Interoceanmetal
Interoceanmetal Joint Organization holds an exploration contract from the International Seabed Authority over 75,000 km² of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is not a company. It was created by treaty in 1987 by seven Soviet-bloc states, and is owned today by six governments: Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechia, Poland, Russia and Slovakia. Its headquarters have been in Szczecin since the beginning.
It signed one of the first two exploration contracts the authority ever issued, in March 2001, and has since been granted three extensions. The most recent, approved in March 2026, runs to 2031.
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Overview
- Created by intergovernmental agreement on April 27, 1987, among Bulgaria, Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic, Cuba, Poland, the USSR and Czechoslovakia. It gained legal personality under Polish law that December.
- Vietnam left in 1989 and Germany after unification. Russia succeeded the USSR in January 1992, and Czechia and Slovakia divided the Czechoslovak position at the end of that year.
- It was registered as a pioneer investor by the United Nations in 1992, having narrowed a 546,000 km² prospecting area down to the 75,000 km² it holds today.
- The exploration contract was signed on March 29, 2001, the same day as one other contractor, making the two of them the authority’s first.
- The block sits in the eastern Clarion-Clipperton Zone in two sectors, in water 2,450 to 4,750 metres deep. Within it, four exploration blocks and one 957 km² block earmarked for extraction have been surveyed in progressively finer detail.
- Twenty-seven research cruises have been run since 1987. The earlier ones used Soviet, Polish and Russian vessels; the most recent, over the turn of 2024 into 2025, used a Western charter.
- Its only piece of real hardware is a hydraulic collector head built by a Polish state mining institute, which recovered more than 90% of artificial nodules in a tank test in 2022. Everything else remains a design.
- The 2024 pre-feasibility study concludes that it cannot build a processing plant of viable scale, and proposes instead to sell 1.5 million wet tonnes of raw nodules a year to an existing plant in Cuba, a member state.
- Its director general presided over the authority’s council in 2022, the year that body set up its working groups on the mining regulations, so it is a contractor that also helps run the room.
The contract
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Mineral | Polymetallic nodules |
| Area | 75,000 km² in the eastern Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in two sectors |
| Water depth | 2,450 to 4,750 metres |
| Sponsoring states | Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechia, Poland, the Russian Federation and Slovakia |
| Signed | March 29, 2001, for fifteen years |
| First extension | To March 28, 2021, signed May 25, 2017 |
| Second extension | To March 28, 2026, approved December 2021 and signed November 2022 |
| Third extension | To March 28, 2031. Applied for September 17, 2025, recommended March 6, 2026, and approved by the council on March 18, 2026, effective March 29, 2026. |
| Neighbours across the boundary | The contract areas held by Nauru Ocean Resources, Ocean Mineral Singapore, Germany’s federal geoscience institute, and Blue Minerals Jamaica |
The authority’s own public contractor table had not been updated to show the third extension when checked on October 3, 2026, and still showed the contract expiring in March 2026. The council decision is the better source.
Resources
A classified resource statement is published, which is unusual for a seabed contractor. It is reported to the authority’s own standard rather than to any of the codes used in mining markets, and there are no reserves. Figures are wet tonnes of nodules, at a cut-off of 10 kg per square metre, estimated in 2020.
| Classification | Where | Abundance | Manganese | Nickel | Copper | Cobalt | Wet tonnes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Measured | The 957 km² block earmarked for extraction | 14.6 kg/m² | 29.19% | 1.31% | 1.25% | 0.18% | 12.2 Mt |
| Indicated | The two most studied exploration blocks | 12.4 kg/m² | 31.37% | 1.30% | 1.29% | 0.16% | 77.0 Mt |
| Inferred | The remainder of both sectors | 11.5 to 13.4 kg/m² | 27.80% to 32.35% | 1.20% to 1.41% | 0.90% to 1.21% | 0.18% to 0.20% | 183.3 Mt |
| Total | The whole contract area | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | 272.5 Mt |
A second 2024 estimate for the same extraction block, derived from processed seabed photographs rather than sampling, returns 8.3 million wet tonnes against the 12.2 million above, a reduction of about a third. Both are published, and they are not reconciled with each other.
The plan, and what the regulator has said about it
- The 2024 study settles on extracting 1.5 million wet tonnes of nodules a year from the 957 km² block and selling them raw, because no processing route examined would earn an acceptable return at the scale this contractor could build.
- With the production vessel chartered rather than bought, the study returns a net present value of US$160.8 million and an internal rate of return of 24.2% against a 12.9% hurdle. Buying the vessel drops that to 17.35%, with an 80.3% chance the net present value is negative.
- The study expects the technical obstacles to commercial seabed mining to be overcome within five to ten years of 2024.
- When the authority granted the second extension in 2022 it did so on the basis that the contractor would be able to proceed to mining at the end of it. It did not.
- Granting the third in March 2026, the authority’s commission found instead that the contractor had made good-faith efforts but had been unable to complete the preparatory work for reasons beyond its control, and that prevailing economic circumstances did not justify proceeding to mining.
- On February 10, 2026, Russia told the authority that its participation in this organisation had limited its ability to exercise effective control as a sponsoring state, without terminating its sponsorship. The secretariat said it would seek further information. The extension was approved anyway.
Ownership
There are no shareholders. Six governments own it through the treaty, each represented by one plenipotentiary on the council, and no share split or contribution key is published anywhere.
| Member state | Status | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Republic of Bulgaria | Founding member | Apr. 27, 1987 |
| Republic of Cuba | Founding member | Apr. 27, 1987 |
| Republic of Poland | Founding member and host state | Apr. 27, 1987 |
| Czech Republic | Successor to Czechoslovakia | December 1992 |
| Slovak Republic | Successor to Czechoslovakia | December 1992 |
| Russian Federation | Successor to the USSR | January 1992 |
The organisation itself treats this as a problem to be solved before anyone will finance a mine. Its 2024 study lists, among the steps it must take, transitioning into a commercial law entity with a transparent share distribution and defined contributions to profits and expenses. Commercialisation has been a formal council agenda item since 2025. None of the six member states appears to have national seabed mining legislation in force.
Listed exposure
There is none, and there is no mechanism by which there could be. This is an organisation created by treaty and owned by governments. It has issued no shares, has no parent, and is not a subsidiary of any listed company.
One indirect touchpoint is worth naming only to rule it out. The pre-feasibility base case sells nodules to a plant at Moa Bay in Cuba, which is run as a fifty-fifty venture between a Cuban state company and Sherritt International, listed in Toronto. Neither party has announced any agreement, offtake or discussion with the other. The plant appears in the study as a logical destination, not as a counterparty.