A Trump executive order will unleash a global deep-sea mining boom

WHEN PRESIDENT Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 24th authorising seabed mining for critical minerals, he meant to free American companies from international constraints and license their roving hands to search for precious stones on the bottom of the deepest oceans—Earth’s last mining frontier. The order was a bombshell. Though America has never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), under which the regulation of seabed mining sits, it had long accepted its provisions as customary international law. And the International Seabed Authority (ISA), created under UNCLOS, currently forbids mining.

Breaching settled international law, Mr Trump’s order applies to international waters beyond American jurisdiction as well as those within its own exclusive economic zone (EEZ). It follows vigorous lobbying of the White House by some deep-sea mining companies in league with conservative ideologues who resent perceived impingements on America’s sovereign rights. This alliance scorns the ISA, which regulates the seabed in international waters “for the benefit of humankind as a whole”.

Yet in less than a week the latest Trump-shock has generated its equal reaction. Abroad, outrage runs high, as countries look at ways to prevent companies seeking licences from America to mine outside that country’s waters. France will host a UN ocean conference in June (with Costa Rica); its ambassador for the ocean stated bluntly: “The abyss is not for sale”. The EU insists that UNCLOS provisions represent customary international law and are binding even on countries that have not signed it, such as America. China, which is racing to make good a technological disadvantage with America and Japan in deep-sea mining, condemned Mr Trump’s move, saying it violated international law. China bankrolls much of the ISA’s activities, in an effort to present itself as a good global citizen (even as, in the South China Sea, it has ignored rulings by an international tribunal declaring its territorial claims illegal). As for the ISA, its secretary-general, Leticia Carvalho, is firm: America has no authority to grant licences in international waters.

Crucially, however, Ms Carvalho also says Mr Trump has galvanised the ISA’s 169 members into action. Only in March, they failed to agree on a common rule book for the exploitation of seabed minerals. Now Ms Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, assures The Economist that a regulatory framework for deep-sea mining—one that takes the interests of members, mining groups and environmentalists into account—will be finalised by no later than the end of the year. If she is right, that would be striking progress and would initiate an era of seabed exploitation under commonly agreed rules.

The deep-ocean fuss is all about rock nodules, typically the size of goose eggs, that are rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese and other minerals. They are abundant on large parts of the ocean floor. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) alone covers some 4.5m square km in the north Pacific and contains an estimated 21bn tonnes of nodules (see map); they may hold four times all known cobalt reserves on land. The nodules lie at depths of up to 5,500 metres. Specialised equipment, such as remote-controlled vehicles, is fast being developed to bring minerals up. To date, the ISA has granted a number of prospecting-only licences to companies keen to explore the seabed for minerals. The Metals Company, a Canadian firm listed in America, has pulled up several thousand tonnes of polymetallic nodules prospecting in the CCZ. It is now at the front of the queue in Washington. On April 29th it said it had applied to the administration for a licence to exploit minerals on the seabed.

The minerals in question are key building blocks of defence systems, electric vehicles and batteries, among many things. Global demand for minerals by clean-energy industries alone could quadruple by 2040, the International Energy Agency estimates. Mr Trump is determined to secure supplies of critical minerals for America that are “independent of foreign adversary control”. That is another way of saying “not from China”, which is currently by far the biggest processor of cobalt and the second biggest processor of nickel after Indonesia. (The same determination also colours Mr Trump’s land-grabbing views about Canada and Greenland, and his dealings with Ukraine.) His executive order instructs multiple parts of the government to work together to ensure national security, technological dominance and support for exploration, extraction and refining.

The administration insists that this new strategy will not only hugely increase American-controlled supplies of critical minerals. It will also, officials claim, create around 100,000 jobs over the next ten years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is to be in charge of issuing mining licences.

The promulgation of an ISA code, if it happens, could make mining companies think twice about the legal and reputational risks of seeking licences from America if its regulations do not conform to the international rules. That outcome would be the opposite of what Mr Trump intended with his executive order. It would also undermine America’s aim of securing a commanding lead over China, among others, in the race to the seabed.

But the ISA has to get a code approved first. Countries with mining ambitions will pile on pressure for it to allow extraction. They include China, which has invested billions in deep-sea research, and Japan, which has collected nodules in trials around Minami-Torishima in its southern EEZ. Poorer countries, though, have concerns about the equitable sharing of mining royalties. Meanwhile, more than two dozen countries, among them Canada, New Zealand, Britain, France, Spain and Germany, have favoured at least a “precautionary pause” on deep-sea mining. Many demand levels of certainty about the environmental impacts that are significantly higher than those available for terrestrial mining. Some members, including Costa Rica and a number of Pacific island states, favour an outright ban on mining.

How much damage deep-sea mining causes is hotly debated. Mining interests insist that their operations are light-touch. Though methods vary, typically truck-size remote-controlled vehicles scoop up seabed nodules (along with sediment) and send them in tubes to the surface. Once the nodules are collected above water, the residue is thrown back into the sea.

Miners argue, correctly, that far more biomass resides in a tropical forest in Sulawesi, one of the world’s most heavily mined sources of nickel, than in the deep ocean—which is therefore the better place to mine. Still, it is not clear how much Indonesian mining would be displaced by ramped up nodule collection in the CCZ.

Guarding the forests or the deep

For some environmentalists, biomass is not the only measure of value. Douglas McCauley, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes the deep-oceans as “among the least resilient ecosystems on the planet”. Life there faces extraordinary challenges. It is cold, short of oxygen, has no light and contends with 4km of water pressure. The clock of life, as Mr McCauley puts it, “ticks slowly down there”: organisms live long and reproduce slowly. That means deep-sea ecosystems take an age to recover. Mining might cause the extinction of species that have yet even to be recorded. Though surely that has happened in Sulawesi, too. Environmentalists also worry about the potential harm that stirring up sediment may inflict on fisheries. Deep-sea science, which also faces challenges, still has much to learn.

Some critics predict that the costs of mining the deep will be prohibitive. As it is, the price of nickel and cobalt has slumped from four years ago. They argue that mining the ocean bottom could prove to be a race for fool’s gold. If that is indeed the case, then environmentalists have little to worry about.

Yet the race is on, primarily in the Pacific Ocean. There, some small states fear competition between the great powers, America and China above all. Others see it as their moment. In February, for instance, China signed a strategic partnership with the Cook Islands, whose prime minister, Mark Brown, carries a handful of nodules—“batteries in a rock”—almost wherever he goes. Either way, countries would much rather China and America played under shared rules. For America, Ms Carvalho insists, the door is always open.■