 I'm going to talk on a completely different topic. I wasn't aware when I agreed to make this presentation that the theme was taxes, but I'll return to that later on. But I'd like to start with this picture of a... That's a submarine of the Gulf class, Soviet K-129. I see a terrible mistake here. This submarine sank in the Pacific in 1968. And of course the Soviets started looking for it. They didn't know exactly where it had sank because those submarines are always traveling without contact with head office. So the Americans saw that there were lots of Soviet vessels in that part of the Pacific. And they started, well, that must be something which has happened. And they managed through their, I think, underwater sonar systems to localize this sankin submarine. And you see there is the cross there where the Americans found it. It sank in March and the US managed to pinpoint where it was in May. And the intelligence organizations started thinking, how shall we be able to take this submarine out of the Pacific? I think it was four or five thousand meters deep without the Soviets noticing and understanding that we know where it is. That's a bit of a difficult issue. And so they started a long-term project which involved deep sea bed minerals. And they managed, CIA managed to engage Howard Jude, you know, this eccentric billionaire. And he invested, or if it was the CIM, of course, and was the story spread that we are now going to look for nodules in the Pacific? And this was at a time, you know, the early 70s, when the mid-70s, when the oil companies had made huge sums of money from the price shocks of OPEC. And they wanted to move into mining in the second part of the 70s. And this was very hot topic. And as you can see, I'm a very old man. I was working on these issues in our little raw materials group in those days as well. And although we were sort of investigative journalists or, you know, trying to find the truth, we were also completely taken by the CIA ideas. And so it is interesting in retrospect to think a bit about how much of the interest in deep sea bed mining was due to this submarine and how much was really due to technical and economic situation and the demand for those metals and minerals. I'm not a person that, I don't like these sort of hypotheses. But I think in this case, there is a certain, it's a thing to think about because the deep sea bed mining and what I'm going to tell you now is part of a study which Wider asked us to do. How much is, oh really, let me change it. The technologies and the optimism about sea bed mining has been flowering and exploding several times over the past 50 years but nothing has really happened. So I think this is a very interesting question. And let me, in addition to what Alan here told you about my history, I would also like to mention that, and this is a lesson of life for myself. I was part of a little collective starting this journal in 1980. Now, in 2023, I'm still the editor-in-chief, so never start a journal. I would like all of you who are working in the field of minerals and metals and policy and economics to contribute, send your stuff to us. We are one of the most highly valued journals. I enjoyed very much the introduction yesterday by the boss of the Nourad and he said in Norwegian facts or fakta or ermakta and he translated I think a little, not to the point, to me, facts are power and he said something he enveloped that a bit. But that has been the basis for the raw materials group since early 70s and that's why we built a database over all mines and metals, as Alan said. When retiring 10 years ago, we had to sell the database but if you want to approach or use it, it's still with standard and pours their sortiment. My agenda is short. What is marine mining? And then deep seabed mining which is part of the marine mining and some observation which I will hope provoke a lot of discussion. Tony has told me, don't worry about a lot of slides, just provoke. He didn't say exactly like that, but that was his intention. So here you have the seabed and let me go to the next slide directly. What is there on the continental shelf? That is what we call offshore mining. Then we have on the sea of the bottom ocean floor, that's the rest of this picture. There are the polymetallic nodules along the Atlantic mid-oceanic ridges. There are sea floor massive sulphides, the SMS and there are nodules and other stuff. I will get back to that a little later because that's where Norway is now heading to extract from the mid-Atlantic ridge. The depth here is 4, 3, 4, 5,000 meters and I just added far to the right the depth of the deepest gold mine which is also around 4,000 meters just outside Joberg. But of course that starts at 1,500 or 1,000 meters which is the altitude in the Vitvatersrand. So these are the possibilities and I'll talk a bit more about that. Ah, here we are. This is what marine mining there is in the world. Let me start with the deep seabed mining. You see the Clarion Clipotone Zone in the middle there, the Nauri D1. D1 is the, you see the note there. That's a deep seabed mining where a company called the Metals Company is engaged. Then there is Cook Islands, further south there are more projects around there. And a little up towards Japan is the Japanese Jogmec State Organization doing work outside of Okinawa which is on the national territorial waters. And finally the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where Norwegian companies hope to do some extraction which is also in the Norwegian exclusive economic zone. So it's outside of the Clarion Clipotone Zone under the leadership of the International Seabed Authority. So that's the project of deep seabed