For many countries, though, the first booty from any newly acquired seabed will be either oil or gas, both of which can now be extracted fairly easily from deep water.
The US will probably need to explore novel sources of fresh water in the near future, with rivers in the southwest extracted beyond sustainable limits and with climate change threatening to push them further into the red.
Under the process of fracking, oil or gas is extracted from shale rock by pumping a mixture of sand, water and chemicals into the rock at high pressure.
Shale gas is natural gas that is trapped inside shale rock and is extracted by using a technology called hydraulic fracturing, where highly pressurized water mixed with sand and chemicals is used to crack open rocks.