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capital invested in seabed mining because the seabed mining 

 industry is still in the development stage, seabed mining 

 consortia are unlikely to commence full scale commercial 

 operations for a number of years, and future prices of 

 constituent metals are unknown. It is just as difficult to 

 determine the revenues which miners will share with the 

 International Seabed Authority since (1) it is too early to 

 estimate the number of mine sites which will be operating in 

 the seabeds at any one time; and (2) the structure of the 

 revenue-sharing provisions in the Law of the Sea Treaty is 

 roughly based on profitability and return on capital, which 

 can not be accurately estimated. 



The best source of information on the financial aspects 

 of seabed mining is "A Cost Model of Deep Ocean Mining and 

 Associated Regulatory Issues" developed at the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology. Since the model is based on a number 

 of assumptions, however, the U.S. delegation to the Law of the 

 Sea Conference has been careful to use this model only to 

 measure the relative impact of various policies and revenue- 

 sharing proposals on seabed mining and Authority revenues; 

 the model can not be used with any high level of confidence 

 to predict actual returns on investment or actual Authority 

 revenues. 



14. How will deep seabed mining work in reality? 



— Will mineral exporting countries seek to block seabed 

 mining to keep their own prices high? 