mining. Nothing is going on yet and all the others are offshore mining which is on the continental shelf and not so deep waters. And I'd like to point out the, you see there outside the Namibian coast diamonds. I think Namibia has done a very interesting work, a bit like Botswana. It's a 50-50 venture with De Beers and they have mastered to some extent the seabed mining problems and issues. And they come quite far in that area. There are also projects to take up phosphorites, phosphor containing material there from. All the others are sand, tin in the Southeast Asia, some iron ore mining in New Zealand and there are projects around the world which uses offshore that is near to land resources. Sand and gravel is by far the most common. Here is an illustration of the value of marine extraction and really only offshore because there hasn't been any deep seabed mining. And you can see oil and gas is indicated on the top there as a point of comparison. At the end you might have some views on that. Welcome to the question session later. And you can see that I've summed it up. There's some 35 billion dollars is the value. If you subtract the sand and gravel, 15 billion remains. And that is about one or two percent of the total value or non-fuel minerals produced in the world in 2018. So it's a fairly small share but it has increased over this period. The 1972 figures were given by a study and we did the 2018 figures. The deep seabed mining is attracting a lot of interest and I'll discuss that a little later how realistic is it really. But never mind that this is a list of the exploration contracts the international seabed authority has made until it's two years ago. But you see it covers about 0.7 percent of the total area of the seas. And if you, if one, it's in total how many? Well, 50, a little less than 50, 30 to 40 exploration licenses. On land, roughly one exploration, one mining project results out of a thousand exploration projects. So there is, I don't think there is a reason to assume that the success rate will be higher on the deep seabed mining. So it's really a small part of the oceans that might be affected by this. So that's the background and let me just give you a couple of my conclusions, observations if you like. And I start with the deep seabed mining, five minutes, oh plenty of time. It's technologically difficult and it's unproven except after 50 optimistic years. I'm very doubtful about this. Second point, there is no mineral reserves. Mineral reserve is what you need in order to start to mine. If you don't have a reserve, there will be no mine and reserve is simply something a deposit we can be profitably mined. On the international seabed authority, I haven't spoken about that at all, but as I said it governs all the extra territorial areas. And I find it a very interesting, unique global ex-ante mineral regime. It takes a long, it's taken a long time, it's slow, but that depends on the fact that it is a democratic organization, one country, one vote. So I think ISA is an underestimated organization. It also has a lot of opportunities for developing countries and it is something which should be followed and could perhaps be what is the revved up to use the title of the conference here. In offshore mining, I think the opportunities for low income and middle income countries lies really in offshore mining, as Namibia has shown, as Indonesia, Malaysia and their tin mining. And there are other ways of approaching this also. Mauritius is a country which have very actively used the opportunities that ISA opens for developing countries and they built a cater of knowledgeable people that can act as lawyers, technical people, etc. That can act as expert around the world. There are serious environmental issues, whether it's offshore mining or deep seabed mining. And continuous studies are necessary here. But there has been called for a moratorium on deep seabed and I'm a bit worried that we'll rather be shooting oneself in the foot. Because if there is a complete moratorium, all research will stop, no funding will be funneled into that type of research to understand the biology and fauna in the depth. I think one should rather have a reasonable way of strengthening the international seabed authority to continue the work to solve these problems for the future. My second, lost by second is that whether it's a land-based mine or a marine operation, it will be the lowest cost producer that will start working. And that's something that often is overlooked. It doesn't matter if one could do deep seabed mining, if it's more expensive than land-based, it will not happen. And I think also the environmental alternative cost should be considered. What is the alternative cost for a copper or a cobalt mine or land compared to the nodules? I've come to my final point here and that is the blue economy perspective. The deep seabed mining or marine mining in general should always be weighed against or together with tourism, fisheries. It's a blue economy and you have to take the whole picture into account before moving ahead. And I think I promised you to say something about taxes. Have you forgotten that? I have not. The metals company, which is now going ahead they say with this Nauru Deep project, they have projected profits or $1,800 per year in their operation. Nauru and the company has not published information about the tax flows. But another company that was nautilus, it's now in bankruptcy, they published details on their deal with Tonga. And if you use those figures and calculate the income for Nauru, every year it's $8 million. So that's two figures, $8 million to Nauru, $1,800 million to the company. Thank you very much.