The 133,000 km² Question: Who Actually Owns the Biggest Deep-Sea Mining Licences?

When UK Seabed Resources Ltd (UKSRL) first made headlines, the story wrote itself: Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor, quietly becoming one of the biggest concession holders in the deep ocean. The arms industry meets the last frontier. Clean narrative, powerful image.

The reality in 2026 is messier — and more revealing.

The Concessions

UKSRL holds two ISA exploration licences for polymetallic manganese nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), the abyssal plain stretching between Hawaii and Mexico:

• UKSRLPMN1X — approximately 58,620 km², roughly the size of Croatia
• UKSRLPMN2X — approximately 74,919 km², roughly the size of Ireland

Both are flagged as high-risk on Abyssal Claims. The CCZ hosts nodule fields that take millions of years to form and support some of the most biodiverse abyssal communities on Earth. The combined footprint of 133,000 km² — larger than England — makes UKSRL one of the largest single concession holders in the entire ISA registry.

These are exploration licences only. No commercial mining has been authorised by the ISA. No extraction is underway.

Lockheed Bets, Then Folds

Lockheed Martin acquired UKSRL in 2016. The strategic logic was clear: manganese nodules contain cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese — minerals critical to battery technology, aerospace components, and defence electronics. A vertically integrated supply bypassing terrestrial mining jurisdictions was exactly the kind of asset a defence contractor might want.

It's worth noting that Lockheed's interest in deep-sea minerals is not new. The company was central to Project Azorian, the Cold War CIA operation that used a cover story of commercial nodule mining to secretly recover a sunken Soviet submarine in 1974. The cover story was chosen precisely because it was plausible.

Fifty years later, Lockheed concluded the real version wasn't worth pursuing. In March 2023, it sold UKSRL to Loke Marine Minerals, a Norwegian firm, and exited the industry entirely. The financial and regulatory risks — an unfinished ISA mining code, intensifying environmental opposition, no exploitation licence on the horizon — made the position untenable.

The Bankruptcy

Loke Marine Minerals lasted less than two years. In April 2025, the company filed for bankruptcy in Norway after failing to attract new equity investors. Its board had issued an investor call just five months earlier. The bankruptcy came as global resistance to deep-sea mining was mounting — institutional investors were pulling back, and no major economy had issued a commercial exploitation licence.

UKSRL's two Pacific exploration licences, still active ISA contracts, became assets in a bankruptcy estate.

Enter Glomar Minerals

In September 2025, a newly formed UK-registered company called Glomar Minerals acquired UKSRL from Loke's bankruptcy estate. On 5 December 2025, a deed of novation formally transferred the obligations to the new entity. On 28 November 2025, the UK government confirmed it would continue as sponsoring state.

The Glomar acquisition raises serious questions about continuity and accountability.

Three of Glomar's directors and shareholders — Walter Sogness, Tore Halvorsen, and Kai Hadle Hjemgaard — are former Loke Marine Minerals executives. The same management team responsible for the bankruptcy of UKSRL's previous parent is now running the company that holds the licences.

Glomar's majority shareholder is listed as a firm incorporated in Delaware — a US state whose corporate secrecy laws do not require public disclosure of owners or directors. The ultimate beneficial owners of the company holding 133,000 km² of Pacific Ocean exploration rights are not publicly known.

Among Glomar's identified principals is Raphael Isaac Meir Diamond, a Washington-based director and executive chairman of Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE), a US lobby group that brings together military and business leaders to advocate for reducing reliance on foreign supply chains. In April 2025, SAFE publicly welcomed President Trump's executive order on deep-sea mining, stating: "we must make sure we don't cede access [of seabed nodules] to our adversaries" and calling on the United States to "out-compete China to be the first nation in the world to commercialise deep-seabed minerals."

The Government's Contradiction

The UK government approved the Glomar transfer without public announcement. Greenpeace UK obtained the information and published it, describing the approval as having been made "secretly" — approved by Business Secretary Peter Kyle while the UK was publicly supporting a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining at international negotiations.

The UK is one of more than 30 countries that have called for a moratorium. It has simultaneously continued to sponsor UKSRL's licences through two ownership changes, including one to an entity with undisclosed majority ownership and active ties to US national security lobbying.

Greenpeace has filed a Pre-Action Protocol letter — the formal first step in a judicial review — arguing that the Business Secretary's decision to approve the transfer may breach both domestic and international law. The legal challenge is ongoing as of early 2026.

What Sits Below

The CCZ hosts extraordinary and poorly understood life. Nodule fields support sponges, sea cucumbers, polychaete worms, and crustaceans — many found nowhere else. The nodules act as the only hard substrate in an otherwise featureless sediment plain. Recent peer-reviewed work in Nature and Current Biology has found that recovery timescales for disturbed abyssal communities are measured in decades or longer, not years.

Mining-generated sediment plumes are projected to travel hundreds of kilometres from the extraction site, smothering filter feeders across an area many times larger than the direct mining footprint.

The Ownership Trail as a Story

Lockheed Martin's exit, Loke Marine Minerals' bankruptcy, and Glomar Minerals' opaque arrival tell a specific story about where deep-sea mining stands in 2026: the early speculative wave has receded, leaving behind concessions whose financial backing, commercial timelines, and governance accountability are increasingly unclear.

The licences have now passed through three owners in three years. The current holder has undisclosed majority ownership, is run partly by the executives who bankrupted its predecessor, and is connected to a US lobby group that publicly frames Pacific nodules as a geopolitical asset in competition with China.

The UK government — publicly committed to a precautionary pause — has quietly sponsored all of it.

The 133,000 km² is still there. The nodules are still there. The question of who should decide what happens to them, and in whose name, has become harder to answer with each ownership transfer.