AOMC announced a reverse merger with Odyssey last week, valuing the combined entity at $1 billion and pointing investors toward nickel, cobalt, and manganese sitting on the ocean floor. The timing is deliberate. Lithium carbonate prices in China are projected at $22 per kilogram in 2026, up 135% from last year. Australian hard-rock operations are straining under diesel shortages tied to the Iran war. A Chinese mine closure and a Zimbabwe export ban have tightened cobalt supply simultaneously. The story writes itself: land is failing us, so we go deeper.
Before accepting that story, ask who commissioned it.
The Deficit Is Real. The Solution Is Chosen.
The supply pressure is genuine. Global lithium mining operations have nearly doubled to 80 mines over 4 years, and demand is still outrunning them. Each EV requires roughly 40 kilograms of nickel and 13 kilograms of cobalt, metals that deep-sea nodules happen to contain in abundance. The financial case for seabed extraction is not fabricated. But a financial case and an environmental case are different documents, and right now only one of them exists.
The International Seabed Authority has been issuing exploration licenses for years while the scientific community has been explicit that polymetallic nodule fields support ecosystems we do not yet understand, ecosystems that recover on timescales measured in centuries, not quarters. The ISA's governance structure was designed with extraction in mind, not precaution. Its funding comes partly from the companies it regulates. That is not a conspiracy; it is an incentive structure, and incentive structures predict behavior more reliably than mission statements do.
I'll grant the industry one fair point: land-based mining is not clean either. The diesel dependency of Australian lithium operations, which supply 49% of global lithium, is a real vulnerability that the Iran war has exposed with uncomfortable clarity. Critics who oppose deep-sea mining while ignoring the ecological cost of Pilgangoora or Greenbushes are drawing an arbitrary line. The ocean is not sacred while the Pilbara is expendable.
But that tension does not dissolve the argument for a moratorium. It strengthens the case for a broader reckoning with how we extract battery metals at all, including on land. The answer to one unexamined extraction regime is not a second one.
Who Absorbs the Risk When the Nodules Are Gone
AOMC going public means the financial upside of seabed extraction gets distributed to shareholders. The downside, disrupted deep-ocean carbon cycling, collapsed benthic ecosystems, sediment plumes spreading across hundreds of kilometers, gets distributed to no one in particular, which means it gets distributed to everyone. That asymmetry is the oldest trick in the extractive industries playbook, and the EV transition does not make it new.
China controls over 70% of EV battery production and has already moved toward lithium iron phosphate chemistries that reduce cobalt and nickel dependence. Sodium-ion EVs have been on Chinese roads since January 2024. The Western argument for deep-sea mining is partly a supply chain argument and partly a geopolitical one: we need our own source of these metals because we cannot trust Beijing's. That is a legitimate concern. It is not a license to skip the science.
A commercial moratorium on deep-sea mining, enforced through the ISA with binding environmental review requirements before any extraction license converts to production, is the specific policy that needs to happen now. Not a study. Not a working group. A moratorium with teeth, while battery chemistry catches up to the ambition. The $1 billion valuation AOMC just claimed will survive a delay. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone will not survive a mistake.
