All of Odyssey’s current projects involve subsea mineral resource development. Environmental considerations are deeply ingrained into every aspect of our business and operating framework and will not proceed with projects unless world-class environmental science supports that resources can be recovered in an environmentally responsible way.

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Environmental Management

We design our project plans with a goal of achieving leading global standards for environmental responsibility at every stage, beginning with initial research and continuing through exploration.  

 

Important considerations during our research phase include limiting sound, minimizing materials released into water columns and striving to avoid incidents of pollutant or harmful toxic materials released into the water column.  It is important to note that during our company history of conducting extensive offshore operations on many ships and in many locations throughout the world, Odyssey has never had to file a pollution claim with its insurers. All of these measures help reduce potential impacts to ecosystem function to biomass and biodiversity.

 

Each exploration project includes environmental surveys and studies that will inform an Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). Our surveys are compliant with local jurisdictional requirements and generally follow International Seabed Authority (ISA) recommendations. The outcome of this work informs future steps in the best interest of protecting the environment should full-scale extraction occur. Our studies also include a baseline assessment that will drive mitigation strategies to minimize environmental impact. Areas of focus for baseline studies include chemistry (chemical and geological oceanography), mammal and other living organism behavior (biology and ecosystems analysis) and physical impacts with the atmosphere and marine environment (physical oceanography)

 

To ensure that our approach is in line with leading global standards, our projects are conducted under the supervision of a Chief Environmental Scientist for environmental management, and a Qualified Person (QP)/Competent Person (CP) to assure mineral resource confidence. We are also advised by a Seabed Mineral Advisory Board comprised of technical advisors and subject matter experts.

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Odyssey is committed to maximizing possible transparency of environmental information.  We share environmental data collected with our partners, host governments, and academic institutions where such data is not commercially confidential.  We also encourage our environmental scientists to publish their findings and submit information for peer review.

 

Odyssey maintains compliance with standards for safeguarding health, safety and the environment such as International Organization for Standardization standards. Additionally, Odyssey abides by the codes of conduct, practices and principles of the IMMS (https://www.immsoc.org).

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Biodiversity

In 2023, using the Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) as our guide, Odyssey conducted a natural capital risk analysis for our current projects and those for which we are a partner. Through this process we increased our understanding of the nature-related risks and opportunities including the highly localized characteristics of biodiversity that result in different nature-related risk profiles by project. The conclusions confirmed that nature-related impacts and dependencies are very location-specific and we will continue to monitor by project.

 

The outcomes were a useful input into future planning, including increasing the tracking and disclosure of metrics over time, and laying the groundwork for work with our current and future partners.  
 
We have done some preliminary work on measuring our emissions, and currently measure scope 2.