The International Seabed Authority ISA, the United Nations body that regulates the world’s ocean floor is preparing to resume negotiations that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials critical for the green energy transition. Years long negotiations are reaching a critical point where the authority will soon need to begin accepting mining permit applications, adding to worries over the potential impacts on sparsely researched marine ecosystems and habitats of the deep sea.

Here’s a look at what deep seabed mining is, why some companies and countries are applying for permits to carry it out and why environmental activists are raising concerns. Deep seabed mining involves removing mineral deposits and metals from the ocean’s seabed. There are three types of such mining: taking deposit-rich polymetallic nodules off the ocean floor, mining massive seafloor sulphide deposits and stripping cobalt crusts from rock. These nodules, deposits and crusts contain materials, such as nickel, rare earths, cobalt and more, that are needed for batteries and other materials used in tapping renewable energy and also for everyday technology like cellphones and computers. 

Engineering and technology used for deep seabed mining are still evolving. Some companies are looking to vacuum materials from seafloor using massive pumps. Others are developing artificial intelligence-based technology that would teach deep sea robots how to pluck nodules from the floor. Some are looking to use advanced machines that could mine materials off side of huge underwater mountains and volcanoes. Companies and governments view these as strategically important resources that will be needed as onshore reserves are depleted and demand continues to rise.

How is deep sea mining regulated now- Countries manage their own maritime territory and exclusive economic zones, while the high seas and the international ocean floor (Area ie seabed and subsoil beyond 350 nm from baselines of any coastal state) are governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS),1982. It is considered to apply to states regardless of whether or not they have signed or ratified it. Under the treaty, the seabed and its mineral resources are considered the “common heritage of mankind” that must be managed in a way that protects the interests of humanity through the sharing of economic benefits, support for marine scientific research, and protecting marine environments. Mining companies interested in deep sea exploitation are partnering with countries to help them get exploration licenses. More than 30 exploration licenses have been issued so far, with activity mostly focused in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, which spans 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers) between Hawaii and Mexico. In 2021 the Pacific Island nation of Nauru — in partnership with mining company Nauru Ocean Resources Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canada-based The Metals Company, applied to the ISA to exploit minerals in a specified deep sea area. That triggered a clause of the UN treaty that requires the ISA to complete regulations governing deep sea exploitation by July 2023. If no regulations are finalized, Nauru can submit an application to conduct the mining without any governing regulations. Other countries and private companies can start applying for provisional licenses if the UN body fails to approve a set of rules and regulations by July 2024. 

What are the environmental concerns? -Only a small part of the deep seabed has been explored and conservationists worry that ecosystems will be damaged by mining, especially without any environmental protocols. Damage from mining can include noise, vibration and light pollution, as well as possible leaks and spills of fuels and other chemicals used in the mining process. Sediment plumes from the some mining processes are a major concern. Once valuable materials are taken extracted, slurry sediment plumes are sometimes pumped back into the sea. That can harm filter feeding species like corals and sponges, and could smother or otherwise interfere with some creatures. The full extent of implications for deep sea ecosystems is unclear, but scientists have warned that biodiversity loss is inevitable and potentially irreversible. “We’re constantly finding new stuff and it’s a little bit premature to start mining the deep sea when we don’t really understand the biology, the environments, the ecosystems or anything else,” said Christopher Kelley, a biologist with research expertise in deep sea ecology.

The ISA’s legal and technical Commission, which oversees the development of deep sea mining regulations, met in July 2024 to discuss the yet-to-be mining code draft. The earliest that mining under ISA regulations could begin is 2026. Applications for mining must be considered and environmental impact assessments need to be carried out.

In the meantime, some companies — such as Google, Samsung, BMW and others — have backed the World Wildlife Fund’s call to pledge to avoid using minerals that have been mined from the planet’s oceans. More than a dozen countries—including France, Germany and several Pacific Island nations— have officially called for a ban, pause or moratorium on deep sea mining at least until environmental safeguards are in place, although it’s unclear how many other countries support such mining. Other countries, such as Norway, are proposing opening their waters to mining.

As demand grows globally for metals needed to make batteries for electric vehicles, one of the richest untapped sources of the raw materials lies two and a half miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. This remote section of the seabed, about 1,500 miles southwest of San Diego, could soon become the world’s first industrial-scale mining site in international waters. Some firms, based in Vancouver, has secured exclusive access to tons of seabed rocks packed with cobalt, copper and nickel-enough, it says, to power 280 million electric vehicles. Recent trends of allowing tax credits for buyers of electric cars by some countries, will only accelerate the need for these materials as automakers also push forward with plans to phase out production of gasoline-powered vehicles. 

