Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. Trades on the NASDAQ, OMEX. It's an ocean explorer committed to sustainable and responsible discovery, validation, and advancement of seafloor critical minerals projects, including polymetallic nodules for battery metals and subsea phosphate deposits for fertilizers. Happy to welcome Chairman and CEO Mark Gordon. Welcome back, Mark. We're excited for your update.
Oh, great. Great to be back with you again today. Start right off with all the headlines driving the macro environment. The macro environment for seafloor minerals has never been better. The headlines out of Washington, D.C. alone are staggering in terms of our government's support for, well, they have to obtain critical minerals from anywhere they can get them. The seafloor represents a really amazing opportunity for it. I was really encouraged recently seeing the MP Materials deals. For any of you that haven't followed that, here, the Department of Defense invested $400 million directly in this rare earth miner and magnet producer. What I'm more encouraged by than anything, though, isn't the money in this transaction. It's the fact that the U.S. government has provided price guarantees and offtake agreements for future production for MP Materials. Armed with those two items, raising capital is a pretty easy task.
The other thing that's exciting, different numbers are being thrown around, but we're seeing numbers between $1 billion and $5 billion being allocated for the U.S. to acquire critical minerals. The good news is that Odyssey has a solution for that. The last thing I'll say here is that I spent 27 years of my adult life in Washington, D.C. I have never seen so much concentrated action so quickly on a single critical initiative. Thankfully, Odyssey is positioned to take advantage of this activity. Odyssey is one of the few ways that investors can participate. It's one of the only publicly traded companies, one of two in the United States, where investors can make investments to take advantage of this emerging opportunity. Odyssey brings 30 years of deep ocean exploration experience. We've been involved for over 15 years in the deep ocean exploration business for seafloor minerals specifically.
We've built an unbelievable team, average tenures over 15 years for the Odyssey team. We have an unbelievable network of international partners to help us achieve the outcomes we're targeting right now in this space. We've also developed over the years some really interesting proprietary tools. One is a, and it's intellectual property that allows us to analyze where in the world the best mineral opportunities reside. We've looked at over 120 different exclusive economic zones and have ranked them. And then we've developed some specialty tools that allow us to predict where the best mineral resource specifically will lie inside a government partner's exclusive economic zone. We've built a diverse portfolio of projects, different mineral sets in different jurisdictions. I think, of course, that gives us a diversification in two ways: one on mineral, the commodity risk, if you will, and one on geopolitical risk.
I think Odyssey is one of the few ways for investors to participate in this opportunity that just keeps getting better and better. We're well positioned to take advantage of that. When you drill down a little bit more about what makes maybe Odyssey unique as an investment opportunity, I mentioned it in the prior slide, but we're not tied to a single commodity or a single jurisdiction. It gives us that great diversification for commodity risk and geopolitical risk. The other thing that's great about having a portfolio of projects where you have a number of different projects going at any one point in time is that we have at any time the ability to bring out catalysts as these projects progress that help drive value for shareholders.
We're not dependent on a single outcome or a single point in time, but we'll be producing multiple outcomes and multiple catalysts that we believe will drive value. Finally, I think we've picked the right initiatives to focus on food security through our phosphate project, currently in Mexico. I'll speak more about that in a minute, and energy transition, which are the investments we've made in the Cook Islands and polymetallic nodules. Our financial situation continues to improve. Just since our last update, which wasn't that long ago, we've had another almost $2.4 million of our debt convert into equity. We have long-term, large equity holders that had provided the debt, and they're converting to become even larger equity participants at this point. Year to date, $12 million, which is about 60% of the original debt amount, has already converted. It positions us strongly.
We're funded into 2026 right now with capital, and not just enough capital to operate the business, but also to continue to invest in our various projects, which we'll talk about in a second here. Cook Islands. Look, we saw that opportunity a long time ago. More than a decade ago, we started building relationships with the Cook Islands governments. That tool I mentioned that we have, our unique intellectual property that allows us to analyze where the best opportunities are, the Cook Islands lit up right away for us. We're invested in two of the three license holders in the Cook Islands. More important than our money and the knowledge we brought to the fact that there was great prospectivity there is we're lending a lot of the expertise I mentioned in my earlier slide about our 30 years of history working in the deep ocean.
We've also deployed some of our most sophisticated tools dedicated to the Cook Islands now. Our 6,000-meter remotely operated submarine resides on our partner's vessel and is at work in the waters of the Cook Islands. In the past few weeks, we sent down some very sophisticated pieces of equipment called autonomous benthic mini landers, ABMLs. These are devices that will sit on the seafloor and gather environmental data. Getting that data and the environmental reporting completed is the critical path step to moving these programs from exploration into extraction, which is when all the value will be unlocked. What I'm most excited about right now is the partnership between the U.S. government and the Cook Islands government. In the past month, David Copley, who is President Trump's top advisor on critical mineral issues, a White House advisor, actually made the trip down to the Cook Islands.
The Cook Islands and U.S. government signed a cooperation agreement. As we speak, NOAA has a vessel in the theater actually doing some exploration work, surveying some of the priority areas. This is all very good for the Cook Islands. It's also obviously very good for Odyssey's investments that this partnership is progressing like it is. Winding down my final slide here, a quick opportunity to review the projects I've referenced here, the diversified portfolio. FOSACMEX is our Mexican phosphate project. We own 35% of that project. Odyssey does. We use internally what we think is a very conservative valuation of $1.3 billion for that project, which will obviously increase as we continue to demonstrate that we're advancing that project. By the way, the first column is just a 50% discount to these NPV numbers to set up a range of values. OML is one of our Cook Island investments.
They have a JORC-compliant report that's an independent geologist evaluating their resource, based on the exploration results that have come back from their exploration program. That puts a $4.7 billion net present value for that resource. That resource has been upgraded recently, but we're just using their original estimates here. If anything, that's gotten a little better. CIC, our second investment in the Cook Islands, has not published any financial or resource data yet. What we're doing is using the same $4.7 billion that we use for OML based on their JORC-compliant resource report, and here's why. CIC's license area is adjacent, so the mineralogy is going to be exactly the same, and CIC's area is 10 times the size of OML. We think the $4.7 billion is a fair, but conservative representation of potential value. We own 7% of OML and about 14% of CIC.
You see that this sets up a range of values of $700 million to $1.4 billion in potential value just from these three projects. Any one of them moving to production is a multiple to our current market cap. With that, I don't know if we have time left for questions or not, Anna, but I'm done with my presentation.
All right. Thank you. Yes, real quick, we'll ask one question. There's a lot of motion at Odyssey and across ocean resources. What's the near-term marker of progress you'd highlight for investors right now?
Yeah, it's a great question. Let's start with Mexico, FOSACMEX. There we've mentioned a few times we're working on recovering the mining concessions that we had owned, and that's a work in progress. I think I said in an earlier presentation I did on your platform that things are moving a little slow over the summer, which is typical, you know, with governments anywhere around the world. Of course, I'm sure people will call me on this. The summer's over, and I would say stay tuned because we are seeing progress pick up and you hope to have some more announcements on that shortly, how progress is being made. Cook Islands, there again, I sort of already referred to it, the fact that we have this U.S. government, Cook Islands government partnership and that there's active investment by the U.S. government in exploration work there.
I think it's driving the next steps for those projects advancing. Finally, where I started with the headlines, the U.S. government, there's just one headline after another that's very not only encouraging for but supportive of the fact that deep sea mineral extraction is something that will be very much supported not only by our government but by investors.
Perfect.
I think that's my answer.
Awesome. Great answer. Thank you so much, Mark, for joining us with this update, and we'll see you again really soon.