President Donald Trump’s assertion that the U.S. government can unilaterally give companies permission to plumb the deep-sea floor for critical minerals thrusts NOAA into largely untested legal and geopolitical terrain.
The deep oceans targeted by mining companies are far removed from the United States’ coasts and waters. International regulators who for years have worked on potential regulations for deep-sea mining are calling Trump’s move brazenly illegal.
The president’s aggressive pursuit for ocean minerals is also bucking long-standing U.S. policy abiding by international treaties around ocean activities that are enshrined in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982 and ratified by most of the world’s countries.
But the United States never signed on. This gives Trump a potential loophole to meet the nation’s rising demand for critical minerals — like cobalt, manganese, nickel and rare earths — that drive the 21st-century tech-based economy. The administration underscores that embracing mining of the seafloor could also help wean the country off imported minerals that come largely from China, which controls much of the world’s critical mineral processing.
