Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate submarine mining, the US government received its first permit application from the Metals Company, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the practice that has yet to be proven.
On Tuesday, the company's CEO, Gerald Baron, was also on hand in Washington for a controversy hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee. He likened the transition to a “start gun” with a race that extracts minerals such as cobalt and nickel from potato-sized nodule lying in the frigid, pitch black 2.5 miles deep sand on the Pacific floor.
Members of the Republican and Democrat committees clashed over how much weight should be given to environmental concerns about practice. The Trump administration said it would consider issuing permits for mining in US territories and international waters.
Other countries have accused the United States of essentially circumventing international law, saying they allow for submarine mining in waters that nearly every other country believes to be governed by an independent organisation, international submarine authorities.
No commercial scale submarine mining has been carried out to date.
California leader Jared Huffman, who is also a ranking Democrat on the committee, said Metals Company and Trump are pushing forward with undersea mining in “reckless cowboy ways.” He and other Democrats questioned the business case of mining cobalt and nickel, as it was not used by an electric vehicle manufacturer that had previously moved towards batteries that were not used by major metal buyers.
“The industry's financial model is based on highly optimistic assumptions and does not reflect the volatility and reality of the global mineral market,” said Maxine E. Dexter, Democrat of Oregon.
The metals company has sought to assure the committee that damage to the seabed would be far greater than potential job creation and supply chains would be accessed to the minerals currently controlled by China. The company says it has conducted a decade of expensive environmental studies in support of its conclusions.
Trump's order comes after years of delays in international submarine authorities in establishing a regulatory framework for submarine mining. Authorities, created under the auspices of the United Nations decades ago, could miss another deadline this year to codify these rules.
“It took me 14 years to begin drafting the mining code,” Baron told the committee, calling it a “deliberate strategy” to slow down the mining of undersea.
He also said that a polymetallic nodule extracted by his company was recently given to Trump, and he claimed it was now sitting at the president's desk in an oval office.
The US Geological Survey estimates that nodules in a single belt in the Eastern Pacific, known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all ground reserves combined. The area, where metal companies propose mines, is located in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, covering an area about half the size of the US.
The committee chairperson, Arizona Republican Paul Gossal, said subsea mining was necessary to drive the US out of under China's “supply chain yoke.”
China has recently imposed export restrictions on several rare earth elements, and is fearing that American companies will face a shortage of using them to create a set of advanced electronic devices.
The House Committee also participated in a study of the impact of submarine mines on the seafloor from Thomas Peacock, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, part of which was funded in part by metal companies.
Dr Peacock said there are potentially hundreds of unknown species in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, and certain areas deserve to be kicked out of mining, but “studies may not be as severe as speculated that some of the proposed effects of nodal mining may be.”
In particular, he downplayed the risk that mining could cause a plume of sand and debris. This can affect the life on the seabed, close to the surface of the open ocean where fish, like fish, are alive and fed. The fragments “almost correspond to grains of sand in a bowl of fish,” Dr. Peacock said.
Sitting next to Mr. Baron, he was another future deep-sea miner, the CEO of Impossible Metals. Unlike metal companies with vacuum-like extraction technology connected to self-driving cars across the seabed, they send nodules to ship via pipes, but Impossible Metals says they have machines that pick up the nodule individually and carry them without actually landing on the seabed.
“Our underwater robots hover to collect mineral-rich nodules from the seabed through AI-driven selective harvesting,” said Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of Impossible Metals. “We individually avoid all visible life expectancy, leaving 60% untouched.”
The company has reapplied for permission to exploit US Samoa on US territory. Gunasekara said that the previous applications had been denied under the Biden administration, but that both American Samoa and Washington are under new leadership and that he is confident in its approval.