“No mining has ever been done on a scale like this on the planet,” said James A.R. McFarlane, former head of environmental monitoring at the International Seabed Authority, an agency affiliated with the United Nations that will regulate mining by the Companies and the many other businesses and countries expected to follow. To exploit this new frontier in the green energy revolution-the firma are calculating that they may clear $31 billion in earnings over the 25-year life of the project. The ISA provided data identifying some of the most valuable seabed tracts, and then set aside the prized sites for the company’s future use. The sharing of that information has angered some, who said some of the data was meant for developing countries trying to compete with richer countries, something the agency is mandated under international law to assist. Nearly two dozen contractors that have exploration deals with the ISA; most of them are held by the member countries. But the other firms have been especially aggressive in pushing the Seabed Authority to allow it to start mining by 2025. The undertaking has raised concerns among environmentalists about the perpetually underfunded agency’s commitment to protecting life on the ocean floor, and has renewed broader questions about who gets to profit from the riches of the sea.

The Seabed Authority was established under the auspices of the United Nations well before climate change set off a surge in demand for the metals. Though it has never gotten off the ground, a unit of the agency was charged with leveling the playing field for developing countries, in part by reserving metal-rich tracts of the ocean floor and helping to mine them. With jurisdiction over half the planet, the agency’s 50 employees work out of offices here in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston on a small annual budget of $12- 13 million. At a meeting of the agency’s governing body in 2024, contractors were among a group of businesspeople who roamed freely among the international delegates as they debated agenda items, including the firm’s request for the authority to sign off on a plan to test mining equipment. One of the top rule-making bodies at the Seabed Authority, its legal and technical commission, is supposed to be secretive and meeting behind closed doors.

Even with that partner, the Pacific islands of Nauru and Tonga, which have a combined population of 120,000 and are nowhere near the mining zone-some of the firms have maintained nearly complete financial control over the project, including rights to all but a fraction of the anticipated profits. A law firm retained by the ISA rejected the notion that anyone at the agency had acted inappropriately in sharing data or engaging with contractors. The legal and technical commission, the firm said, “meets entirely properly” with its members and exercises independence in its decisions.

Mr. Michael Lodge, the then secretary general also defended the agency’s actions. Around that time, he said in an interview at the headquarters in December,2023 it publicly released summaries of some data in an effort to draw attention to the seabed’s riches and generate interest in mining, and it welcomed inquiries by potential partners. The biggest hurdle is the enormous task underway at the Seabed Authority to enact the world’s first environmental regulations of deep-sea mining in international waters — and a royalty system to collect revenues from contractors extracting the metals. The effort has been in the works for years but recently accelerated after Nauru, one of the Metals Company’s sponsors, invoked a provision effectively mandating that it wrap up by 2024.The plans to begin mining by the contractors have generated fierce opposition from some environmental groups, which along with government leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France have called for a moratorium on mining until scientists can study the remote seabed and better understand the consequences of an industrial-scale operation.

However the secretary general said in interviews that the criticism was unfounded and the mining would be for the “benefit of mankind,” as required under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982, which established the Seabed Authority, and they predicted that it would cause less ecological damage than open-pit mining. A miniature replica of the British Royal Navy’s H.M.S. Challenger found a place at the Seabed Authority headquarters. The famed ship set sail 150 years ago on an expedition that mapped the ocean floor. A dredge on that voyage scraped “several peculiar black oval bodies” out of the Pacific, the crew reported in 1873. The polymetallic nodules, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, had formed over millions of years and contained high concentrations of valuable metals. A century later, China, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United States and some European nations began exploring a stretch of the ocean between Hawaii and Mexico, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, that has an especially large volume of the nodules.

With no mining rules in place, the UN intervened and adopted the Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that went into effect in 1994 and now has been ratified by 168 countries and the European Union. The agreement established the Seabed Authority, granting it exclusive jurisdiction over mining in international waters — those not under the territorial rule of individual countries — and charging it with the creation of a regulatory system. A delegate from Malta had laid out the mission years earlier during a 1967 speech at the U.N. The seabed should be used “for the exclusive benefit of mankind as a whole,” said the delegate, Mr. Arvid Pardo, adding that poorer nations should get “preferential consideration in the event of financial benefits” and that mining should not cause “serious impairment of the marine environment.”

The United States refused to ratify the treaty, insisting, among other things, that it gave too much authority to developing nations. But the country agreed to act generally in accordance with its provisions, which extend to other activities like shipping, fishing and navigation. As the rules stand, any nation can seek permission to conduct surveys to identify mining sites, and China, France, India, Singapore and South Korea, among other richer nations, have done just that. When they find worthy locations, they must hand over half of them to the Seabed Authority, which sets them aside as “reserved areas” where less developed countries can initiate their own projects. The authority has allocated roughly 200,000 square miles of seabed to developing nations to do exploratory work in the reserved areas, with nearly half of that space now under the control of various companies.

