One risk is that the mining operations could generate huge plumes of sediment that could drift through the sea - choking any marine life that feeds by ingesting water and filtering out its food sources.
Farming fish close to shore often causes contamination of water and seabeds, so the company has partnered with fish producers to devise a remotely-controlled fish pen that can drift with currents in the open sea.
Goudey, the director of the MIT Sea Grant's Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, has devised a system by which giant spherical cages of fish would drift underwater in circular ocean currents, or gyres.