Scandinavian Ocean Minerals
Scandinavian Ocean Minerals AB is a Swedish company seeking to harvest polymetallic ferromanganese nodules from the floor of the Bothnian Bay, the northernmost arm of the Baltic, in 70 to 115 metres of water. It holds exploration permits over four areas and has taken an extraction application through scoping consultation. It has no extraction permit.
A second strand, lifting oxygen-starved sediment from the Baltic around Gotland to oxygenate the seabed, uses the same recovery technology but has no permit, no application and no consultation behind it.
News and articles
Overview
- Registered as SOM AB, Swedish organisation number 559221-9942. The legal entity was formed on October 10, 2019, as a shelf company and took its present name on February 27, 2020, which is the date the company itself gives as its founding.
- Registered in Stockholm, at Arrendevagen 36 in Spanga. Gotland is the location of the second project, not of the company.
- A private aktiebolag with 50,000 kronor of share capital across 500 shares, and one employee in 2024. Swedish company law bars a private aktiebolag from offering shares to the public, so it is unlisted by operation of law.
- The nodules sit on the Swedish continental shelf, inside the exclusive economic zone but outside the territorial limit, so extraction is decided by the Swedish government under the Continental Shelf Act rather than by a mining authority or an environmental court.
- Exploration permits cover four areas totalling 800 km²: areas 1 and 2 by government decision of July 6, 2023, areas 3 and 4 by an agency decision announced on September 24, 2024.
- The area actually applied for is small. After an October 2024 field campaign over 83 km², the company narrowed its extraction application to 8 km² holding an estimated 250,000 tonnes of dry nodules, to be worked at 80,000 to 110,000 dry tonnes a year for at most ten years.
- That is roughly a tenth of what it contemplated in 2021, when it described 0.7 to 1.0 million dry tonnes a season over a 250 km² area.
- Recovery uses an air lift rather than a pump: compressed air released into a suction line carries material upward, so nodules never pass an impeller. Nozzles run 10 to 20 cm above the seabed and disturb it to a depth of 0.1 to 0.3 metres.
- The company owns the survey vessel R/V Bothnia Surveyor, bought from the University of Gothenburg and renamed at Harnosand on May 21, 2022.
Permits and areas
| Area | What is sought | Size | Water depth | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exploration areas 1 and 2 | Exploration under the Continental Shelf Act | ~450 km² combined | ~60 to 150 m | Granted by the Swedish government, decision KN2023/00565 of July 6, 2023 |
| Exploration areas 3 and 4 | Extension of survey rights | Taking the total to 800 km² | n/a | Granted by the Geological Survey of Sweden, decision of September 24, 2024 |
| Survey area | Field campaign: benthic fauna, drop video, water column, sediment contaminants | ~83 km² | 70 to 115 m | Complete. 56 stations sampled in October 2024 |
| Extraction area | Extraction permit under the Continental Shelf Act, decided by the government | ~8 km² | 70 to 115 m | Scoping consultation documentation dated May 21, 2025, published June 19, 2025, with views due August 22, 2025. Whether the application itself has been lodged is not public. |
| Original 2021 operating area | Extraction under the same act | ~250 km² | ~60 to 150 m | Superseded. Contemplated 0.7 to 1.0 million dry tonnes a season for up to ten years |
| Baltic Sea sediment project, around Gotland | Uplift of oxygen-consuming sediment, oxygenating the seabed | n/a | n/a | No permit, no application and no consultation. Described by the company as its second main direction |
What the resource figures are
The company has never published a mineral resource compliant with any reporting code, and no competent or qualified person is named in any of its material. As a private Swedish company it is under no obligation to. The figures below are company estimates and consultant extrapolations, and they describe different things.
