602 NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM LEGISLATION 



without the use of explosives, and without expensive drilling operations for 

 sampling or ore breakage. There will be no drifts to drive, shafts to sink, or 

 town sites to construct in developing a deap sea mine. An ocean-mining 

 operation, because it would be an entirely new concept in mining, can be 

 designed for automation from the beginning. The equipment would be very 

 flexible to move from one area to another for the various types of ore as the 

 market demands. Sea transportation can be used to carry the mined material 

 to most of the world's markets with no other form of transportation involved. 

 About 75 percent of the material, and more in some cases, being mined and 

 handled is salable in contrast to the 2 percent or so of today's copper and 

 nickel ores. The unlimited amount of the sea floor minerals should establish 

 a base price and supply for nodule contained metals which certain of these 

 commodities need. But most important, the sea floor minerals should prove to 

 be a less expensive source of many materials than are our present land sources. 



Whereas we might think, that in the face of the studies and data that has been 

 developed, private corporations in the United States would be anxious to develop 

 many of the ocean mineral deposits, the fact is that they are not. The minerals 

 industry in the United States, tends to be quite conservative in its policies of 

 approaching completely new technologies which cannot be developed efficiently 

 on a small scale. Also, the legal cornerstone of the minerals industry, that of one 

 group or company being able to secure complete control of a deposit so that it 

 may develop it as it sees fit, is absent in many of the ocean floor deposits. For 

 these and other good and valid reasons industry needs the help and encourage- 

 ment of its Government in developing these deposits. Ironically, our Govern- 

 ment, by charging incredible high bonus bids, rentals, and royalties on those 

 offshore mineral deposits within its jurisdiction is actually discouraging industry 

 from developing these truly great and important mineral deposits. This con- 

 dition should be immediately rectified and Congress could easily do so by direct- 

 ing the Department of the Interior to charge only nominal bonus bids, rentals, 

 and royalties until industry can see its way to paying such costs from a developed 

 technology from which the high risk has been removed. The Federal Govern- 

 ment will gain its share of the wealth produced through the income tax, regard- 

 less. Charging initial high fees simply for granting companies the right to 

 develop the technologies for offshore mining, while saddling industry with the 

 very considerable risks inherent in developing such a technology, is incredibly 

 shortsighted on the part of our Government. 



More important is the fundamental research that our Government could finance 

 such as explorations and sampling of the deposits, studies of the environmental 

 conditions of the deposits, studies and development of the methods of mining 

 and processing the minerals, as well as studies concerning the social, economic, 

 and political overtones of developing such a technology. While a start has been 

 made in this regard by the Bureau of Mines and the Geologic Survey, the funds 

 thus far appropriated for ocean minerals research are vastly inadequate. Con- 

 sidering the economic benefits to be gained from such research, I strongly urge 

 Congress to carefully consider support of such activities. House bill 6009, en- 

 titled the "Marine Exploration and Development Act," if passed, would do much 

 to rectify our neglect of this important area of oeeanographic research. The 

 scope of the activities described in this bill is sufficiently broad to enable the 

 agency controlling the expenditure of the funds provided by the bill to function 

 in an appropriate and adequate manner to accomplish goals of substantial and 

 meaningful forth. The level at which the commission's activities is pegged in 

 the bill are certainly adequate for the initiation of this program, however, pos- 

 sibly a better level would be that which is commensurate with the funds the 

 Treasury now receives as bonus bids, rentals, and royalties from all offshore non- 

 living resource exploitation. The reinvestment of these funds in the develop- 

 ment of the additional resources of the sea would pay huge dividends to our 

 Government in the form of income taxes realized from the profits of companies 

 operating in the offshore areas. Implementation of this bill would also allow the 

 United States, under the Geneva Convention to appropriate vast areas of the 

 deep ocean floor, off the geologic Continental Shelf, for minerals exploitation, and, 

 incidentally, for correlary military purposes. I most strongly urge passage of 

 H.R. 6009, as a necessary measure to assure not only future generations, but our 

 present generation, of an adequate participation in the benefits of utilizing the 

 resources of the sea. 



