S2 E52: Impossible Metals – Innovative Robotics in Deep Sea Mining

Dustin Olsen (00:40)
Welcome back everyone to the rare earth exchanges podcast. I'm Dustin. You're joined by my cohost Daniel. And today we have Oliver Gunasekara who is the CEO of Impossible Metals and you guys are specializing in deep sea mining. And I am super excited to talk about this conversation and what you guys are doing. Oliver, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Oliver Gunasekara (01:02)
Yeah, I'm great and thank you for the opportunity. I'm excited to get into today's discussion.

Dustin Olsen (01:07)
Yes, absolutely. just to kind of kick it right off, for listeners who are most likely unfamiliar with Impossible Metals, can you just give us a high level overview of what problem you're trying to solve and why does it matter right now?

Oliver Gunasekara (01:20)
Yeah, so we want to be a mining company. We want to deliver large quantities of copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese and some rare earth elements like neodymium to the marketplace. And we want to do that by using brand new technology that we've invented consisting of underwater autonomous hovering robots and access the resource from the deep ocean in a way that still preserves and protects

the marine habitat.

Dustin Olsen (01:51)
That's awesome. So deep sea mining tends to trigger some strong reactions. When you first explain Impossible Metals to someone, what are the biggest misconceptions that you have to clear up right away?

Oliver Gunasekara (02:03)
think the first is that we have invented new technology. Deep sea mining has been discussed and actually tested for over 50 years. So in the 70s, there were a bunch of companies that went and built collection technology to extract resources from the ocean. That technology consisted of what we call a dredging tractor. So it's a huge machine with tracks that gets layered, gets lowered down to the very deep ocean, and then it vacuums up the seabed.

a riser system that goes to a ship. On the ship, it de-waters the sediment and then pumps it back into the ocean. That's the traditional approach. Most people, when they think of deep sea mining, that's what they think of. That's what everyone else is doing. What we did when we started the company five years ago was say, blank sheet of paper. It's now the 21st century. How could we do it differently? How could we use autonomy, robotics, AI, computer vision, batteries? How could we invent a collection system

that doesn't have those environmental concerns and is also less expensive and we believe far more reliable because it doesn't have any single points of failure and that's ultimately what we invented and because of that our impacts are vastly different and if you're happy I'm happy to talk a little bit about why our impacts are different compared to the dredging.

Dustin Olsen (03:25)
Yeah, if you want to expand a little bit more on those differences, that'd be great.

Oliver Gunasekara (03:29)
Yeah, so you know the type of deep sea mining because there isn't only one resource in the ocean, but the one that we're focused on is this potato size rock that I'm holding up here. It's called a polymetallic nodule. It's a potato size rock and they just lie on the seabed floor. So this resource doesn't involve any cutting or blasting or tunneling like we might do on land. Literally you just have to pick up these rocks. So imagine you've gone to a driving range

where people are practicing golf and you see huge quantities of golf balls. That's what the seabed floor and the deep ocean in specific locations looks like. And so the traditional technology that others have deployed and were first developed in the 70s is, as I mentioned, this dredging tractor that's vacuuming up. What we did is say from a blank sheet of paper, how could we break this problem down and avoid those environmental concerns? So the first area

we looked at was the actual collection. How do you get stuff off the seabed floor? And instead of having a tractor that is lowered to the seabed and vacuums, we have a hovering robot. So it never actually lands and it has an array of robotic arms and it has stereo cameras and a big NVIDIA GPU to run the AI algorithms. And with that, we can control the array of arms to pick up the rocks one by one and store them on board.

beauty of this approach is that A, we're hovering, so we're not generating a sediment disturbance, a big sediment plume. B, we can use the AI to avoid the life. So if we can detect life, and most life is microscopic, we cannot detect it. It's bacteria, because there isn't much life down there. occasionally, there is like an octopus and its eggs or a coral or a sponge. But the cameras will detect that.

and not disturb it and just fly over the top without impacting it. And then the third benefit is that we can program the arms to leave a large percent of these rocks or nodules undisturbed. In our current model, we plan to leave 90 % of them unpreserved, ⁓ unimpacted, because that way we preserve the microscopic life, the bacteria, the single cell organisms, which is the vast majority.

