Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Please contact our team if you have any questions that aren’t covered here or would like to discuss your questions or feedback with Impossible Metals.

The transition to clean energy is the defining industrial project of our century, and it will be built out of metals. Nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese are the quiet backbone of every electric vehicle, grid battery, and wind turbine — and the world will need far more of them than today’s mines can deliver. The International Energy Agency projects demand for these minerals to roughly quadruple by 2040 under a net-zero pathway. The question is not whether we source them. The question is how, and at what cost to people and planet.

At Impossible Metals, we believe the seabed can be part of that answer — carefully, selectively, and only when the evidence supports it. Our position rests on three convictions:

First, the data should lead. Independent life-cycle assessments consistently show that selectively harvested polymetallic nodules carry a lower carbon, land-use, and biodiversity footprint than their terrestrial equivalents, particularly the rainforest nickel and artisanal cobalt supply chains that dominate today’s market.

Second, “low impact” is a design choice, not a marketing claim. Our selective-harvesting approach uses robotic picking to leave the seafloor, its sediment, and the organisms that depend on it materially undisturbed — a sharp departure from the dredging methods that have shaped public perception of this industry.

Third, we will not mine unless the science says we can do so responsibly. Our commitment is unambiguous: Impossible Metals will only proceed where our Environmental Impact Statements demonstrate no material, long-lasting harm to marine habitats or to the other ways people depend on the ocean — fishing, transport, recreation, and the cables that carry the world’s data.

Any emerging industry attracts speculation, and seabed minerals are no exception. Some of what circulates is honest uncertainty; some is outdated; some conflates very different technologies under a single label. We welcome scrutiny, and we have found productive common ground with the majority of scientists and NGOs engaged on these questions. The pages that follow address the claims we hear most often — not to argue, but to share what the current science actually shows and where the open questions remain.

History offers a cautionary note. A generation ago, well-intentioned opposition to nuclear power cost the world roughly two decades of progress on a technology now recognized as essential to reliable, low-carbon energy. A critical minerals policy built on science — rather than on the loudest objection — is how we avoid repeating that mistake.

We invite readers, regulators, researchers, and skeptics alike into that conversation.