The Trump administration’s quest to spur an offshore mineral boom rests on a largely untested collection of deep-sea mining companies.
The U.S. is just years away from launching a deep-sea mining sector, administration officials insist. That’s after President Donald Trump directed agencies last year to “rapidly” expedite permitting for seabed mining both near the U.S. coasts and in international waters.
But the eight ventures applying for U.S. permits — including some startups created in recent years — have yet to show they can operate on a commercial scale in some of the most difficult conditions on Earth. Outside observers say the nascent industry, overshadowed by past bankruptcies, faces big questions about financial viability and whether companies can avoid causing permanent damage to mysterious, deep-ocean habitats.
At the same time, the U.S. decision to move ahead unilaterally on permitting bypasses an existing international process, possibly leaving mining companies that plunge into this new territory vulnerable to legal challenges.
“It’s like during the dot-com boom and trying to predict which of those companies were real and which of those companies were nonsense. It’s kind of impossible until you see who actually survives until the industry is mature,” said Andrew Thaler, a deep-sea ecologist and CEO of the environmental consulting firm Blackbeard Biologic. “Some of these companies are going to be an Amazon, and some of them are going to be Pets.com.”
The prospect of companies able to gather off the seafloor baseball-size nodules rich in cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese is enticing for policymakers scrambling to wean the U.S. off Chinese supplies. Beijing is also vying for those metals, which are used in military technology, electronics and batteries and has deployed dozens of research vessels to map the ocean bottoms.
State-backed Chinese entities hold the largest number of exploration contracts at the U.N.-affiliated International Seabed Authority, or ISA, which oversees mining in international waters and has been working for years to develop a permitting framework. The head of ISA last week said Trump’s rush to authorize mining the deep seas is “unlawful.”
While pilot tests have been conducted, full-scale commercial deep-sea mining has never occurred in U.S or international waters. Yet people with companies seeking U.S. permits say there’s plenty of proof the underlying technology is mature. They point to decades of offshore oil and gas production, which has used much of the same tech. They also note developments in subsea robotics and work over many years of testing prototypes and running trials.
“Anybody could buy a URL for $7 on GoDaddy, right? This isn’t an industry where people, anybody can come in and play … we know the oceans well from our work,” said Tony Romeo, CEO of South Carolina-based Eco Minerals. “We know how to operate equipment on the ocean.” Romeo, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, founded the company last year.
Before searching for minerals, Romeo snagged headlines for his 2023 expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s missing plane in the Pacific. He said companies will have to undergo an extensive series of environmental reviews and tests to show their systems operate safely before securing permits. Romeo hopes to mine in international waters by 2028.
Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Co., dismissed skeptics and said a 2022 large-scale pilot test that his company conducted in the Pacific Ocean with Swiss offshore engineering firm Allseas shows the industry is viable. TMC collected more than 3,000 metric tons of polymetallic nodules from the seafloor that were then transported to a former drilling vessel called the “Hidden Gem” using a riser system.
Barron said those trials were important because they tested a “fully integrated test system” and not just robots or the riser system.
“We’re ready to go,” said Barron. “We just need the rubber stamp.”
US-led ‘gold rush’
Subsea miners are lining up for approval a year after Trump ordered agencies to revamp and speed up the permitting process. One analysis estimated the market could be worth more than $16.3 billion by 2033.
At least six companies are seeking permits from NOAA to explore and mine in international waters, while two are in talks with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is becoming part of the new Marine Minerals Administration, for activity in domestic waters.
“There’s a strong incentive to be the chosen company that gets a big license in the right area,” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow with the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The U.S. government is going to be, in a way, choosing which firms it thinks are actually capable of doing this … which ones are a good bet.”
TMC, which has a market capitalization of about $2 billion, is leading the pack. Earlier this month, NOAA found TMC’s application for a consolidated exploration and commercial recovery permit was fully complete, the company said. If given final approval, TMC and Swiss Allseas would use a specialized seafloor collector vehicle and a riser system to bring nodules up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone to its vessel. Barron said he expects to get a final permit by the first quarter of 2027.
“It’s like a gold rush,” said Barron. “Some people are selling the shovels and other people are out there putting a stake in the ground. I think we’ll see lots of different people come in and try and find their place, and we welcome them all. … [W]e want more people out there picking up rocks, because that will help us drive more economies and lower costs into the industry.”
