When most investors think of deep sea mining stocks, they picture the companies that would actually license a claim and send vessels to the seafloor to collect nodules. Those companies are mostly small, mostly private or thinly listed, and almost all of them are still waiting on the regulatory framework that would let them operate at scale. There is a genuine industry forming, but it is young.
That is why it is worth pausing on the “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation from Jim Rickards. Rickards, a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and a best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, runs model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter. His pitch claims President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals,” and it points investors at three companies positioned as the discovery layer of that story. The catch is that none of the three is actually a seafloor miner.
The Difference Between Miners and Surveyors
A deep sea miner holds exploration licenses, builds collector robots, and bears the environmental and engineering risk of retrieving nodules from kilometers below the surface. A surveyor is a very different business. It shoots seismic or acoustic signals into the earth, records the echoes, and sells the resulting data or the equipment used to collect it.
The three “MDP” picks in Rickards’s pitch are surveyors and equipment makers, not miners. They are Geospace Technologies, a maker of land and marine seismic equipment with about $116 million in trailing revenue; TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm formed from the 2023 TGS and PGS merger, which licenses large offshore seismic data sets; and MIND Technology, a maker of offshore seismic hardware under the Seamap brand with about $46 million in annual revenue.
What the Tease Claims, and What Happened
The ad frames one of these as the deep sea play, calling it the “Wildcat.” TGS ASA does run a “Deep Sea Minerals Pathfinder” project on the side, which is real, but it is a small part of a company built on selling offshore seismic data to oil and gas customers. Since the tease, Geospace is down 73.8% and MIND is down 56.8%, while TGS is up 8.9%.
That is the honest scoreboard against promised gains of “1,520% gain potential” to “4,800% gain potential.” The June 24, 2025 catalyst the original ad leaned on came and went without a surge. We walked through the seafloor itself in our deep-sea mining explainer and the discovery technology in our AI mineral exploration coverage.
The Revenue Reality
All three of these companies are oil and gas seismic businesses first. Their revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets, not mineral discovery, for decades. TGS and MIND both had their run during the 2010 to 2012 oil bull market and gave most of it back. Betting on them as a pure play on deep sea mining means betting that a small sliver of their business becomes the main driver, and the pitch never justifies that leap with numbers.
The institutional-ownership claim is another tell. The ad says one pick has ownership of “only 8%,” the kind of number meant to suggest you are early. Our teardown found the real figure near 67%. That matters because it changes the story from “undiscovered” to “already widely held.”
The Pre-Revenue Miners Versus the Surveyors
A handful of small companies have secured exploration contracts through the International Seabed Authority and are preparing the vessels and collector robots that would do the actual harvesting. Those are the true deep sea mining stocks, and they are mostly young, thinly capitalized, and waiting on the same regulatory licenses as everyone else. The three survey names in the Birthright pitch sit one step removed: they sell the data and equipment that find resources, on the seabed and far more often beneath oil and gas basins. That positioning is why the pitch calls one of them the deep sea play even though its seabed minerals work is a small side project. For an investor who wants the seafloor story specifically, the honest question is whether to own the pre-revenue miners, which carry the discovery and engineering risk, or the surveyors, which carry a steadier but more indirect exposure to the theme. Neither group has turned the regulatory promise into revenue yet, and the share price moves since the tease reflect that.
A Fair Frame
The critical minerals story itself is real, and we covered the policy and market side in our rare earth stocks coverage and our critical minerals strategy explainer. The pick-and-shovel logic behind the pitch is sound: surveyors get paid on activity, not on findings. But investors who want deep sea mining exposure should know that these three are, at their core, energy survey companies. The offer behind it all is The Situation Report at $1,995 per year with no refunds.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the American Birthright presentation.
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