Gerard Barron, the CEO and chairman of The Metals Company, pulls a fist-sized black rock out of his pocket and displays it proudly in his hand.
“Everything you need to build an EV battery cathode is in here,” he says. “It’s an amazing mix of metals that are just made for this time we find ourselves in.”
Barron carries that rock everywhere and has finely tuned his pitch over hundreds of investor meetings as he tries to explain his vision of mining the deep seabed, which has never been done before.
The rock, technically a polymetallic nodule, is laced with high concentrations of