Daniel O'Connor (05:30)
you

.

⁓ Oliver,

could you explain a little bit for everybody here the geology of these occurrences? how does this come about? ⁓

Oliver Gunasekara (06:02)
Yeah,

how do these polymetallic nodules form? basically what happens is that through volcanic action, these metals get moved to the surface of the planet. And then through weathering, they ultimately get eroded and end up in the ocean in parts per million. Now, around a kernel, for instance, a shark's tooth or other small item, in certain locations, the metals start to solidify and be deposited.

and they actually grow. So this particular rock is about five million years old and it has grown over that time. And so that's basically how they form. They don't form everywhere, but they form in areas that are called the abysmal plains. These are the very flat, very deep parts of the ocean, typically three to four miles deep, four to six kilometers. At that depth, there's very, very light.

little life. There's no light. There is microscopic life. And there is occasionally, there's an octopus, there's very unique types of fish, but it's very, very rare. Most of it is microscopic.

Daniel O'Connor (06:59)
Right.

And a little bit more on the geology. What is it about these? Do you have to have some sort of, do you have to survey the underlying host rock under the sea? Like how do you know where to go? I mean, I hear what you're saying. There's a flat area. It's a certain depth. But are there other geological occurrences that you look for? Because that's deep down there, right? So you have to.

Oliver Gunasekara (07:33)
you

It's deep, unlike land-based mining where you may have to tunnel and do a core hole to try to understand, we can do this all from the sea, from the ocean. So we can use what's called white band sonar to basically scan an area and see these rocks. We can also use cameras. So we can collect a lot of the data by using ships and dragging equipment down or using

robots

that are torpedo style that fly over the area and and

measure it. That typically is combined with what we call boxcore sampling. So instead of a drill hole, which is what you would often have in a mine, in the ocean you will collect boxcore samples. So these are a box that is dropped over the side of the ship on a crane, on a cable, and it would go and collect like a square meter or square yard of material from the seabed, brings it up, and then you

send that data to the lab to essay and understand exactly what is there and you will do multiple of these in an area.

One thing I would also say is that seabed mining is highly regulated, just like land-based mining. And so you need permission to do all of this. And globally, there are about 40 licensed areas. Each area is about the size of Portugal, huge. And depending on which resource could have quarter of a trillion dollars worth of minerals in it. But each area is heavily studied because the companies that own those areas, they have

Daniel O'Connor (08:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Oliver Gunasekara (09:08)
to do a minimum of five-year environmental and economic resource definition. Many have done 20 or 25 years of collecting data.

Daniel O'Connor (09:19)
So a little bit on that. So these areas that have licenses to deep sea mine, are they already claimed by companies?

Oliver Gunasekara (09:25)
Yeah.

Some are. So the licenses that they have are called expiration licenses. So they don't yet allow commercial use, but they are exclusive to their owner. Most are owned by countries because most of this resource tends to be in international waters. It's not in the jurisdiction of one country. There's a UN framework that has created the rules and the regulator. And so most of these areas are actually owned

Daniel O'Connor (09:47)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver Gunasekara (09:58)
by countries. There are a few commercial companies, we're one of them, that has an area that is sponsored by a country. In fact, ours is an application, but there are others that already have areas.

Daniel O'Connor (10:10)
Interesting interesting so so what we're hearing is that according to your What you learned so far this is a more novel less environmentally destructive way to mine the the seafloor bed okay, and you can and what about economy like because you're just picking up these these

the rocks, it's less, I would imagine the ROI might be better than having to dredge and.

Oliver Gunasekara (10:37)
Yeah.

We, we, and I think there's, there's two parts of that. How do we compare with land-based mining and how do we compare with the, the direct dredging in, the ocean? In both cases, I think we have a really strong story on, on the land-based mining. you don't really find four metals plus rare earths in one resource. You know, you might find two, and the grade, the percent of the material that's valuable is super high. So when you come to evaluate the

Economics, it's really how many metals what is their grade? That's the first question and then it is like where is it? Well, if it's in the middle of Africa, there's no road You've got to build all of that infrastructure again in the ocean. We can just reuse ships and ports We don't need to build any of that So we have a really strong argument when it comes to the economics compared to land base In fact in our model, we're looking at being something like ten times less expensive in an all-in

Daniel O'Connor (11:22)
Right.

