June 25, 2021 — The first time Gerard Barron tried to mine the sea floor, the company he backed lost a half-billion dollars of investor money, got crosswise with a South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat and ultimately went broke. Now he’s trying again, but with a twist: Mr. Barron is positioning his new seabed mining venture, The Metals Company, as green, to capitalize on a surge of environmentally minded investment.
TMC is set to receive nearly $600 million in investor cash in a deal slated to take the company public in July. If successful, that would value TMC at $2.9 billion—more than any mining company ever to go public in the U.S. with no revenue.
“We were positioning this incorrectly as a big mining, deep-sea mining project, which it was,” says Mr. Barron, who says the metallic nodules he hopes to bring up are crucial to building electric-vehicle batteries. “But it wasn’t the way that we were going to garner support from investors to make this industry a reality.”
Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like.