A deep-sea mining firm led by former Rio Tinto CEO Tom Albanese is growing through a $1 billion merger and hopes to mine U.S. and international waters, another sign of money flowing into the nascent industry.
Albanese, chair of the newly formed company American Ocean Minerals, said during an interview on Fox News’ “Mornings With Maria” on Wednesday that his company is merging with Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida-based ocean exploration and subsea mineral development company.
The company, he said, has already hired a slew of explorers, engineers, and deep-sea specialists with plans to survey seafloor mining near the Cook Islands, a nation of 15 islands and atolls in the South Pacific Ocean. Raw materials, he said, would eventually be shipped back to states like Texas and Louisiana, where future processing plants and shipbuilding yards will need to be built.
“What we’ve done is we’ve collected a number of some of the top explorers and deep-sea specialists and basically combine that with exploration licenses in the Cook Islands exclusive economic zone and in the U.S. jurisdiction of the international waters,” said Albanese. “We’ll be bringing many of these minerals back to the U.S., so we’re going to need to build plants. We’re going to build factories.”