Oliver Gunasekara (11:35)
sustaining cost than an average nickel mine and that's because of the by-product credits from the non-nickel, the copper, the manganese, the cobalt and some of the rare earths.

Daniel O'Connor (11:47)
So a couple more questions here. Are there any rare earth deep sea mining endeavors at this point? And if there are, are they just in a pilot stage so far?

Oliver Gunasekara (12:00)
So there is no deep sea mining at commercial stage yet, but there are about 40 licensed areas. Many of them have had their areas for a decade or more. And we are right on the cusp of this mining happening. We also had a strong support from the Trump administration. Last year, there was an executive order in April to really accelerate and fund and remove regulatory hurdles.

Daniel O'Connor (12:13)
Mm.

Oliver Gunasekara (12:28)
So I think we're going to see mining starting in the next few years

Daniel O'Connor (12:33)
Yes, I mean, now with Deep Sea, I believe there is a regulatory body that has global scope. Can you share a little bit about that?

Oliver Gunasekara (12:41)
Yeah, so the regulatory frameworks depend on where you are. If you're within 200 miles off the coast of a country, you're in what's called the exclusive economic zone. So then it's regulated the same as if it was on land of the country. Each country makes their own rules, happens to be in the States, its Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. And each country will have their own equivalent. Now, if you're all beyond areas of national jurisdiction,

Daniel O'Connor (12:50)
Mm.

Right.

Oliver Gunasekara (13:10)
beyond

that 200 nautical miles, you're in international waters or high seas. So here we have a UN treaty called the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982 I believe, that establishes a UN regulator based in Jamaica called the International Seabed Authority that now regulates. Now recent developments, that regulatory body has been moving a little slowly and so the US actually passed laws that

Daniel O'Connor (13:21)
Right.

That's right.

That's right.

Oliver Gunasekara (13:38)
dates it and has never signed this UN law and so the Trump administration has now decided that it is going to permit in international waters using the authority that Congress gave it and it's using NOAA. So now we have two frameworks for potential mining in international waters, the UNISA one and the US NOAA Department of Commerce framework.

Daniel O'Connor (14:03)
Make sense and is there a there a race to my because there's other companies that we've written about and you know, we're always Questionable for us the scalability is key, right? You know, it's one thing to get some samples. It's another thing at scale to produce Which is what's going to be needed for competing against China, for example. So can you talk a little bit about your technology?

⁓ You know from the robotics to you know, the AI like what's the stack?

Oliver Gunasekara (14:32)
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of activity. So China actually holds more license areas in the seabed with that UN body than any other country. So they're pretty active today. They're on the dredging.

tech stack like everybody else. We're really the only people to have built a new approach and tested it. And as I mentioned, it's a hovering robot which then moves up and down the water column using a technology we invented called a buoyancy engine. So it's a titanium sphere that we can pump water in and out of, a bit like how a submarine operates, not exactly, but broadly equivalent. And then we also invented what we call the smart hook and the

Daniel O'Connor (15:01)
Mmm.

Oliver Gunasekara (15:16)
So this is how we get the ship on, sorry, how we get the robot onto the ship. So we want to be able to do that very quickly and to do it in a wide range of sea states and waves. And so we have another robot, which we call the smart hook, that actually does the docking maneuver with the real robot that's coming off the seabed. And we do that below the wave affected zone. And we do that using optical cameras. And then once

Daniel O'Connor (15:25)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver Gunasekara (15:43)
Once the smart hook is docked, it's on a cable, it gets ⁓ pulled into the ship, we have a rail system on the side. There's a 3D animation I'll give you for the show notes that will describe how the whole system works. Once the robot's recovered onto the ship, we unload the payload, the nodules are emptied onto the ship, the battery is swapped and any maintenance is performed and now this robot can be redeployed.

Daniel O'Connor (16:10)
Right, Very interesting. Dustin, any follow-up questions just on this topic?

