Here is the complete article in raw Markdown format, written as Priya Voss:
Roughly a mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific, where sunlight becomes a fading memory and pressure crushes everything it touches, lie objects that took millions of years to form. Black, potato-sized nodules scattered across the abyssal plain contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and traces of rare earth elements, the metals that batteries demand. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a stretch of seafloor roughly the size of the European Union between Mexico and Hawaii, holds trillions of them. [2] And now, a race is intensifying to pull those metals from a place where virtually no commercial activity has succeeded before.
The push accelerated in April 2025 when the Trump administration signed an executive order to develop the seabed mining industry, framing it explicitly as a move to counter China's dominance in critical mineral supply chains. [1][3] The United States has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the international treaty that established the International Seabed Authority, yet it is now moving to issue its own licenses for deep-sea exploration and commercial mining. This creates a fragmented regulatory landscape where one of the world's largest economies is operating outside the very framework designed to govern the ocean floor.
What These Nodules Actually Are
The polymetallic nodules scattered across the Clarion-Clipperton Zone are not ordinary rocks. They precipitate slowly from seawater, layer upon layer, accumulating at a rate of roughly 1 to 10 centimeters per million years. [1] What they contain is chemically valuable: cobalt and copper and nickel for electric vehicle batteries, rare earth elements for clean energy technologies, and smaller amounts of lithium. The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based mining firm, claims its contracted nodule fields hold enough metal to manufacture batteries for 280 million electric vehicles. [2]
But the numbers are contested. The International Energy Agency projects that demand for cobalt and nickel in a net-zero scenario will only double by 2040, a figure that sits uncomfortably against the breathless promises of an industry seeking to justify billions in extraction infrastructure. [5] Meanwhile, LFP batteries, which require no cobalt or nickel, have captured over 50 percent of the global electric vehicle battery market, reshaping the demand picture in ways the early nodule rush never anticipated. [2][5]
The International Seabed Authority holds exploration contracts for seventeen sites within the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, each approximately 75,000 square kilometers. [2] The Metals Company and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. invoked a procedural mechanism called the "two-year rule" in June 2021, effectively forcing the ISA to either establish full commercial mining regulations or allow exploratory extraction to proceed under provisional rules. [2] The ISA Council convened its 31st session in Kingston, Jamaica in March 2026 and failed to deliver key outcomes on binding environmental standards. [3]
The American Exception
NOAA expedited the environmental review process in early 2026, allowing companies to apply for exploration and commercial mining in a single consolidated step. [1] On March 9, 2026, the agency determined that The Metals Company's U.S. subsidiary had achieved "substantial compliance" with its application covering approximately 65,000 square kilometers in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, with an estimated 619 million tonnes of wet polymetallic nodules. [3]
The company reported a widened annual net loss of approximately $320 million in 2025, with liquidity of roughly $162 million at year-end. [3] It is financially stretched, yet it continues to push toward commercial operations as early as 2027. [1] The Metals Company has shifted its lobbying strategy toward defense and national security officials rather than environmental audiences, framing nodule extraction as a matter of strategic supply chain independence. [5]
A merger announced on April 8, 2026, will combine American Ocean Minerals Corporation with Odyssey Marine Exploration in an all-stock transaction creating a deep-sea critical minerals platform valued at approximately $1 billion. [3] American Ocean Minerals Corporation holds exploration applications covering inferred resources exceeding 1.4 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules. [3] Glomar Minerals and Australia's Cobalt Blue Holdings have separately announced plans to construct a refinery on United States soil. [3] Japan, meanwhile, retrieved rare-earth mud from approximately 5,700 meters depth near Minamitorishima Island in February 2026, demonstrating that its own extraction ambitions remain firmly on track. [3]
China controls nearly 90 percent of global rare earth refining capacity, a concentration of processing power that no amount of seabed mining can quickly dismantle. [5] The geopolitical framing of deep-sea mining as a counterweight to Beijing is compelling politically, but the timeline for building alternative supply chains runs counter to the urgency the rhetoric implies.
What We Do Not Know About the Deep
Here is the tension that no press release resolves: scientists cannot say with confidence what lives in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, let alone what industrial disturbance would do to it. Approximately 90 percent of species inhabiting that region remain unknown to science. [1][6] Deep-sea ecosystems rely on nodule surfaces for habitat, and the organisms that live there are highly specialized to local conditions that have persisted, undisturbed, for geological ages. [6]
A study conducted by the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom found that two months after an experimental mining operation, species abundance had fallen by 37 percent and biodiversity by 32 percent. [1] The microbial communities in sediment disturbed during test mining operations in the 1980s still had not recovered decades later, according to deep-sea biologist Beth Orcutt. [5] New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution emphasizes that impact assessments must keep pace with technological innovations, as the machinery being proposed for commercial extraction operates at scales that earlier studies did not anticipate. [4]
The sediment plume generated during nodule processing presents a separate concern. The Metals Company plans to release this material at around 6,000 feet depth, below where many filter-feeding organisms concentrate. [1] But the deep ocean is not a series of isolated boxes. Interference with filter feeders at one depth range could cascade upward through a food web that scientists are still mapping.
If nodule mining proceeds at commercial scale, the Institute of Sustainable Futures argues that a global transition to 100 percent renewable energy could be achieved using existing land-based mineral reserves, particularly as urban mining, the practice of recovering metals from electronic waste, could be substantially expanded. [2] The IEA estimates that more than half of cobalt demand and 12 percent of nickel demand could be met through recycling by 2040. [5] These figures do not make for clean conclusions. They suggest that necessity and desirability are not the same thing, and that the case for deep-sea mining depends heavily on assumptions about demand growth, battery chemistry evolution, and the political will to invest in circular economy infrastructure.
The Unresolved Question
One machine operating over a 30-year contract could strip 10,000 square kilometers of seabed, an area larger than many small countries. [2] The sediment would be disturbed, the nodule habitat obliterated, the slow recovery clock reset to zero. A typical harvester gathers about 400 metric tons of nodules per hour. [2] The Metals Company has applied to mine between 3 million and 20 million tons of nodules annually over a 20-year lease. [1]
The International Seabed Authority continues to deliberate without binding environmental protections. [3] The United States proceeds outside its framework. [1] The financial commitments are real, the technological capabilities are advancing, and the geopolitical incentives show no sign of weakening.
Yet the underlying question remains open: whether the metals hidden a mile beneath the Pacific are worth extracting at the cost of ecosystems that may not reassemble themselves for millions of years, if they ever do. [2][5] That is not a question regulation alone can answer. It is a question about what the clean energy transition is actually willing to cost, and who gets to decide.