Waiting for future mineral resources in the Singaporean Deep-sea

Singapore's ocean history has been told from the vantage of ports, refineries, or reclaimed land. This paper instead figures the deepest seabed of the central Pacific Ocean, where Ocean Mineral Singapore (OMS; a subsidiary of state-backed Seatrium, Ltd) holds an exploration contract for prospecting deposits of polymetallic nodules — ores rich in copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel that are increasingly framed as battery-grade ores essential for the energy transition. OMS has held this contract for over a decade, though the speculative deep-sea mining industry has existed in a state of perpetual deferral for more than fifty years. This paper examines the work of waiting for future resources in Singapore. What transpires to keep the seabed plot pried open for investigation? How do those forms implicate the potentiality of deep-sea minerals and places in projects of experiments in blue territorialization? And how does the specter of seabed minerals as future resources anchor diverse experiments in volumetric sovereignty? In conversation with work from science and technology studies, critical geography, and artistic practice, I argue that tracing Singapore's relationship to deep-sea minerals since the 1970s, during the long wait for so-called future resources to arrive, demonstrates how the ongoing deferral of commercial extraction's inception has conditioned a relationship among the politics of maritime legal heritage, future-proofing planning, and natural-social relations that shapes both the long-term aspirations of Singaporean technocracy and of global (seabed) governance. The work of waiting for future deep-sea minerals has accrued multiple, conflicting visions of common community and desirable futures.