Dustin Olsen (16:16)
Yeah, so the technology you're using sounds truly fascinating. You've combined robotics, AI, and obviously the deep-sea technology as well. What are some of the technical hurdles you've had to overcome to get to where you're at?

Oliver Gunasekara (16:30)
Yeah, I mean, whenever you're building something to work in the ocean, it's challenging. You know, the ocean is a tough environment. I think it's similar to space, could be even harder than space. You know, for instance, the pressure, you know, we've got to operate at four miles deep.

And that means we've got to survive 600 times atmospheric pressure. So everything will be implode unless we build it out of titanium or steel. So that's challenging. But, you know, we've had vehicles and robots in the ocean for 30 years. So it's a known problem, but you've got to design for it. The ocean is also very, very hard to communicate. You know, in space, we can use radio waves. They work perfectly.

Daniel O'Connor (16:52)
home.

Oliver Gunasekara (17:13)
Guess what? Radio waves don't work in water. So no GPS, no radios. So how do you position? How do you communicate? Well, we use acoustics. We can use sound, but it's not as accurate. has higher bit rates. Sorry, lower, much lower bit rates, higher noise. So those are mitigations that we have to deal with. And then, you know, testing in the ocean is costly. Like each time we want to

deploy one of our robots for testing, we have to charter a ship, maybe go out for a week, have a whole team on board. We're depending on weather, if the weather is too bad. These are all complexities that we've had to overcome.

Dustin Olsen (17:53)
Really fascinating. So your background before starting Impossible Metals actually dealt with AI, robotics, even some defense technologies. How much of that did you bring to the table here?

Oliver Gunasekara (18:07)
Not a lot, actually. Most of my background prior was semiconductors. That's really what I had done for 30 years. I'd worked at a company called Arm and founded a video compression semiconductor company that was bought by AMD. So to be honest, although I had had peripheral exposure, having been in Silicon Valley now for 20 years, I hadn't directly worked at a robotics company or a mining company.

a subsea. So all of this is new. Fortunately, I've been able to find incredible people like my co-founder, Jason Gilligan. He does have 20 plus years of subsea robotics experience. And so, you know, I'm really the vision and idea person and others do the actual hands-on execution.

Daniel O'Connor (18:57)
Has the company raised any capital yet?

Oliver Gunasekara (19:00)
We've raised just over $20 million to ⁓ date. So we did a pre-seed and then a seed, and we're close to closing our Series A. We went through Y Combinator a few years ago that really helped raise our profile.

Daniel O'Connor (19:03)
Okay. Okay.

It did. You found that it helped out. how are you finding the reception? mean, generally speaking, I think there's, I mean, even when we write about the topic, we're a little cautious just because we don't want people to get too excited when it might be some years out. So are you finding that the investor community is embracing this approach?

Oliver Gunasekara (19:39)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a bit of an education. think last year was a game changer. The President Trump's executive order, I think, really unlocked a lot of the regulatory paths that people were concerned about. think our progress on our technology, the fact we've built Eureka 2 and proven it in the ocean at depth has helped. And not many startups of our size are working on a tan that last year was half a trillion.

Daniel O'Connor (19:54)
Right.

Oliver Gunasekara (20:08)
Like 500 million dollars was spent last year on copper nickel cobalt and manganese, know So that's that's that's pretty rare and that's forecast to go to one trillion by 2035 and I think the other thing that a lot of Investors don't understand is that we're selling a commodity which is good and bad The good side is I don't have to really worry about finding customers. It's like you're selling gas or oil, right?

Daniel O'Connor (20:15)
Wow.

Yeah.

Oliver Gunasekara (20:38)
There are customers out there and I don't set the price the market sets the price. That's good What's bad is the I don't set the price which means I've got to control my costs if I'm at the low cost of producing I'm golden because if the price goes up or down I'll do well if I'm at the high end of the cost structure when the price comes down I'll go underwater

Daniel O'Connor (20:50)
Right.

Oliver Gunasekara (21:03)
I have to close because I'll lose money. And that's the beauty of this approach is that we are absolutely in the low part of the cost structure.

