How We Analyzed The Metals Company’s Public Messaging on Deep-Sea Mining

The Metals Company (TMC), headquartered in Canada, has been aggressively pushing to launch deep-sea mining in international waters despite the absence of regulations. Other companies and pro-mining nations are following suit.

To analyze The Metals Company's (TMC’s) narrative strategies, we conducted a frame analysis of content published on the company’s official website. Frame analysis is a well-accepted methodology in sociology, political science and other disciplines for examining how particular ideas and worldviews are embedded in different forms of communication. It can uncover how meaning is constructed and perceptions shaped on certain topics. We focused on press releases published by TMC since they can offer a consistent and strategic view of how a company seeks to shape its public narrative. Press releases are crafted messaging tools, making them useful primary sources for identifying dominant themes and narrative shifts over time.

We identified two dominant frames in TMC’s communications. The first was an environmental or “green” frame, portraying deep-sea mining as crucial for supplying the minerals required to power electric car batteries and other green energy technologies to help fight climate change. The second was a national security or “defense” frame, presenting deep-sea minerals as vital to U.S. national security and defense interests. To analyze how the company deployed each frame, we read a sampling of TMC’s press releases and developed a list of key terms the company repeated in deploying each of the two frames. We chose these terms either for their high frequency within each frame or for their use to convey a message central to the frame.

We included 13 terms for each frame to maintain a balanced approach and avoid skewing the analysis toward one narrative over the other. This structure also allowed for clear comparison across time.

This analysis is featured in the following report published on July 31, 2025: A Sales-Pitch Pivot Brings Deep-Sea Mining Closer to Reality.

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Defining the analytical frames

The green frame terms:

Batteries, Battery, Biodiversity, Circular, Clean energy, Climate, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), Lower-impact (Lower impact), Planetary, Renewable, Sustainability, Sustainable, Unattached.

The defense frame terms:

Biden, China, Chinese, Congress, Defense, Executive order, Geopolitical, Military, Security, Trump, U.S., United States, West.

Certain terms, such as “unattached” in the green frame or “West” in the defense frame, appeared relatively infrequently in TMC’s materials, but we chose to include them because they seemed to be used with deliberate narrative intent. For example, the company used the word “unattached” to describe how nodules are lying “unattached” on the seafloor and could be collected without drilling or digging, minimizing environmental harm. And it used the term “West” to tap into ideas of U.S. exceptionalism and the need to pursue deep-sea mining for national security purposes.

We excluded ambiguous terms that TMC deployed in both frames, such as “critical.” This word appears in the press releases as “critical battery metals” or “critical minerals” to describe materials identified for use in electric car batteries, and for energy and defense needs. Similarly, the word “transition” appeared in both frames, even though TMC most often deployed it in the green frame.

Web scraping TMC’s public content

To gather the data to analyze, we used ChatGPT Pro to develop a JavaScript scraper to collect all publicly available press releases from TMC’s website. As opposed to static websites that are easier to scrape, TMC’s websites are dynamic, meaning their content only loads after users open them. We provided ChatGPT with this information and the HTML structure and tags of the content we needed to scrape, and it wrote us a script using the Undetected ChromeDriver, Selenium and Beautiful Soup Python libraries. The script successfully scraped all the press releases and stored them in a comma-separated values (CSV) file.

TMC published 132 press releases on its website in a six-year time period between 2019 and 2025.

Data processing and validation

We manually counted the occurrences of each selected term and checked if each occurrence lined up with the frame we had assigned it to. We excluded occurrences in which the terms appeared outside the context of the specified frame. For instance, we did not count uses of “security” when it appeared as part of “securityholders,” as this usage fell outside the defense frame. We recorded the total word count for each term in a spreadsheet, then calculated how frequently terms associated with each frame appeared by year. This data was used to create a graphic illustrating how the use of each frame evolved over time.

Data limitations

Even though we combined quantitative (word count) and qualitative (alignment with the frame) approaches, this analysis is preliminary and subject to limitations. First, the data set only included the 132 press releases published by TMC, resulting in an incomplete representation of the company’s communications across a broader range of media. Second, the word counts for each narrative frame are based on manual classification, which may introduce subjectivity or inconsistency. Finally, the frames themselves are simplified constructions and may not fully capture the complexity or overlap in messaging strategies.

Nevertheless, this analysis provides useful insights into the evolution of narrative framing in TMC’s messaging. By quantifying the emphasis placed on these two different narratives, the data reveals shifts in the company’s priorities and messaging over time.

The results show that between 2019 and 2021, TMC heavily promoted a green-focused narrative, though its emphasis on this framing began to wane in 2021. By 2024, the company had significantly shifted its messaging, with a defense-oriented frame overtaking the green narrative and remaining dominant into the present day. However, TMC did not abandon its green framing entirely, with elements of this narrative continuing to appear in its communications today.

These patterns can help researchers, journalists and civil society groups understand how corporate communication evolves to legitimize controversial practices or align with dominant political and environmental discourses.

About the authors

This analysis was a collaborative effort between Elizabeth Claire Alberts, a senior staff writer for Mongabay and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network; Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb, a marine social-ecologist at The University of Melbourne who uses frame analysis in her research, including work she does for the Ocean Governance Research Group; Fernanda Buffa, environmental investigations program coordinator at the Pulitzer Center; and Kuek Ser Kuang Keng, data editor at the Pulitzer Center.