The deep-sea gold rush has begun

Today's newsletter looks at the contentious politics of deep-sea mining as the International Seabed Authority, a global regulatory body, holds its annual meeting in Jamaica. You can read and share the full story on Bloomberg.com. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe.

Refereeing the race to mine the sea floor

By Todd Woody

In April, President Donald Trump had issued an executive order expediting US licensing of deep-sea mining in international waters, departing from international law to unleash what the administration called a "gold rush" to "counter China's growing influence." On Monday, China and other nations condemned the move at a meeting of the International Seabed Authority, the United Nations-affiliated organization drafting regulations to govern mining in the global seabed.

"It is outrageous that the US side is ignoring the strong opposition of the international community and pushing forward unilateralist hegemonic acts," said China representative Wenting Zhao at a meeting of the 169-nation International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica.

China, which is set to conduct ISA-sanctioned tests of two seabed mining machines in the Pacific over the next year, already dominates the critical minerals supply chain on land.

A Canadian-registered seabed miner, The Metals Company, had successfully lobbied the US president, tapping into his pursuit of China-free metals. The global seabed, TMC repeatedly emphasized as it lobbied politicians and the White House, holds the planet's largest estimated reserves of minerals like cobalt and nickel in the form of black rocks called polymetallic nodules. These cover the Pacific Ocean floor by the billions.

Samples of polymetallic nodules at the Viridian Biometals lab in Pasadena, California. Photographer: Alex Welsh/Bloomberg

In an instant, Trump cleared the way for a race to the abyss to extract nodules, even though seabed mining technology remains under development and commercially unproven. Within days of Trump's order, TMC's US subsidiary filed the world's first application to mine the seabed in international waters, including an area the company licenses from the ISA. Delegates in Kingston on Monday also ordered a report on ISA-licensed seabed miners at risk of violating their contracts with the body, a thinly veiled reference to TMC and other companies that might also seek to apply for US licenses to mine in international waters.

A Silicon Valley startup called Impossible Metals, meanwhile, has applied for a license to explore and possibly mine nodules in US waters off American Samoa, with an aim to raise $1 billion. Then on July 14, a top executive at US defense giant Lockheed Martin told the Financial Times the company is in talks to give seabed miners access to international areas of the Pacific it licenses from the US.

The Trump-triggered seabed mining boom faces significant hurdles, though. While TMC has told investors it expects to begin mining within a year of receiving a license, the technology to extract minerals from the seabed at depths of four kilometers (2.5 miles) could be years away from being deployed at scale. Its competitiveness with terrestrial mining is unknown, as is the economic viability of processing and refining seabed minerals amid seesawing metal prices and the growing market share of battery technologies not reliant on nodule metals. The US lacks such metallurgical capacity, and it could take years to bring online in the few countries outside of China with the potential to refine nodule minerals.

The countries that TMC relies on for seabed mining and processing technology are among the ISA's member nations (plus the European Union) that oppose unilateral mining in international waters. Amid such backlash, a Japanese corporation, Pacific Metals Company, that planned to process TMC's nodules has now told investors that it would only "launch operations once the international rules are finalized."

Read the whole story on Bloomberg.com.

Not just rocks

30% to 40%

The share of deep-ocean species that scientists estimate live on polymetallic nodules, in a zone of the Pacific targeted for mining.

Plunging ahead

"[T]he US has every right to pursue seafloor resources in international waters, and existing US regulations were established to do just that."

Gerard Barron

CEO of The Metals Company

TMC's US subsidiary filed the world's first application to mine the seabed in international waters, days after President Donald Trump issued an executive order to "accelerate the responsible development of seabed mineral resources."

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This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Jigar Shah, a clean energy expert and former head of the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, to make sense of the bill's impacts, and whether it's as bad for climate as it seems. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.