심해저 광물자원의 상업적 개발을 위한 로열티에 대한 검토

Abstract

For the commercial development of the deep-sea mineral resources, the International Seabed Authority(the ISA) is in the process of preparing the exploitation regulations for the deep-sea mining. The key issue is the financial system of development, especially the type and proportion of royalties. The exploitation regulations draft provides for royalties, but the actual rates for them are blank. Under the principle of redistributing deep-sea mineral resources as a common heritage of the mankind, the ISA assumes three approaches to loyalty assessment: unit-based royalties system, value-based royalties system and profit-based royalties system. In the initial stage of development of the deep-sea mineral resources, the risk is very high, so early uncertainty must be reduced to increase the possibility of investment success. Therefore, the ISA should lower the royalty at the initial stage, attract the investment, and impose the royalty on the contract at the time the revenue is generated. In other words, the ISA only charges developers a fixed fee based on the area of development in the development system preparation phase. The ISA must ensure that contractors will be able to recover capital costs from sales in order to gain profits when entering the commercial mining phase and charge royalties on remaining revenues excluding capital costs.