Daniel O'Connor (21:05)
Yeah.

Right. And you know, back to the machinery or the robotics, like is this, was this developed at your headquarters in the Bay Area, San Jose, South Bay? that?

Oliver Gunasekara (21:21)
Most of the team is actually in Canada. So we have a design center just north of Toronto in a city called Collingwood, which is actually on one of the Great Lakes. And that's where we have the majority of the team actually building and testing the robots.

Daniel O'Connor (21:32)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, okay, interesting. what would it, go ahead Dustin, I have some more but you go ahead, let's mix it up.

Dustin Olsen (21:39)
What?

I know I was just curious in as you were talking is like who who's the beneficiary who's the end market that you're serving with Impossible Metals because obviously there's a lot of people out there that are trying to mine and create feedstock but who would you say your your top target is there?

Oliver Gunasekara (21:58)
So.

We don't want to be a seller of technology. want to sell our product is the metal. A product is not the robot. The robot we use internally to get to market. so today, copper is used everywhere. If you're building an AI data center, you need a huge amount of copper. You're building an automotive, you need copper. Majority of nickel goes into stainless steel market, but

batteries are also pretty big. Cobalt is used in batteries, which is also used in military and other industrial. So there's a whole range and whether we sell direct or through an exchange like the London Mail Exchange, that's to be decided. mean, most mining companies tend to have long term off take agreements and that's something that we would probably do. And I think the automotive industry is probably the most interesting.

know, EVs are a little bit slower sales right now, but I think long term it's very clear that EVs will be the majority of the market. It's just going to take a while and they need massive amounts of these metals.

Daniel O'Connor (23:04)
Well, that's.

Yeah, a study just came out, reported on it, Toyota, 50 % of their auto sales have to do with some electrification. whether it's hybrid or, know, Raggy Pure Electric, but they're definitely, the trend is going in that direction. So.

Oliver Gunasekara (23:23)
Yeah, yeah, I think

in China, over 50 % of new car sales are electric, know, fully electric. California varies, but I think on a good quarter, it's probably about 20 % of sales in California are fully electric.

Daniel O'Connor (23:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dustin Olsen (23:41)
So talking about target market, are there any industries, downstream buyers, that would have an issue with how you're sourcing the material?

Oliver Gunasekara (23:52)
I hope not. mean, I think it's pretty simple. I'll show them a map of Indonesia and they can see how they get their metal comes today. mean, 70 % of the world's nickel comes from islands in Indonesia and they have to destroy the whole rainforest because the nickel laterite ore is directly below the rainforest. So the environmental impact in a rainforest where you have orders of magnitude more life.

Daniel O'Connor (24:06)
Mm.

Oliver Gunasekara (24:19)
Also, you have massive social impacts. A lot of people in Indonesia live on that land and get forced on it, often by soldiers at gunpoint. And then there's pollution. And then in Africa, you find artisanal mining, sometimes slave mining, child mining. I would guarantee that I can show a far better environmental story and social story than any other. mean, literally, in our case, after the mining,

has occurred you will not even be able to tell. You can't see 10 % of the nodules gone unless you've got a picture before and after. You will never know that the mining has occurred and our impact will be very similar to the submarine cable that goes everywhere in the ocean today.

So, you know, there's a lot of NGO activity out there that is focused on trying to stop deep sea mining. think most of it is based on the older technology, but some of it is just the fact that miners in Africa and Indonesia don't want to give up.

You know, if deep sea mining, when it scales, it's going to have a big impact to their market. You know, right now, nearly all the nickel mines in Australia have closed because they can't compete with Indonesian nickel mines. Cost really matters.

Daniel O'Connor (25:23)
Right.

Yeah.

What, ⁓ you know, on that note,

Yeah, a little bit more on the economics and then I want to get into a timeline, but how would this compare? I mean, what's the ballpark economic math here? know, for is mining, does it go ongoing? Do you go there as a project, pulse them out, leave? Like, what's the model?

Oliver Gunasekara (25:58)
So it's highly regulated, the concessions are typically granted a 30-year license to operate.

