The Elements of Deep Sea Mining

Jesse Matas is a peace and conflict studies researcher and folk musician based in Canada. In this conversation, Eric and Jesse explore what the discipline of conflict transformation can offer the deep sea mining debate — from how dialogue gets structured, to the role of misunderstanding, identity, values, and even folk culture in shaping how environmental conflicts unfold and how they might be resolved.
Topics covered include the distinction between positions and interests in conflict negotiation, why focusing on values tends to produce more generative outcomes than debating fixed positions, how misunderstandings function in environmental disputes and what clearing them up can actually accomplish, the challenges of funding and accessing environmental conflict mediation, the role of art, music, and narrative in conflict transformation processes, and how folk culture encodes community identity in ways that formal negotiation often misses.
Jesse draws on his experience as a mediator and researcher to reflect on cases including the Norwegian deep sea mining regulatory process, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and a case study involving toxic boat paint in California. The conversation also touches on joint fact-finding, restorative justice, and the limits of interest-based negotiation when power is unequal.
Follow Jesse
LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-matas
Chapters
* 0:00 — Cold open: “critical mineral security is a feeling”
* 0:20 — Intro: peace scholar, songwriter, and the podcast’s theme song
* 2:14 — What environmental peacebuilding is
* 9:41 — Resolution vs. transformation: why conflict isn’t inherently bad
* 14:28 — Positions vs. interests: moratorium, mineral security, and where the debate gets stuck
* 22:42 — Misunderstanding, mediation and how a third party actually works
* 31:07 — The California boat-paint case, and why getting people in a room rarely gets funded
* 36:08 — Why industry has an interest in mediation
* 40:38 — Same facts, different narratives: the “narrative warfare” problem
* 47:47 — Art as a tool for understanding: songwriting workshops and eight-word conflicts
* 58:57 — Folk tales, a Galician fishing village, and “how are we going to protect your story?”
* 1:04:31 — Children singing outside the Good Friday talks: the embodied side of conflict
* 1:06:56 — Fuzziness, emotion, and why security is a feeling
Resources Mentioned
* John Paul Lederach — Peace and Conflict Studies scholar
* Tommy Sands — “There Were Roses” / Good Friday Agreement performance
* Oslo Accords
* California boat paint / tributyltin (TBT) ban
* Environmental conflict resolution / joint fact-finding
* WWF Norway vs. Norwegian government — deep sea mining court case


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Bryan Bille is Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s lead policy and geopolitical analyst, covering the mine-to-electric-vehicle supply chain from a market and geoeconomic angle rather than an advocacy one. Fresh off his first International Seabed Authority session, he tells Eric what struck him most: the ISA room is dominated by legal, governance, and environmental voices, while the market and geoeconomic case for or against deep sea mining is largely absent — a gap Benchmark is trying to fill with independent price assessments and supply-demand forecasting.
The conversation works through where the numbers actually point: whether a projected nickel supply deficit means seabed nodules would displace onshore mines or simply run alongside them; the caveats behind Benchmark’s life-cycle assessment for The Metals Company; why the industry’s “green premium” pitch has quietly become a “security premium” pitch instead; and why manganese, not nickel, may be the harder commercial problem, given how slow-moving and locked-in that market already is. Bryan also gives his read on China’s seabed strategy: two to three years behind on deep sea mining, by his sources, but in no apparent hurry, given how firmly it already controls terrestrial and processing supply.
Follow Bryan on LinkedIn
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bryanbille
Chapters
* 00:00:00 — Cold open: is China racing to mine the deep sea?
* 00:00:47 — Welcome & introducing Bryan Bille
* 00:01:59 — Inside Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s mine-to-EV coverage
* 00:05:06 — Key facts: 15–25 billion tons of nodules, and grades that beat land ore
* 00:06:10 — What’s missing from the ISA’s negotiating table
* 00:10:55 — Deep sea vs. onshore: supply, demand, and the environmental math
* 00:17:36 — From “green premium” to “security premium”
* 00:21:04 — Energy transition to energy security — and the next-gen battery race
* 00:26:38 — Does the NMC-to-LFP shift kill the case for CCZ nickel?
* 00:29:41 — Europe vs. the US on China — and the deep sea mining race
* 00:36:15 — The processing bottleneck and the manganese glut
* 00:39:59 — Can the West compete with China without government intervention?
Resources Mentioned
* Benchmark Mineral Intelligence — Deep-Sea Mining Special Issue: source.benchmarkminerals.com/publications/special-issues
* Benchmark Mineral Intelligence: source.benchmarkminerals.com
* Previous episode referenced — “What Are China’s Deep Sea Research Vessels Actually Doing?” (Kara Fox, CNN & Elizabeth Alberts, Mongabay): tradingoff.substack.com


