Deep sea mining.
One seabed, two laws.

The Metals Company wants a U.S. permit to mine 25,160 square kilometers of Pacific seabed. In July, the International Seabed Authority renewed an exploration contract covering that exact patch, held by the company's own subsidiary.

One company, one stretch of ocean floor, and two legal systems that don't recognize each other. That's what deep sea mining stocks turn on in 2027: whether a permit from Washington is enough to dig, finance, and sell metal from seabed most of the world says belongs to everyone.

What's down there is worth the fight. The richest field, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico, is littered with potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules, sitting four to six kilometers down. They carry nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese, and the U.S. imports all of its manganese and most of its cobalt. Deep sea mining (or seabed mining) means vacuuming those nodules off the abyssal plain and hauling them to the surface.

Washington has picked a side. An April 2025 executive order told regulators to fast-track seabed permits, and a new federal rule lets companies apply to explore and mine in one step. Still, nobody has ever been granted a commercial recovery permit. The international authority hasn't finished its own mining rules, and 46 countries now back a pause.

The deep sea mining stocks below form a queue: the company furthest along, the two waiting behind it, the side bets that pay either way, and two private companies with different routes to the seafloor.

One company is close enough to a permit that its timeline sets the pace for the rest of the sector.

TMC the metals company NASDAQ: TMC

TMC has the most advanced commercial application in the U.S. system. The public comment period on it closes October 19, and Allseas is building a collection system sized for 3 million tonnes of wet nodules a year, set to be commissioned by the end of 2027.

The permit is only part of the problem. In TMC's own feasibility study, 90% of the $4.9 billion build is onshore processing in the U.S., not the ship. TMC says most of that has to be funded by the U.S. government, and no agency has committed yet, against $98.7 million of cash at the end of June.

That makes TMC a binary bet with two switches, a permit that survives the legal fight and a federal check for the refinery, and it has already pushed its permit timing back once this year.

These two microcaps have applications in the same U.S. queue. Their fate depends on TMC going first.

Odyssey Marine Exploration NASDAQ: OMEX

Odyssey Marine is merging with American Ocean Minerals, a private company with interests in two exploration licences in the Cook Islands and its own U.S. application in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The deal comes with a $156 million private placement, and the combined company expects more than $175 million in cash at closing.

But it hasn't closed. The deal was supposed to wrap up mid-year, the agreement's outside date is October 8, and Odyssey is under a Nasdaq notice for trading below $1. American Ocean Minerals has been lending Odyssey money to keep it running until the vote. Until shareholders approve, OMEX is a bet that the merger happens at all.

Deep Sea Minerals Corp. CSE: SEAS

Deep Sea Minerals Corp. is a Canadian-listed microcap with a U.S. exploration application in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Regulators found it substantially complete in May, but it still hasn't been declared fully compliant. The company had about C$1.6 million in cash at the end of June and has applied for a Nasdaq listing. It's a cheap option on the permit queue moving faster than expected, with very little runway if it doesn't.

These two companies get paid if seabed mining works, but they don't depend on it to survive. That makes them the safer deep sea mining stocks.

The Metals Royalty Co. NASDAQ: TMCR

The Metals Royalty Co. was set up with a 2% royalty on the seabed area TMC hopes to mine first, and TMC still owns about a fifth of it. Then it did something smart: it bought a 2% royalty on Mesabi Metallics, an iron-ore project in Minnesota targeting first production this quarter.

The company guides that Mesabi royalty to about $22 million a year. So TMCR now has a path to cash that doesn't wait on the ocean. The catch is how it paid: $140 million of convertible notes, plus a new registration of up to 27.8 million shares for resale.

DEME Group Euronext Brussels: DEME

DEME is a profitable Belgian offshore contractor whose subsidiary, Global Sea Mineral Resources, has spent years testing nodule collection. In March it signed an agreement with a Japanese contractor to run a full system test in that company's international licence area in the early 2030s.

That puts DEME firmly on the international side of the split. If the authority's rules eventually win out, DEME is positioned. If they don't, its dredging and offshore wind business keeps paying the bills.

One built the ship. The other wants to skip international waters entirely.

Allseas

Allseas built and runs Hidden Gem, the ship that recovered about 3,000 tonnes of nodules from more than four kilometers down in a 2022 pilot. It signed the commercial contract with TMC in May. It also owns 14.4% of TMC, and in July it took $43 million of what TMC owed it in shares. A contractor that owns 14% of its client is betting on the permit as much as the client is.

Impossible Metals

Impossible Metals builds autonomous robots that pick nodules selectively instead of dredging the seafloor. More important is where it wants to work. Its request kicked off the first federal lease sale for seabed minerals in American Samoa's waters, proposed for November 19, inside U.S. jurisdiction, where the international authority has no claim.

The legal fight over the high seas could run for years. The International Seabed Authority won't consider its next draft until 2027, and its inquiry into TMC's subsidiaries runs into mid-2027.

Meanwhile, the federal government has quietly opened a second route. It has proposed lease sales off American Samoa in November and the Northern Mariana Islands in December, which would be the first critical-mineral lease sales it has ever held. Seabed inside U.S. waters carries no international dispute. A buyer, a lender or a refinery can deal with it the way it deals with an offshore oil lease.

If those sales go ahead, the cleanest title in deep sea mining in 2027 won't be in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It'll be off a U.S. territory, and the opposition will come from local governments instead of an international authority. American Samoa's governor has already said, "we oppose any lease sale that risks irreversible harm." The deep-sea fight is moving from international law to local politics, and deep sea mining stocks will have to follow it there.