With increasing discovery costs, environmental regulation, permitting costs, and reclamation costs for land-based mines, the alternative of mining seabed deposits is now becoming highly attractive. Mineral exploration groups currently face increasing competition, and increased discovery and development costs as exploration extends to remote and relatively hostile physical and political environments. Finding a commercially viable mine has never been easy, and the opportunity to explore virgin terrain today is very remote. Explorers are confronted with deep ore bodies, complex exploration models, and high sample acquisition cost. DSM has an alternative to the industry pattern in the mining industry of ever increasing costs and risks. The operations planned by DSM will be accompanied by improved rate of discovery of large deposits, minimal environmental impacts, and conservation of potentially at-risk land resources. There has been little commercial seabed exploration to date; though recent research suggests that large deposits may be as abundant on the seabed as they ever were on land. Geological models of formation, particularly for VMS deposits have greatly improved recently, due in part to the observations of the real-time, seabed formation of unmetamorphosed deposits. Seabed exploration tools have been developed to a high degree of accuracy in recent years, approaching and sometimes exceeding the efficiency of land-based methods. We have every reason to believe that the rate of discovery of large deposits will be much higher on the seabed than on land.

Seabed mines will not have the inherent environmental and public health risks to overcome which are characteristic of land-based mines. The primary problem with land-based mines is the presence of sulfide minerals in the overburden and tailings. Sulfides, when exposed to oxygen and fresh water, produce sulfuric acid, the primary culprit in causing heavy metal contamination and other hazards. In the ocean, seawater prevents this sulfuric acid production completely due to its high buffer capacity. The same processes, which remove the metals from hydrothermal vent emissions, will ensure that no acid mine tailings will ever be formed on the seabed..

Noranda's Kidd Creek open pit mine, Canada. An ancient black smoker deposit. Today's mined value of this deposit is approximately $30 billion US