| Figure | What it actually is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ~250,000 dry tonnes, ~450,000 wet | The estimated contents of the 8 km² area applied for. The consultant states the samples it rests on were not taken to measure quantity, and should be read as approximate. | Scoping consultation, May 21, 2025 |
| ~1.5 million dry tonnes | The same basis extended across the 83 km² survey area | Scoping consultation, May 21, 2025 |
| ~20 million tonnes | A regional occurrence estimate for the whole Bothnian Bay, repeated in company releases since 2023. It is not the project, and it is two orders of magnitude above the area applied for. | Company releases, 2023 to 2025 |
| 0 to 42 kg per m² | The measured density range across the 2024 sample points, extrapolated onto a square kilometre grid | Scoping consultation, May 21, 2025 |
The underlying science is a Swedish geochemical research programme of 1976 to 1985, supplemented by the company’s own sampling. Company statements describe nodules containing 27 elements, ~2 cm across, growing at 0.15 to 0.20 mm a year, far faster than the deep ocean nodules that dominate the industry.
Environmental findings
- The consultant’s October 2024 survey found organic pollutant levels generally low, species-poor habitats typical of coastal and lake environments, no red-listed or endangered species, and the nearest protected area almost 30 km away.
- It also flagged that extraction could pose a risk of turbidity and of spreading sediment-bound metals, and said this needs further investigation.
- Soft bottoms in the area are dominated by an invasive polychaete worm.
- The company markets nodule harvesting as restoring the Baltic by removing phosphorus-bearing dead sediment and oxygenating bottom water. The Bothnian Bay extraction area is not dead seabed: the same survey recorded an oxidised surface at every sampled point, indicating oxygen-rich bottom water. The oxygenation case belongs to the Gotland project, which has no permit.
Partners
The working partners are almost entirely Swedish public research bodies and one engineering consultancy.
- Sweco prepares the environmental documentation and ran the natural-value inventory.
- Clinton Marine Survey carried out the November 2023 hydrographic survey, about 520 hours of multibeam, side-scan, sub-bottom profiling and magnetometer data.
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology works on the metallurgy, including at what acidity the nodules begin to dissolve and how to recover the contained metals.
- Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg run a four-year study of sustainable sea-based mineral extraction, financed by the Swedish Energy Agency. That money goes to the researchers, not to the company.
- Stockholm University sampled independently on the October 2024 expedition, and Green Iron has run reduction testwork on the nodules.
- The company’s own milestone page additionally claims a 2021 letter of intent with the state-owned iron miner LKAB, and a 2021 collaboration with Vattenfall and SSAB on the Baltic project. Neither was ever the subject of a release.
Ownership
Shareholders are not public. Sweden does not file share registers for private companies, so no named holder and no percentage is disclosed anywhere in the company’s material, its two government filings or the public register.
| Item | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share capital | 50,000 kronor across 500 shares | Registration certificate, 2021 |
| Registered directors | Knut Arill Pedersen as chairman, Jan Fredrik Eide as chief executive, Marcus Holmstrand and Carl Viktor Erik Ljung. Whether any of them holds shares is not disclosed. | Swedish company register, read August 24, 2026 |
| How the work has been funded | The company told the government in 2021 that it had financed the permit work, the vessel and the survey equipment through shareholder contributions | Exploration permit application, November 26, 2021 |
| Equity ratio | 63.2% at the end of 2024, against 0.4% a year earlier, on total assets of 33.9 million kronor | Annual accounts to December 31, 2024, via the public register |
| Current raise | A private strategic funding round aimed at industrial and raw material investors was under way in June 2026 | Company release, June 5, 2026 |
The jump in the equity ratio during 2024 points to a substantial equity injection. Its source and size are not disclosed.
Listed exposure
There is no way to take listed exposure to this company. No listed issuer has been identified as holding equity in it or an option over it, and it has never named a corporate shareholder. Of the three corporate names it associates itself with, LKAB and Vattenfall are both wholly owned by the Swedish state and unlisted. SSAB is listed in Stockholm and Helsinki, but what the company claims is a collaboration on the Gotland project, not a shareholding, and SSAB has not been shown to have announced it. The only route in is the private funding round the company advertised in June 2026.
Filings
The company is private, so there is no securities filing record. Its substantive public documents are the two 2021 filings to the Swedish government and the 2025 scoping documentation, all hosted here.