The US government is reportedly considering an Executive
Order that would issue permits to companies to mine the deep
sea in international waters, circumventing the International
Seabed Authority (ISA), the body that regulates mining
activities on the high seas.
“This is a search for
fool’s gold. Market prices for minerals and metals sought
from the deep sea have sharply declined in recent years,
driven by global oversupplies from conventional mining and
battery innovations. This could be the most expensive cobalt
and nickel that has ever been mined on the planet,” said
Dr. Douglas McCauley, a professor at UC Santa
Barbara and adjunct professor at UC
Berkeley.
“These trends are in part driven
by reduced demand from the electric vehicle market, which
has become increasingly reliant on new types of batteries
(e.g. the LFP batteries used in many Tesla models) that do
not require difficult to obtain, expensive metals,” said
Dr. McCauley. “New innovation in ultra-fast
charging stations designed for these new batteries, such as
BYD’s recent announcement of charging stations that can
add 400km of range in just 5 minutes, may further secure the
dominance of these batteries that do not require metals from
the ocean. Another challenge may be reluctance on the part
of the US to land this material in US ports given the newly
discovered radioactivity of these
minerals.”
“Unilateral mining of the deep sea, which
is the common heritage of humankind, would be a fundamental
breach of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which for
over 40 years has provided stability in ocean governance,”
said Duncan Currie, international legal expert and
policy advisor for the Deep Sea Conservation
Coalition. “Every country and every person would
suffer the consequences.”
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“Deep-sea mining is
extremely challenging technically, highly destructive, not
meaningful to worldwide production, and a very expensive,
financially-risky solution to a battery metals problem that
existed ten years ago,” said Victor Vescovo,
Founder and CEO, Caladan Capital and retired naval officer,
pilot, and undersea explorer. “It will not yield
the profits or royalties promised, will not solve the
environmental and security problems it claims, and will
destroy tens of thousands of square kilometers of virgin
seafloor – just to prove it doesn’t
work.”
“The Metals Company is promising regulatory
certainty in a regulatory vacuum,” said Bobbi-Jo
Dobush, ocean conservation policy expert and author of Deep
Sea Mining Isn’t Worth the Risk. “The only
certainty is that seabed mining remains an untested, wildly
expensive way to get minerals we have already innovated away
from.”
