehicle. We’ve already tested Eureka II in the deep ocean, but with Eureka III we’re going to go from 3 arms to 16, and from a 14-kilowatt-hour battery to just under 200-kilowatt-hour battery pack. It’s a much bigger machine.
The goal at the end of that Series A round is to have built a single Eureka III and tested it in the deep ocean, in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico. We’ll be operating under a permit in a licensed area and we’ll have a whole suite of marine scientists documenting and recording the impact, so we know how little it will be compared to the dredging tractor approaches. After that, all we need to do is raise the working capital to build a fleet of them. The current thinking is that we can do that through customer offtake agreements.
What is the permitting process like for deep-sea mining?
Deep-sea mining is highly regulated, and it follows the three stages of mining that we have on land. The first stage is prospecting, where you typically don’t need specific permits. You’re just looking for the resource, and because the resource lives on top of the ocean floor, you can do that visually.
The second phase is exploration. You’ve identified an area and now want to get exclusive rights to it. In the deep-sea mining world, there are two types of regulators. There’s a regulator for a domestic country, which covers the exclusive economic zone. This is typically 200 nautical miles off the coast and is treated as if it were on land. It can be regulated the same as mines on land, but it’s up to the country to determine how its regulated. The Cook Islands is a good example of this. Over a decade ago, it created the Seabed Minerals Authority as a domestic regulator. The country is a network of 15 islands in the Pacific, not too far from New Zealand, and it has huge quantities of these minerals within its exclusive economic zone. Two years ago, it issued three exploration permits. The permit sizes are typically around 75,000 square kilometers each, which is about the size of Portugal. These are big areas. There are about a dozen countries in various stages of enacting or issuing permits for deep-sea mining within their exclusive economic zones.
But what if you’re beyond the exclusive economic zone in what’s called Areas Beyond National Jurisdictions (ABNJ)? Well, then there’s a 1980s law that established an international regulator called the International Seabed Authority that came into effect in 1994. That regulator, headquartered in Jamaica, is made up of 167 countries plus the EU. 93% of the world’s population is represented in that body. The only major exception is the United States, which was not able to ratify this law.
The International Seabed Authority has issued 31 exploration permits to date, and some of them are over 15 years old. Those companies are now engaged in resource definition–precisely defining the grades and abundance of material in their exploration zone–and doing the environmental baseline. You have to spend about $70 million on environmental baseline work before you have enough data to submit to the regulator to begin mining.
We’re now at the point where a lot of that data has been collected and companies are about to submit those applications. Our strategy is to partner with them. Instead of proposing dredging technology, we propose our technology. It’s less expensive, it’s more environmentally friendly, and it also has no single points of failure. So we think it’s an all-around superior solution.
Why hasn’t the US ratified ISA treaty?
We would like the US government to ratify the treaty, but it takes an act of Congress to do so. Just a month ago, there was a 60 Minutes program on it, and there have been many calls from ex-presidents and generals to ratify it. It’s baffling that while 93% of the world’s population has ratified the treaty, there’s a small group that is likely from the extreme right that opposes it. They argue against ceding sovereignty and insist on U.S. ownership of the deep ocean. But that’s not how I believe the 21st century works. Ratification would allow Impossible Metals to be sponsored by the US to apply for permits. But in the meantime, we can partner with people who already have permits and we can potentially find a friendly nation to sponsor us. We just need to incorporate a company in their jurisdiction, so it’s not a massive issue.
What do you say to people who think we shouldn’t mine the seabed at all?
I know there is a lot of environmental opposition to deep-sea mining, but I think it’s driven by concerns about older technology. Also, I don’t think people understand the consequences of not engaging in deep-sea mining. In my view, having studied this area for four years, I don’t believe we will hit net zero emissions without seabed minerals. It just takes too long to get them out of the ground on land. It’s also becoming increasingly expensive because the good stuff’s already been mined. You’re left with mineral resources that are very low-grade and very remote, which means they’re incredibly expensive to extract.
Even if you could stop deep-sea mining from happening–which I don’t think is practical at this point, given that there are over ten countries working on it–you would end up not achieving net zero emissions. You would make electric vehicles more expensive because the biggest cost of an EV is the metal in the battery. If you don’t unlock this new supply, then the pricing is just going to continue to go up and you’ll have immense environmental disruption.
Today we get nickel from rainforests in Indonesia and we have to destroy the rainforest to get at it. Look at the environmental damage of destroying a rainforest–the lost carbon sink, biodiversity, and biomass–and all of that’s done with diesel power. It’s dreadful.
It gets worse, though. Once they’ve got this ore, they use a technique called high-pressure acid leaching, where they use coal power to pressure and heat the ore and then they leach it with sulfuric acid. What do they do with the leftover acid? Well, they used to dump it in the ocean. Fortunately they’ve stopped doing that and now they let it dry in the sun and stack it up. Unfortunately, if there’s a tornado, typhoon, or any form of earthquake, this will just be an environmental disaster.
And that’s just the environmental impact. Let’s talk about the social impact. Many indigenous people live in these rainforests, and guess what? Soldiers turn up because often the mines are operated by Chinese companies that bribe the officials. We are forbidden by law to do it, which is a good thing, but these people turn up and suddenly this village has an hour to pack because it’s now a mine.
Unfortunately, in Africa, a lot of people and children are enlisted to work in mines where they’re getting paid one to two dollars a day. Something like 30% of all cobalt is mined by hand and it’s difficult, dangerous work where people frequently get injured and killed. If you say no to deep-sea mining, you’re saying yes to more of this.
We’ve issued an ESG annual report for two years now, which is unusual for a company of our size. We’ve committed to being net zero by volume production. In the short term, we are using diesel generators to power the batteries when we operate our vehicles in the ocean, but that obviously will not achieve net zero. So we need to capture the carbon or use more renewable sources of energy like hydrogen.
How will the minerals you extract from the seabed be used?
Electric vehicles are the first choice because the most expensive component in an electric vehicle is the battery and the most expensive component in the battery is the metal that goes in it. So it can make a big material difference if we can lower the cost of these metals. They also can be recycled but it takes time. A new Tesla probably has a good 10-15 years of life in the battery and then maybe another 5-10 years of being used in the grid. So unfortunately, recycling doesn’t move the needle in the short term, but in the longer term, it does.
We will ultimately be able to get to a fully circular economy where we won’t need to extract any more of this material. And that’s not true with oil and gas so I think that’s attractive. Although nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese are used in many applications like solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, charging infrastructure, and stainless steel, I think the biggest impact is going to be on electric vehicles. This would allow us to get to very affordable yet long-range electric vehicles so that everybody can afford an EV.
What lessons can we learn from past resistance to potentially transformative technologies?
I think it’s very fortunate that it’s becoming very practical to extract these minerals with minimal environmental impact at the same time they’re needed to electrify everything. 50 years ago, the only option was to do dredging, but now with computer vision, AI, and robotics, we can preserve that habitat while still providing enough metal to electrify everything.
I know there are a lot of people that are violently opposed to deep-sea mining. These are often the same people who are opposed to nuclear power. They just don’t want to adopt nuclear power, even though it’s killed far fewer people. The number of people injured by nuclear power is a tiny fraction of those injured by fossil fuels. It is the cleanest form of energy and it gets cleaner and safer with innovation but unfortunately, we lost a decade or more due to some of the extreme NGOs that didn’t want any of this to happen. Fortunately, nuclear power is back but a decade of innovation was lost. I don’t want that to happen again with deep-sea mining.