As it stands, aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin holds the only active, NOAA-approved exploration licenses for international waters but hasn’t said whether it intends to move forward with mining. The company, which obtained the licenses in 1984, supports Trump’s executive order and is “following established U.S. regulatory processes as we evaluate next steps in seabed opportunities,” a Lockheed spokesperson said in an email.
Texas-based American Metal Resources is also seeking permits through its newly created subsidiaries — SeaX and American Metals Resources. The company is led by Robert Heydon, who co-founded DeepGreen Resources, the predecessor to TMC, more than a decade ago with his father, David Heydon. Heydon and American Metal Resources did not respond to requests for comment.
Romeo’s company, Eco Minerals, is also developing a system to collect polymetallic nodules and transport them to a ship. NOAA in March found the company’s application for an exploration license is in full compliance. Romeo said his company is now preparing to file for a combined exploration and production permit.
He described the process for collecting nodules as minimal impact.
“Imagine a rake and just going along. It hovers, there’s no tracks. It pops the rocks up out of the mud, and then it drops them into this hopper, which then sucks them to, all the way through a closed loop system, all the way to the surface,” said Romeo. “It’s all electric, so there’s virtually no sound, subsea, just like your Tesla or something like that, very quiet.”
James Deckelman, a former oil geologist leading Vancouver-based Deep Sea Minerals, said in an interview that his company is pursuing an exploration permit through NOAA and plans to hire contractors to provide vessels, equipment and technology. The company, which rebranded in January from Copperhead Resources, is pursuing that permit through its subsidiary, American Ocean Minerals, to explore the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
In U.S. waters, Florida-based ocean exploration and subsea mineral development company Odyssey Marine Exploration, which previously hunted for vanished ships on the seabed, asked permission last year to develop heavy mineral sands containing titanium, zirconium, rare earth elements and phosphate through shallow-water dredging off the coast of Virginia.
Odyssey has since announced its intent to merge with American Ocean Minerals Corp., or AOMC, a company that says it is valued at $1 billion and will be led by former Rio Tinto CEO Tom Albanese. AOMC has said it’s reached “full compliance” for two NOAA applications to explore the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. AOMC is leveraging “existing offshore technologies, advancing environmental baseline studies, and operating within established regulatory frameworks,” a spokesperson for AOMC said in an email.
Also in U.S. waters, Impossible Metals, a California-based startup, has requested that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management conduct a lease sale off American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean.
Interior in an email said it plans to hold that lease sale later this year. A video posted on Impossible Metals’ website describes a plan to launch “swarms” of underwater robots from a ship. The robots would use camera-based AI to pick up nodules with their robotic arms while “avoiding all visible life.” Impossible Metals declined to comment.
American Samoa Gov. Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula opposes mining off the island’s shores and has banned the practice through a territorial moratorium.
Can miners make money?
Even as companies look for U.S. authorization to get started, the sector is facing questions both about its economic viability and the potential for damaging underwater ecosystems.
Critics say sediment plumes kicked off by the mining process could smother ocean life in remote areas that scientists are just beginning to understand. Forty countries have called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining.
In a fact sheet created just last year, NOAA said data needed to understand the full impact of deep-sea mining on marine environments and ecosystems is limited.
Deep-sea mining advocates say their process is safer than mining on land and will avoid many of the environmental damage associated with those projects.
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have also expressed skepticism, noting past bankruptcies in the sector. For example, there was the 2019 bankruptcy of Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian company that sought to mine copper and gold from hydrothermal vents off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Last year, Norwegian deep-sea mining company Loke Marine Minerals also declared bankruptcy.
Companies like TMC say they’ve shown their projects are economically sound. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, requires various disclosures through which companies can show their projects “demonstrate the economic viability of the mining property or project.” TMC published a report last year that complied with those rules, declaring a $5.5 billion net-present value for its first nodule project in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. TMC also published a separate report of its broader estimated resource showing a combined net-present value of $23.6 billion.
But Victor Vescovo, a venture capitalist, retired naval officer and undersea explorer who led a record-setting dive in 2019 to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, said that deep-sea mining proposals are not economically or technically viable. He questioned how TMC will make the jump from a pilot-scale test that pulled up 3,000 tons of nodules to a commercial scale operation expected to produce almost 11 million metric tons of nodules each year from the deep seas.