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Te Ipukarea Society has been one of the most consistent civil society voices in the Cook Islands’ deep sea mining conversation since long before it became international news. In this episode, Eric speaks with two of its members: Imogen Ingram, an accountant-turned-environmental advocate with decades of experience in UN chemical and waste conventions, and Kelvin Passfield, an Australian-born ecologist who has called the Cook Islands home since 1988. Together they offer a ground-level account of what the DSM process looks like from inside one of the world’s most watched jurisdictions — a country that is 99.99% ocean, whose EEZ sits directly over some of the most actively explored nodule fields in the Pacific, and whose government has already passed exploitation regulations while the ISA is still working on its own.
What makes this conversation particularly useful for anyone tracking the Cook Islands situation is the level of institutional detail both guests bring. Imogen walks through the consent process as she has experienced it firsthand — the community meetings with no recordings, the DSMA staff who cannot answer questions about investor-state dispute mechanisms, and what she describes as a pattern of regulatory capture that mirrors what civil society has raised at the ISA level. Kelvin picks up the legislative thread, explaining the quiet but significant shift from “public interest” to “national interest” in the Cook Islands’ seabed mining legislation, the consolidation happening among the three active exploration license holders, and why the precautionary approach is the only intellectually honest position when the science on deep sea ecosystem impacts is still this incomplete. Both guests are clear that they support a moratorium rather than an outright ban — and both explain precisely why that distinction matters legally and strategically.
Follow Te Ipukarea Society:
🔗 Website: tiscookislands.org🔗 Facebook: Te Ipukarea Society - TIS
Chapters:
* 00:00:00 – Introduction: Imogen & Kelvin on the Cook Islands
* 00:02:22 – Geography: 15 Islands, 99.99% Ocean
* 00:06:57 – From Accountant to Environmental Warrior
* 00:11:08 – When DSM Became Real: 2007–2012
* 00:22:47 – What Do Cook Islanders Actually Think?
* 00:40:51 – Consultation Theater: Appearance vs. Reality
* 00:52:40 – Regulatory Capture: The Fox in the Henhouse
* 00:56:51 – The Trade-Off Question: Minerals for Climate?
* 01:21:40 – Rahui: Traditional Ocean Stewardship
* 01:46:05 – Closing: “Just Don’t Do It”
Resources:
* Deep Sea Conservation Coalition — deepseaconservation.org
* IUCN — iucn.org
* Marae Moana Act 2017 — govt.co.ck/marae-moana
* UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html