So you would have 30 years of operations and that actually can be extended if needed. And the resource is so big, know, literally we're thinking the size of the country of Portugal. So, you you could mine this for hundreds of years if you wanted to. And demand is not going anywhere. You know, if anything, demand for these metals driven by low carbon technologies like EVs, driven by ⁓

data centers driven by defense driven by urbanization it's just accelerating so we see this as you know something that would go on for 30 plus years generating in our economic model each mine location and we'll have more than one in time but each mine location would do something like four billion top line revenue one billion profit per year

Daniel O'Connor (26:37)
Right. Yeah.

Okay.

And you'll have, yeah, I mean, that's pretty crazy. You have offtake agreements. Like, how would you, would you work with a trader to get the product to the market? Like, who would you work with? Do you have that figured out?

Oliver Gunasekara (26:58)
for 30 years.

Yeah, I mean,

we have…

We have some letters of intent. haven't signed any definitive. ⁓ actually would quite like to combine off take with future capital raise because we will need capital to build out the fleet. You know, it's we won't mine with one will mine with two ships and 200 robots. And so that will need substantial capital. But, you know, I could see selling through traders having direct deals off take agreements with

Daniel O'Connor (27:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oliver Gunasekara (27:41)
say automotive customers and also selling through exchanges like the London Metal Exchange.

Daniel O'Connor (27:47)
Also working with the exchanges.

Oliver Gunasekara (27:50)
Yeah, I think so. mean,

most, you know, most mines tend to pre have pre agreements for off take. And that's part of the funding. You know, whether the money comes direct or whether you take that to a bank and say, look, I've, I've got this $10 billion purchase order that I'll deliver over the next few years. Now let me loan me the money to, build up the, capex, the infrastructure to start mining.

Daniel O'Connor (28:10)
Yeah.

Right,

Yeah, I mean, it's quite interesting. What's your timeline? if folks are interested in this and like when do you go into like a pilot and then when is actual live production?

Oliver Gunasekara (28:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we are doing a test mine next year. So we have an agreement with the German government. They have one of these areas, which is most of the areas are between Hawaii and Mexico. There's 16 locations on the seabed. It's a huge area bigger than the continental USA. That happens to be the richest area for these nodules. So we have an agreement with the German area to do

test mine.

in 2027, which will allow us to show our full scaled up technology operating. Once that is complete and documented, and we'll have a lot of scientists 30 or more on a boat recording and documenting the impact, we then submit an environmental impact statement where we take the collected baseline data over the last two decades of what exists and combine that with the results from the test and say, this is

what the actual impact would be and we submit that to the regulator. In parallel, we build out the fleet and so the idea is that all of that comes together for late 28, early 29 when we start the mining.

Daniel O'Connor (29:42)
Okay, I mean that's just around the corner. It's not that far away. It's 2026. I can't believe that, right Dustin?

Oliver Gunasekara (29:45)
Yep. Yep.

Dustin Olsen (29:50)
Blink of an eye, we're here already.

Oliver Gunasekara (29:51)
Yeah, it's,

Daniel O'Connor (29:52)
Amazing.

Oliver Gunasekara (29:53)
I mean, the fact that like the German area, I think they got it early 2000s. So they've been researching and studying and collecting environmental data since that date, having cruises with scientists. So, you know, once our tech is scaled up, which is our goal this year, we've built Eureka 2. This is the version we've tested it. It's smaller scale. We're now working on the full scale version, Eureka 3. We'll build and test that over the next 18

Daniel O'Connor (30:11)
Yeah.

Oliver Gunasekara (30:22)
months. Once that is tested, then it's a matter of submitting the permit application, whilst also building out not one, but maybe 15 of these robots to start with, and then scaling from 15 to hundreds.

Daniel O'Connor (30:35)
How much is, go ahead, yeah, go ahead, Asim.

Dustin Olsen (30:36)
How big are these?

Sorry, how many are these robots? Just curious.

Oliver Gunasekara (30:42)
So, yeah, Eureka 2, the one we've built and tested is the size of a small car. Eureka 3, which is the production size version, it's a shipping container size robot. It's pretty big. It has something like a 200 kilowatt hour pack. So large truck size battery pack that powers it.

