Port of Brownsville could soon host Nodule City, a first-of-its-kind commercial deep-sea mining hub

By José Martínez

In the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico, a deep-sea mining company called The Metals Company Inc. (TMC) plans to lower a nearly 50-foot-wide vehicle to the seafloor more than two miles below the surface to collect metal-rich rocks known as polymetallic nodules.

Once the nodules are brought up and loaded on a vessel, they would take an almost three-week trip through the Panama Canal to an industrial park dubbed Nodule City at the Port of Brownsville, where they would be refined into metals used in batteries and raw materials used in steelmaking, then sold commercially.

“It would be the first of its kind,” Yoram Carboex, a deep-sea mining historian formerly with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. While companies and governments have performed mining and processing tests on polymetallic nodules since the 1970s, Carboex said, TMC’s attempt to commercialize them has never been done.