2024 was the hottest year in the history of the planet. The shift away from fossil fuels couldn’t be more urgent. EVs form a big part of that long-term plan.

By 2030, they will be 2/3rd of the world’s vehicle sales. 

But even the EV revolution has an Achilles heel: minerals. To put one EV on the road, it takes 6 times as many minerals than an average petrol car. Minerals extracted by ruinous mining of land and rainforests.

Gerard Barron – pioneering energy entrepreneur, and CEO of The Metals Company – has an alternative: change not how we dig but where we dig. Instead of mining land, mine the bottom of the ocean. But hitch that to a “circular resource economy”. 

Meet the Miner of Oceans

As energy wars intensify on land, some 4 kilometers below the surface of the ocean sit magic rocks: polymetallic nodules, which are made of valuable battery metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese – crucial for batteries to power the clean energy transition. Barron calls them ‘a battery in a rock’. These nodules are a proverbial gold mine. For starters, the supply of nickel from the seabed alone could help the planet manufacture 250 million EV batteries. And if the world is short of anything at the moment it is batteries.

Barron is an ‘omnivorous’ entrepreneur, having founded businesses as diverse as publishing, telecom,finance and SaaS. His obsession with mining and the mineral resources that power the world’s engines began two decades ago when he seed-funded a friend’s start-up trying to explore the seabed for minerals. Gradually Barron understood the ‘planetary scale problem’ that has been humanity’s struggle to move away from fossil fuels. “We are playing a game of wack-a-mole with extractive industries,” he says. He is now on a mission to end this. 

The Sea as Saviour 

In the name of energy the planet has bled plenty: land has been ravaged, forests have been uprooted, biodiversity has been erased. All done with a side serving of staggering carbon emissions. That’s just legal mining. Half the world’s mining is carried out illegally. The famed transition to clean energy, therefore, rests on the shoulders of a necessary evil. To change this, Barron argues, we must start looking at ‘metals as a service’ as opposed to a resource. So we can create a ‘circular resource economy’ where we re-imagine how we use and re-use critical metals and minerals. 

According to him, there are clear benefits to mining the seabed: one, it’s just easier. For the most part nothing to crush, blast or drill. It’s more like scooping something from the bed of the ocean as opposed to carving it free. Secondly, the scope of biodiversity thriving at these depths - called the ‘abyssal zone’ - is minimal. i.e. significantly less collateral damage compared to land mining. 

Third, nodules contain little to no toxic elements, which means little to no toxic sludge or waste to further contaminate the environment. And the most important of all, mining the ocean will be done at an emission cost that is a fraction of the endless disaster that land mining has become. It’s not perfect but it seems like the lesser of two evils. 

That is until you hear Barron’s critics.

Dive or Disappear

The first sobering counter fact is that we know only 10% of the ocean. 

Of this, marine researchers argue that roughly 40% of marine life surviving in the depths that Barron wants to extract depend on the nodules themselves. Environmentalists also argue that the waste, though minimal, will eventually cause disruption to oceanic life in ways that are yet to be mapped and understood. Developments have hinted that the world is apprehensive yet paying attention to Barron’s drive to dive. 

In 2023, Norway became the first country to allow deep-sea mining on its shores. Barron’s company has adopted Nauru, an economically ravaged island of just 12,000 people in the Pacific to mine and will start mining its shores by 2026, pending approval by the UN regulator. While Barron views it as an act of socio-economic rescue, critics claim it’s a new form of ‘imperialism’. In July of 2024, 32 countries called for a ban on deep sea mining in international waters. India, though, is considering opening 13 blocks of mineral reserves off its shore for auction.

Between the believers and the deniers, the urgency – and complexity – of energy transition cannot be wished away. 

The needle has moved but which way will it ultimately tilt?  

At SYNAPSE 2025, Barron will illuminate the depths of the ocean, demonstrate its rich platter of resources, debate the forks we could use to lift them, contrast blasting open land to gently parting the sea, simplify the race to power the EV revolution, and argue a decree for diving into the ocean to save what’s left on land. And will take on the inevitable counter questions that emerge from his vision.  

Previous Next