By Todd Woody
May 1, 2025 (Bloomberg) – President Donald Trump first set his sights on Canada and Greenland’s mineral resources. Now he’s eyeing the global seabed that holds vast troves of critical metals for green technologies but is controlled by a United Nations-affiliated organization.
Trump may be unlikely to gain dominion over Canada or Greenland, but he’s vying to supersede the UN treaty that governs nations’ use of the ocean, potentially with far-reaching consequences for untouched and biodiverse deep sea ecosystems targeted for exploitation.
“‘The next gold rush’: President Trump unlocks access to critical deep seabed minerals,” the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proclaimed in a press release on Friday.
Just days after Trump issued an executive order expediting the processing of seabed mining applications, The Metals Company (TMC) on Tuesday applied for a US license to extract minerals from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an immense region of the Pacific that stretches from Hawaii to Mexico.
There’s a hitch, though. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone and the rest of the ocean floor in international waters falls under jurisdiction of the International Seabed Authority, whose 169 member nations plus the European Union are loath to give up their mandate to regulate deep sea mining for the benefit of humanity while ensuring the effective protection of the marine environment.
ISA Secretary-General Leticia Carvalho on Wednesday warned that unilateral action by the US “sets a dangerous precedent that could destabilize the entire system of global ocean governance.”
At stake is not just who gets to exploit polymetallic nodules — potato-sized rocks rich in cobalt, nickel, and other metals that carpet the Clarion-Clipperton seabed — or the fate of the otherworldly deep sea life that lives on them, but the future of a treaty that has kept commercial peace on the world’s oceans for more than 30 years.
Who is in charge of deep-sea mining in international waters?
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea established the ISA to regulate deep sea mining beyond national jurisdiction, with royalties on any mining to be distributed among member states. The organization, which is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, has spent more than a decade negotiating mining regulations with an end currently not in sight.
For more than 30 years, the ISA has forestalled a deep-sea gold rush as nations respected its mandate to first develop regulations to minimize harm from mining to unique marine life that evolved over eons in the frigid darkness of the abyss. Then TMC grew weary of waiting, saying it spent half a billion dollars on environmental assessments required to prepare an ISA mining license application.
What is The Metals Company?
TMC is a public company registered in Canada and run by Gerard Barron, an Australian former internet advertising entrepreneur. It holds two of 31 ISA exploration licenses. As ISA negotiations dragged on, company executives lobbied Trump White House officials to issue seabed mining licenses. A polymetallic nodule “was presented to the president last week and now sits on the Resolute Desk” in the Oval Office, Barron said at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. The company’s US subsidiary has applied for the US seabed mining licenses.
What is the US authority to issue mining licenses in international waters?
It’s complicated. While the Law of the Sea treaty was being negotiated, the US enacted the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Resources Act to allow it to grant mining licenses in international waters. The idea at the time was that the law would serve as a placeholder — “an interim legal regime,” in the words of the legislation, until the treaty came into force so that companies would be encouraged to develop deep sea mining technology.
But when the Law of the Sea treaty became what is called “the constitution of the ocean” 14 years later, the US Congress declined to ratify it. Though the US isn’t a member of the ISA, it participates in the organization’s proceedings as an observer and has generally abided by the treaty’s provisions. (The ISA reserved a permanent seat on its policymaking body for the country in case it eventually ratifies the treaty.) With his executive order, Trump reversed the US government’s longstanding position, upending multilateral deliberations about deep-sea mining. TMC is the first company to apply for a mining license under the 45-year-old US seabed mining law.
Doesn’t TMC already hold ISA exploration licenses?
Yes, and what’s fueling outrage among the diplomatic corps is that TMC wants US permission to mine an area it licensed from the ISA under the sponsorship of Nauru, a tiny and impoverished Pacific island nation to whom the company has agreed to pay royalties under its ISA contract. TMC declined to comment on whether those obligations to Nauru remain if it is issued a US mining license. Even as it seeks a US license, the company still plans to apply for an ISA mining contract in June, despite the absence of mining regulations.
How has the ISA responded to Trump and TMC?
Member nations are divided over whether deep sea mining should proceed but agree that the ISA is the sole authority empowered to make such decisions. “Circumventing the regulatory authority of ISA not only breaches international law, but also erodes trust, exacerbates global inequality and silences the voices of least developed countries,” the ISA said in a statement released after Trump signed the executive order.
What happens next?
TMC said it expects the initial US review of its mining application to be completed within 60 days. Matt Giacona, the acting principal deputy director of the US Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said that other deep-sea mining application reviews, such as for exploration licenses, will move faster. “These new permitting procedures will reduce a multi-year process down to just 28 days upon request by project applicants,” he said at a press briefing last week.
That timeline worries deep-sea biologist Diva Amon. “It will likely prevent robust assessment of whether environmental obligations will be fulfilled,” said Amon, a science advisor to the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Currently we know little about the animals inhabiting the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, including their ecology and how they will cope with the potential impacts of deep-sea mining.”
Read Also: Renewable Energy vs Ocean Life – The Deep Sea Mining Dilemma
TMC has previously said it expected to begin commercial mining in 2026 if it obtained an ISA license. While the company tested a small-scale prototype of a nodule mining machine in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in 2022, it will need to secure a full-size commercial version capable of operating continuously under crushing pressure and ice-cold conditions.
Where would nodules be processed?
The US has no current capacity to process and refine the minerals contained in nodules into metals suitable for making electric car batteries and other products. A Japanese company has conducted processing trials for TMC but building industrial-scale operations for nodules could require billions of dollars in investment. “Polymetallic nodules are a unique resource, and there is no proven processing technology that can recover all four saleable elements contained in them,” stated an April RAND report on seabed mining.
© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.
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