Seabed miners have yet to build and operate a full-scale collector, he said.
TMC’s own financial filings acknowledge its pilot-scale work doesn’t fully replicate commercial-scale operations. “Our business is subject to significant risks, and we may never develop minerals in sufficient grade or quantities to justify commercial operations,” the company states. But TMC in an email said the filings are drafted to cover a wide range of hypothetical scenarios and shouldn’t be interpreted as a forecast of the business.
The economics are also shaky given the U.S. has access to copper and manganese in land-based mines, said Vescovo. The Trump administration’s decision to move ahead with permitting even though ISA has yet to hammer out global rules means nodules collected under the U.S. system could be considered “pirated” or conflict minerals, he said.
“I’m very middle of the road, but … the operating mantra of this administration is, when they say they want something, they’re going to push it hard through the bureaucracy … and it doesn’t matter what any environmental consequences are, or even critical analysis of economic viability. It doesn’t matter,” said Vescovo.
Ian Lange, director of the mineral and energy economics program at the Colorado School of Mines, noted that TMC is expecting rates of return from its work in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between 28 percent and 36 percent, according to a March 27 presentation. But those rates, he said, are either in line with existing offshore oil and gas operations or weaker than on-land mining operations with stable legal and regulatory environments that have higher rates of return.
While minerals and metals are in demand for a range of products — from renewable energy technology to data centers — mining is also an incredibly difficult space.
Lange noted that there are land-based copper and cobalt mines in the U.S. that are fully permitted but currently not producing, including a copper mine in Michigan, a gold and copper project in Wyoming, and the shuttered Jervois cobalt mine in Idaho.
Permitting a ‘mad rush’
While companies are cheering Trump’s decision to speed up permitting without global rules in place, the move is raising fears about the potential for legal fights and geopolitical tension with countries like China.
An administration official said NOAA has the authority to permit mineral extraction in international waters through a 1980s law, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. The official said NOAA’s newly streamlined process offers a consolidated review of exploration licenses and commercial recovery permit applications, which will help establish a supply of rare earths that is cleaner than land-based mining
“The Trump administration supports deep-sea mining as it stabilizes, strengthens, and diversifies our supply chains, ultimately protecting America’s economic and national security,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers. “The administration’s partners are committed to deep-sea mining in a responsible manner.”
Barron with TMC said he played a key role in pushing the administration to move forward, citing his increasing frustration with the United Nations’ ISA, which has been crafting global rules for more than a decade. “We said we will pivot our permitting pathway away from this international body into the USA, but we need a bit of help. We need a bit of momentum,” said Barron.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster said in an email that the agency will assess each “fully compliant application” before drafting an environmental impact statement and opening a public comment period.
But while the administration’s priority appears to be speed, its work — if it overlaps with areas in which ISA is working — could fuel litigation and tension with other countries, said Prétat with CSIS.
NOAA has said it’s legally authorized to move ahead under the existing deep seabed federal law while emphasizing that ISA is crafting global rules under the Law of the Sea Convention, an international treaty that the U.S. has not signed onto. China last year blasted the Trump administration’s decision to move forward with permitting as “selfish,” calling it an illegal act that violates international law.
“If someone was to go ahead with deep-sea mining on the high seas, I think that China would be among the first to defect from the ISA and just begin mining itself,” said Prétat. “[China is] basically trying very much to be the dominant player in this industry.”
Some law firms have advised clients that Trump’s approach raises legal vulnerabilities as it could run afoul of international law. “Participants in this space should anticipate a perfect storm of complex, high-profile legal action,” the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan warned clients in a note last year.
Liz Klein, who led Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management during the Biden administration, agreed NOAA’s decision to move ahead unilaterally poses legal issues. It also remains unclear what standards U.S. agencies are using to determine which companies are technically qualified and should be granted a lease. Stronger rules are needed to ensure taxpayers won’t be left with a cleanup bill if something goes wrong, she said.
“It’s sort of this mad rush to be the first entities to hold a lease, and some of them, it feels very much like, ‘Well, we’re just going to get a lease and then we’ll figure it out later,’” said Klein. “It does very much feel like a scramble to just get a foot in without having done a lot of the homework to make sure that this is going to take place safely and responsibly.”
