President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Thursday aimed at accelerating the collection of critical minerals from the ocean floor to enhance defense, infrastructure, and energy capabilities.
Under the order, which seeks to challenge China’s stronghold on critical minerals, the Commerce, State, and Interior departments will coordinate a plan to expand deep-sea mining by mapping “priority areas of the seabed to accelerate data collection.”
“These resources are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers for critical minerals,” the order reads.
“Our Nation can, through the exercise of existing authorities and by establishing international partnerships, access potentially vast resources in seabed polymetallic nodules; other subsea geologic structures; and coastal deposits containing strategic minerals such as nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, titanium, and rare earth elements, which are vital to our national security and economic prosperity,” it continued.
More than a billion metric tons of polymetallic nodules, which are filled with the building blocks for electric vehicles, electronics, and other goods, are estimated to be in U.S. waters, an administration official told Reuters.
The official hoped that extracting them could boost U.S. GDP by $300 billion over 10 years and create 100,000 jobs.
The Metals Company, a prominent Canadian deep-sea mining enterprise, has already announced plans to pursue being a part of the president’s commercial nodules development project after previously revealing this spring it was seeking approval from the Trump administration to launch the world’s first deep-sea mine in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
“With a stable, transparent, and enforceable regulatory pathway available under existing U.S. law, we look forward to delivering the world’s first commercial nodule project, responsibly and economically,” Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron said.
“It’s an amazing way of catching up from what is a very distant second place to China when it comes to critical minerals,” he added in comments to Newsweek.
China challenged Trump’s sweeping action on Friday, with foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun saying it “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community.”
His comments refer to a line in Trump’s Thursday directive that ordered the expedited review of seabed mining permits “in areas beyond the national jurisdiction.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was further tasked with establishing a process for reviewing and approving permits and granting licenses for seabed territory covered under the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs the offshore region where the U.S. holds jurisdiction and control for resource exploration and development.
Burgum’s action will allow the U.S. to identify critical minerals the government can lift “from seabed resources for defense, infrastructure, and energy purposes,” the White House said.
The executive order angered environmental groups, which worried the action could prove dangerously debilitating to fragile ecosystems.
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“Areas of the U.S. seafloor where test mining took place over 50 years ago still haven’t fully recovered,” Jeff Watters, Ocean Conservancy’s vice president for external affairs, said in a statement.
“The harm caused by deep-sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it. Evidence tells us that areas targeted for deep-sea mining often overlap with important fisheries, raising serious concerns about the impacts on the country’s $321 billion fishing industry,” he said.