Starting two decades ago, the Seabed Authority began keeping track of the reserved areas with the highest concentration of nodules, based on countries’ proprietary surveys. Some of the data was used for a modeling project that charted the geology of the ocean floor, and its potential for mining, though the public version of that project aggregated the data and did not disclose anything proprietary. Around the same time, some companies were keenly interested in the reserved areas and turned to the Seabed Authority for help in deciding where to focus their attention, the documents show. Nauru, Kiribati and other island states, one of the world’s smallest nations, quickly emerged as a leading country. They also did not demand much in exchange for sponsorship, having no ability of its own to pursue such an undertaking. A community leader in Tonga, said in an interview that the company had agreed to pay it $2 per ton as a “mining production fee.” That payment would amount to less than half of one percent of the firm’s total estimated value of the mined material. Separately, the companies would have to pay an undetermined royalty fee to the Seabed Authority once commercial mining began.

But the Seabed Authority staff routinely interacted with contractors pursuing mining sites, but reiterated that the agency had always honored data confidentiality rules. It is not unusual and is entirely proper and normal practice for the ISA secretariat to engage with contractors to discuss proposals which those contractors have regarding potential applications and also the contractors providing a confidential indication of the areas under consideration. The rules require that the sponsoring nations, in this case Nauru and Tonga, exercise “effective control” over the mining projects so they are not partners in name only. Nii Allotey Odunton, a mining engineer from Ghana who served as the Seabed Authority’s secretary general from 2009 to 2016, said that developing nations were left with no choice but to work closely with private contractors, particularly because the unit within the agency meant to facilitate mining was never created. 

“The only realistic option for most developing states therefore was to form partnerships with commercial interests that have access to the financial capital and technology necessary to conduct deep-sea exploration,” A spokesman for one of the private company said it donated a total of $140,000 in 2022 to support community and social programs in Nauru and Tonga. The spokesman added that the contracts left the islands in “effective control” because their environmental agencies have regulatory oversight.

Scientists say that more is known about the surface of the moon than about the floor of the ocean, with much of it still unmapped, and estimate that perhaps 90 percent of the species at the bottom of the Pacific remain unclassified. Worries about that knowledge gap emerged publicly in 2023 when the Metals Company submitted plans to test a new mining machine. The company had teamed up with Allseas, the offshore oil contractor, to equip a former drill ship with a device resembling a bulldozer that vacuums up nodules. The machine has been tested in the North Sea, but the Metals Company wants a separate trial in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone so it can demonstrate what, it predicts, will be limited consequences for aquatic life as it collects about 3,600 tons of nodules. Ultimately, once commercial mining starts, it intends to extract 1.3 million tons of these rocks a year at its first site.

These questions echo larger concerns about the harm some scientists fear large-scale seabed mining may cause. These are some of the most pristine, biodiverse habitats on a planet where we already have a biodiversity crisis because of destruction on land. Some of course opined that criticism was off base and that these projects are extremely important to the future health of the planet: this could be one of those projects that could really make a difference — that could really move the needle and their immediate concern is for approval to test its new nodule collector. After pushback from governments and environmental groups about its proposal, the company supplemented its filing with the Seabed Authority with additional environmental data. “Picking up the nodules from the seabed has to be accomplished with the maximum efficiency and minimum disturbance,” a former offshore-drilling executive said at a briefing. The effort, according to the company, would include a continuous environmental monitoring system that would allow the crew to redirect the mining if sediment plumes or other harm occurs.

The broader issue is: “Where are you going to get these minerals from?” The Seabed Authority, nonetheless, has taken significant steps to limit harm, including setting aside about 40 percent of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, 760,000 square miles, as areas where mining will not be allowed. At the meeting of the authority’s governing body in 2023, proponents and opponents of the Metals Company’s plans reached a compromise to speed up the review of the comprehensive seabed mining rules, sticking with the firm’s proposed timeline to start commercial operations as early as 2024. “Consensus means that everybody is slightly unhappy,” Mr. Lodge told the council. But framing of the rules could not be completed in 2024 and this would be discussed again in March and July session to be held in 2025. It is expected that finally the mining code allowing exploitation of seabed resources could be adopted by the ISA and thus allow companies waiting for long 15 years to commence much discussed seabed mining according to the implementation regulation of the UNCLOS 1982.

Bangladesh has already promulgated the Territorial Waters and Maritime Zones Act in 2021 allowing such contracts to be signed with private companies willing to invest, as a sponsoring state. As a sponsoring state Bangladesh will have the authority over a licensed area extending over 75,000 sq km more than half of Bangladesh’s total Sea/land area. However, it will entail scrutiny of the contractors work and physical monitoring of mine site and then negotiating a good term for every ton of minerals being exploited by the company. Environmental regulations are being drafted by the ISA and the sponsoring state will also be made responsible for environmental hazards during mining. Overall, this could be a game changer for Bangladesh.