It has seven arms and a payload of ⁓ four metric tons, 4,000 kilograms. That's how many nodules it picks up on each mission.

Dustin Olsen (31:10)
Wow, so when you say deploy hundreds of these, I'm imagining a shipping container ship, just like you're going out there with the whole fleet on one of these.

Oliver Gunasekara (31:19)
Yeah, in

fact, there's a 3D video. If I can share my screen, I can show it to you or we can put it in the show notes, but it shows a bulk carrier ship. So a ship today that might be moving coal or iron ore or grain. What we do is we install onto that ship these launch and recovery cranes. And that's how we deploy.

And so that ship comes to the location where the resource is. It deploys, say, 100 robots. They fill the ship. Each robot has a four hour mission. So every four hours, we reuse the same robot. Once the ship is full, the robots stay in the ocean. A new empty ship comes, and the full ship goes to port. And they swap.

Dustin Olsen (32:02)
fascinating. Daniel, what was your other question?

Daniel O'Connor (32:04)
No, I think that was sort of the ballpark. I and I think we covered the cost, the unit cost of a robot to make. Did we cover that?

Oliver Gunasekara (32:14)
About, we have about $3 million at scale for each robot, but with a lot of maintenance every year, we will have that robot last about 20 plus years.

Daniel O'Connor (32:18)
3 million.

Yeah, this is amazing. It feels like on the one hand, still very early days, almost science fiction like. On the other hand, you're right around the corner. So this is crazy.

Dustin Olsen (32:27)
Amazing. Truly.

we're actually getting towards the end of our time here. one of the questions I do like to ask Oliver is putting everything into perspective, especially those who are unfamiliar or have a lot of misconceptions about this space. Like, how would you summarize everything?

Oliver Gunasekara (32:55)
Yeah, I think the first thing is understand that yes, the deep ocean is a pristine location, but it has orders of magnitude less life than where we mine today. And with new technology, like what we've developed, you can preserve that life and still

get the resources we need while still keeping the habitat viable. And I think it really matters. It's everyone knows we need these metals. I don't think there's much debate about that. The question is, do we get them in areas where they have huge environmental and social impacts and it's all controlled by China?

Or do we get them in areas that are on our backyard where we preserve and protect the habitat and we do it without China's involvement? That's really the argument. And if you don't do the mine in the ocean, you're going to have to do more of the land-based mining and more control to China.

Daniel O'Connor (33:47)
Before we stop, Oliver, on competition, because we cover other efforts, Japan's talking about some major effort off an island that's part of their territory. Are you involved with that? Okay, you're partner in that effort?

Dustin Olsen (33:47)
All said, all said.

Oliver Gunasekara (34:01)
Yeah.

Not

directly, but I'm aware of it. We are interested. think, you know, Japan is one of the countries that has these medals, these nodules in their own waters. And so we would love to get involved in that as well.

Daniel O'Connor (34:19)
It's good to know, given we connect with a lot of folks now that we've met you, we'll try to make some connections for you.

Oliver Gunasekara (34:26)
Great, yeah, we think Japan's really interesting. They have a lot of experience in manufacturing, in robotics. They have a lot of mineral processing expertise. In fact, they're the country that has processed more nodules into actual real metal than anybody else. And also a country that isn't very rich in their own natural resources. So going to the ocean, I think, is a really good fit for Japan.

Daniel O'Connor (34:50)
Dustin.

Dustin Olsen (34:51)
Awesome. Oliver, thank you so much for joining us here on our podcast. ⁓ Very educational and truly very, very interesting. Speaking for myself, I'll be watching you guys and what you guys do over the coming years. I think it'll make a big difference. And to those who are listening to the show, if you found this also educational and very helpful, please give this episode a thumbs up.

wherever you listen to this podcast. If you don't want to miss the future episode, please subscribe to the channel. Oliver, thank you again for being on the show and hopefully we have you again in the future to give us an update on where Impaulsthal Metals is at and how people can get more involved.

Oliver Gunasekara (35:28)
Great, well thank you again, I really enjoyed the discussion.

Daniel O'Connor (35:31)
Thank you.