Trump Ignites A Fight Over Seabed Mining

Forbes

28-04-2025

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Polymetallic sea nodules, containing nickel, manganese and cobalt rich mineral deposits, collected from the seabed.
Inhis first 100 days as president, Donald Trump's executive orders have triggered no end of controversy and concern. One of his latest, aimed at encouraging and potentially mining valuable minerals from seabeds, puts the administration on a collision course with both environmentalists and other nations concerned about risks to aquatic life.
Trump's April 24 order calls for 'American dominance in offshore critical mineral resources,' not just within the country's territorial waters but 'beyond national jurisdiction.' The order calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to set up a process for issuing permits to companies and overseeing a plan to map seabeds where the concentration of valuable materials is likely to be the greatest.
Scientists and private companies have been studying the potential to harvest small rock-like nodules resting deep below the surface on the ocean floor because they contain high-value minerals including manganese, nickel, copper, zinc and cobalt–used in batteries, military hardware and advanced electronics. No company currently mines them, but startups like The Metals Company say they're ready to. Most coastal nations joined the International Seabed Authority in the 1990s to determine if and how that might happen, but the U.S. isn't part of that group.
The problem is those nodules, formed over millions of years, have laid undisturbed, serving as a home for sensitive forms of aquatic life. Removing them would destroy that unique environment and potentially create sediment plumes that are broadly harmful to sea life.
'Scientists agree that deep-sea mining is a deeply dangerous endeavor for our ocean and all of us who depend on it,' said Jeff Watters, a vice president with the Ocean Conservancy. 'Areas of the U.S. seafloor where test mining took place over 50 years ago still haven't fully recovered. 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.'
And it's not just environmentalists who don't like Trump's order. It 'violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community," said Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry.
Trump's obsession with critical minerals isn't new and the seabed mining push is of a piece with his fixation on Greenland and Canada as additional suppliers of those resources. Meanwhile, many startups and materials companies think recycling, tapping existing resources and developing alternative materials are a faster, less controversial alternative to scraping up the sea floor.
Trevor Paulhus for Forbes
Since China retaliated against President Trump's tariffs by restricting exports of rare earth minerals — crucial to making the magnets that go into electric motors, used for cars, electronics, robots and wind turbines — MP Materials founder and CEO Jim Litinsky's phone has been ringing off the hook from companies desperate for new suppliers.
'The sense of urgency, I've never seen anything like it,' he told Forbes. 'It's pretty wild and exciting–and daunting.'
Litinsky runs the only U.S. rare earths mine, Mountain Pass in California's Mojave Desert, supplying elements like neodymium and praseodymium that industries like defense, automotive and electronics rely on to build efficient electric motors. Once Litinsky's staff of over 800 engineers, technicians and miners harvest the minerals from the earth, MP refines them, turning them into metals, which companies like General Motors need for EV motors. Starting this year, MP will also make high-powered magnets with those metals at a new plant in Texas, a market China currently dominates.
Ninety percent of all rare earth metals are processed in China. The country produces nearly 95% of all rare earth magnets–prized for their strength and long-term retention of magnetic properties–and virtually all of the 7,000 tons the U.S. imports each year came from China — a clear vulnerability in American companies' supply chains that rely on them for their products. As Trump's tariff war escalated, China on April 4 announced it was restricting U.S.-bound exports of 'heavy' rare earths, shutting down imports of magnets made with them.
'The problem for almost every industry that uses a motor that requires magnets is that China has this massive strategic flex on rare earth minerals,' said a board member for a U.S.-based carmaker who asked not to be publicly named. 'The stuff China just put export controls on is a freaking big deal. We won't be able to make motors anymore or anything that has a spinning magnet in it. Game over.'
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One of the things you look at is effective strategies to cut automotive carbon emissions. How has that effort been impacted by the change in U.S. administration?
The answer, surprisingly, is not very much at all. And the reason is that we look at the timescale of climate change and the timescale of carbon staying in the atmosphere. The political cycle, the swinging of the pendulum back and forth, is happening at a very short timescale compared to the evolution of these things.
Climate change has been going on for decades, and it's going to keep on going. The slope of the curve has accelerated. It's on this kind of rapid slope up now, and it's staying the same. We think it's essential to mitigate net CO2 emissions or to somehow have other mitigations if we're going to have any hope of reducing climate change. The laws of physics don't care what we think. They don't care about politics. They don't care what we wish for. They are what they are. We've learned that every time nature teaches us a lesson.
Our goal remains to be carbon neutral by 2050. That's what we've always said. The question is what's the best way to impact that?
The answer is not to do wishful thinking about customers following the edicts of the government to act in a certain way. That's because we know customers, at worst, resent it, but typically they go their own way. If we push too hard, and it doesn't matter who does it, the result is going to be people will hold onto older cars that will emit far more than if we gave them a choice to improve by lowering their CO2 emissions with a newer car that would both have lower CO2 output, maybe not as much as an EV with renewable generation to charge it, but far better than the car that they have now. And the car will be safer also.
There are lots of reasons to not try to lead the target too much and not artificially constrain customer choice.
On the other hand, we should work as hard as we can, which is what we are doing, to lower the carbon emissions of every powertrain type that we have. By doing that, we're actually allowing the system to do what it's going to do, but trying to make the result as good as possible.
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