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Beverly Ataera is the Commissioner of the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority, the government body overseeing all seabed mineral activity in one of the most resource-rich ocean territories on Earth. The Cook Islands is 99% water, holds an estimated 12 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules at the bottom of its EEZ, and has been quietly building its regulatory framework for over 12 years — long before COVID, long before Trump's executive orders, and long before deep sea mining became a geopolitical talking point.
The episode gets into the geopolitics, the community conversations, and the remarkable way Beverly talks about scale. When Cook Islanders worry about what mining would actually look like, Beverly's team spent six months working out how to explain it. Beverly also pushes back on the narrative that the Cook Islands is caught in a US-China tug of war: they work with America, Japan, Norway, China, and the British History Museum. Science, she says, is a universal language. Success, when it comes, will come on Cook Islands terms — not anyone else's.
Follow Beverly
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverly-stacey/
Chapters
* 00:00:00 — Introduction
* 00:27:01 — What Makes the Cook Islands Unique
* 03:24:00 — Timeline and History
* 05:56:00 — Current State
* 08:33:00 — Environmental and Commercial Reality Must Align
* 12:10:00 — How Rigorous Regulation Actually Works
* 14:03:00 — Transparency as Trust
* 16:46:00 — Size and Scale
* 21:13:00 — Trump’s Executive Order and Maintaining Independence
* 25:26:00 — The Trade-Off Question: How to Weigh Environmental Risk Against Economic Benefit
* 30:39:00 — Economic Resilience, Healthcare, and Why Cook Islands Won’t Rush
* 34:48:00 — Infrastructure and Opportunity
* 36:24:00 — Final Framing
Resources Mentioned
* Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority: sbma.gov.ck
* IBOSS (Institute of Blue ocean Sustainability and Science: pmoffice.gov.ck
* Tiz: local Cook Islands NGO (search via SBMA website for contact)
* Oceans Ancestors: local Cook Islands NGO
* Maui Collective: Hawaiian cultural heritage group active at ISA meetings
* Marae Moana — Cook Islands Marine Protected Area: sbma.gov.ck


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Most conversations about China’s grip on critical minerals stop at the “how” — the export controls, the smelting capacity, the twenty-plus restrictions since 2020. Tomasz Nadrowski, author of Mineral War and portfolio manager at Amvest Terraden, spends this episode on the “why,” and his answer isn’t really about markets at all. It’s about security. Nadrowski traces the legal machinery that makes Western free markets function — a contract-law tradition going back to the School of Salamanca — and argues it simply has no equivalent leverage against a state that treats mineral control as a tool for regime survival rather than profit. From there he walks through how China ended up owning the unglamorous, low-margin middle of the value chain that Western firms were happy to offload in the 1990s, why price floors (not just subsidies) are the only real lever the West has left, and why the distinction between “monopoly” and “weaponized monopoly” is the whole ballgame, illustrated with a live-fire example involving gadolinium and the Tomahawk missile that Eric spends a good five minutes trying to pin down.
The back half gets more philosophical and more personal. Nadrowski makes the case via the French philosopher Julien Freund that whether the West is in conflict with China isn’t actually the West’s decision to make, and points to Xi Jinping’s 2013 “Document Number Nine” as evidence the answer was settled years ago. He also gets candid about running a fund that profits from exactly the supply-chain gap his book describes (”isn’t that a false dichotomy? Can’t we just do both?”), and closes by connecting all of it to the deep-sea mining conversation: why the EEZ land-grab in the Pacific may matter less for the minerals themselves than for which geopolitical orbit small island nations end up in.
Follow Tomasz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadrowski/
Chapters
* 00:00:00 — Cold Open: “Price Floors Are Non-Negotiable”
* 00:00:18 — Welcome & Guest Intro
* 00:00:50 — From Career Accident to Mineral War: Tomasz’s Story
* 00:08:26 — Why the Free Market Fails on Critical Minerals
* 00:19:11 — Price Floors and Rebuilding Western Supply Chains
* 00:32:47 — Monopoly vs. Weaponization: The Gadolinium Example
* 00:41:05 — Junior Miners and the Exploration Funding Gap
* 00:46:39 — Inside the Fund: Profit, Purpose, and the Ethics of Mining
* 00:55:30 — Is the West Already at War? Document Number Nine
* 00:58:03 — Deep-Sea Minerals and China’s Seabed Ambitions
* 01:04:41 — Closing Thoughts
Resources & Links Mentioned
* Book — Mineral War: China’s Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction by Tomasz Nadrowski: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFNP46NB
* Tomasz’s podcast — Tyranny Today:
(also on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/tyrannytoday/)
* Amvest Terraden Critical Minerals Fund: https://www.amvestterraden.com/
* “Document Number Nine” (2013 CCP internal memo), full ChinaFile translation: https://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation


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