After September 11, 2001, David Heydon was a dreamer in need of a dream, an entrepreneur in search of an enterprise. A native of Brisbane, Australia, he had transplanted himself to New York during the dot-com boom and had tried to flog a new kind of customer-relations software to airlines—an idea that did not survive the post-9/11 travel slump. Heydon slunk back to Brisbane. There he reconnected with Julian Malnic, an old friend from his student days at the University of New South Wales, and unexpectedly found himself on a whole new path.
Malnic was a mining journalist who had crossed to the other side: He was sitting on a claim to a patch of volcanic seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. There was gold in those submarine volcanoes, Malnic said, and copper, too—but it was going to take a lot of capital to raise it to the surface. Heydon had studied geology with Malnic. He knew that if there were rich mineral deposits near Papua New Guinea, there were many more of them all along the Ring of Fire, which includes a chain of underwater volcanoes winding from New Zealand to Japan. At 45, Heydon hadn’t worked for anyone but himself in more than 20 years and didn’t want to start again now. He was looking for his next big thing. “You can’t get much bigger than this,” he thought.
Heydon signed on with Nautilus Minerals, Malnic’s start-up, and pretty soon replaced Malnic as chief executive and—for the first four years, at least—the company’s sole employee. His solitude did not help his case as he tried to raise funds. Mining on the ground is hard enough; extracting minerals from the ocean bottom is perceived to be so difficult that many potential investors were unwilling to take the financial risk. “Surely if it was going to happen,” Heydon remembers his would-be investors saying, “it would be done by a big mining company, not some guy sitting in a study in Brisbane.” He traveled the world on his credit card, until that was no longer enough. “So I sold off my backyard,” he says. “My wife had a tennis court and a swimming pool. That gave us the funds to proceed.”
And even to succeed, almost. By late 2006 Heydon had taken Nautilus from Australia to Canada and from an empty shell to a credible operation that had secured the backing of major mining companies such as Teck Cominco and Anglo-American. Nautilus had a ship under construction, a contract out for a giant seafloor-mining robot, and $266 million in the bank. It even had an environmental impact statement at the ready to persuade environmentalists and local Papua New Guineans that the company’s mining scheme would not unduly harm the ocean. Heydon’s team (he then had a staff of 60) had every reason to believe they would begin pulling up rich copper ore in 2010.
